Aside from recurrent themes that suggest I have issues with things I don’t think I do – public toilets, public transport, shopping centres, escalators, elevators, being trapped… which are nightmarish, I guess (but just daft to me), the key aspect of my dreams is flying.
Over many decades my flying in dreams has evolved—many years of throwing myself into the air and crashing. Then the early awkwardness and fear, like The Greatest American Hero learning to fly. With time I got better at it, but was scared of going too high. For a long time nobody noticed me, which was fine. Then for a short while (maybe a couple of years in the real world) people did notice me and ooh and ah! So I tried to do it secretly. I managed to achieve great heights but it was a bit boring up there.
A lot of the time, I don’t fly; I surf the ground, floating inches above it. When I do fly these days, the general public are “that’s just Rob doing his thing”.
I almost always fly over busy streets and float through shopping malls.
But yeah, decades the journey has taken. My ability to evolve within the dream world is really slow. Really, really slow. Almost not allowed.
I have lucid dreaming reasonably often, but it is not the norm. For rare nightmares, typically when I am about to meet my doom, I am aware that it is a dream and I choose to wake up.
I do make conscious choices in dreams, and when dreams have logic issues I knowingly end them and try something different.
I have dreamt very regularly about my Dad since he has died, and almost never before he died. He is a good Dad in my dreams.
Sometimes I dream up movies, better than I could write awake. Sometimes I recall them and write them down, here.
I’m pretty sure that dreams are very economical. They are in black and white, and they tell us the colour of something if it is important. Instead of the 24 frames per second of a movie, I think it’s more like a frame every 5 seconds. The aspect of my brain viewing the dream fills in the in-between, just like our brains do with vision.
If a person is the issue we are trying to handle in the dream world, then we don’t dream specifically of them, but someone similar. It is like reality is forbidden.
I meet people in my dreams, most commonly female love interests, and they are so fully-formed I expect to bump into them in the awake world the next day. It doesn’t happen, but I expect that they do really exist somewhere in space and time
I love dreams, and they are the key reason why I can get to sleep on sober nights – I want them. They are a home.