the border between dream and reality

[convallaria]

Do you have dreams when you are sleeping?

I have. And a lot of people have dreams when they sleep even if they don't have a good imagination. I was always interested in the theme of dreams and I did not find the thread on this forum about dreams and so I decided to write it.
the question is: are the dreams of autistic people differ from NT`s dreams? how often do you not see the boundary between dream and reality?

From 2009 to 2013, I often had sleepy paralysis with visual hallucinations, sounds and other things. I was a really stupid child and I thought that I was abducted by aliens because of hallucinations and nightmares about the end of the world where aliens destroy the Earth.
I have no idea what caused my sleep paralysis, can this be related to asperger syndrome? it's a neurological disease.

Now I have a book, through which I learn the meaning of the symbols in my dreams. they help me understand what is my hidden problem in real life.

I often dream that I am a completely different person, of a different gender and age with a completely different story and character. it frightens me, because such a phenomenon is not described anywhere. maybe I'm crazy? or do other aspies have a similar situation?
Once I dreamed how I was dying and now I'm not afraid of the moment of death. It sounds scary, right?

In general, I want to know how do you feel about dreams.

 

[tree]

It seems that many of these threads touch on the topics you mention.

https://www.autismforums.com/threads/frustration-dreams.20178/#post-389866
https://www.autismforums.com/threads/what-do-they-mean-by-vivid-dreams.21279/#post-416767
Strange Dreams?
https://www.autismforums.com/threads/bad-dreams.10194/#post-181068
Lately all my dreams are bad and work related...
Strange dreams/night terrors as a child
Vivid emotion in dreams
https://www.autismforums.com/threads/remembering-dreams.4312/#post-60700
What's the strangest dream you can remember?
Sleep Paralysis
https://www.autismforums.com/thread...ng-you-ever-did-in-a-dream.12809/#post-240224

 

[Judge]

Issues such as hypnogogic and hypnopompic hallucinations and sleep paralysis are not dependent on one's neurological profile. That said, I've personally experienced them all and have known plenty of NTs who have as well.

 

[convallaria]

It seems that many of these threads touch on the topics you mention.

thank you ~

 

[Tulipa]

I remember I used to see a lot of colorful dreams in the time from childhood to my school life. I slept very hard and could even control things. My mom said I was a sleepwalker. (not anymore)
But all changed. I do not have dreams, when I am depressed. My sleeps are superficial and I am always tired. I don't remember my dreams, but sometimes I see what I really desire and it's painful. I don't want to live after this. But they are still very bright, filled with feelings and colors. So I think there is an influence.

 

[Gritches]

I had a sleep study done recently and the sleep specialist told me that if you don't dream, you aren't achieving REM sleep. So dreaming is a good thing.

As to whether there's any difference between AS and NT dreams, I haven't a clue, my guess would be no. Unless I'm horribly mistaken, the Jungian idea of what a dream is is basically your subconscious running wild without influence from your conscious mind. That's where interpretations, probably like in the book you mention, come from. Interpreting what's really going on in your subconscious that your conscious mind might cover up by coping with or compensating for it.

For instance, most of my dreams involve me running from pursuers until I'm cornered at which point they kill me or I kill them, then I wake up. Long story short, this fits very well with the underlying issues I'm working with with a therapist right now.

Amateur interpretation, but could dreaming about being a different person with a different story be an issue of personal identity? Like in your subconscious you want to be, or wouldn't mind being, the characters you dream of?

 

[onlything]

If I had dreams, they would always be very vivid. As a child I would get colorful, fascinating dreams of different worlds, places, people. At times, I used to mistake fantasy with reality because I was so sure that some of my dreams really happened. Memories and dreams have always been hard to differentiate between for me. As an adult I started having vivid nightmares and upsetting dreams that make me miserable. In the end I'd rather not dream at all. If I do, I don't get much energy from my sleep.

 

[dragoncat16]

I once heard that if you dream in colour that means you have schizophrenia. I don't know how true that is. I often dream in very vivid colour. Quite a lot of the time in my dreams I'll think I am awake, and then I'll realize that I've never been in this building before even though I am supposed to live there in the dream. A lot of my dreams are of living in a really unusual house with so many rooms and floors and a maze-like layout, or else another planet, or another place I've never been before, and it is so fun to explore it. Once I realize I'm dreaming, the magic is gone and I usually wake up.

I used to have weird hallucinations of flying (actually floating like a balloon) when I was a kid, though I think those might have been fever dreams. Now, I have the odd flying dream (usually with wings, not floating), which are really fun, especially since I am pretty freaked out by heights when I am awake. In my dreams, I am quite often someone else, even the opposite sex sometimes, but I don't realise that I'm not me (i.e. I don't remember who "me" is) until late in the dream.

The weird thing is that I seem to have several dreams in quick succession, especially when I drop off to sleep while watching TV, and, even though I have the sense that a lot of time has passed, when I turn back the TV to something I remember seeing, it's sometimes only a minute or two in real time, even though I remember having like five complete dreams in that amount of time. Maybe they're running in parallel or something.

When I'm depressed, I not only don't dream, but I barely even sleep. When that happens, I'd do anything to be able to nod off, if only just to get away from reality for a while. Of course, then the nightmare starts when I wake up.

 

[SusanLR]

I once heard that if you dream in colour that means you have schizophrenia

I've never heard that.
I've always dreamt in colour and so did my Mom.
We were surprised to find most people don't.
We thought it was natural and neither of us had
schizophrenia.
The dream studies I read said dreaming in colour is unusual and occurred in the people with a more sixth sense psychic type nature.
That held true for the two of us.

This is a subject I would like to see a post on as a few here have expressed dreams that were of something really happening at the time or prophetic dreams.
I had made the suggestion of dreams of being in unknown places, being lucid and exploring the places could be astral projection.
This IS an area of scientific study and has much proof.

Psychic experiences was a post once and most replied since this is a fringe area that can't be scientifically explained or proven it is not of much interest.
I am a prove it type too.
When it happens to oneself personally it has been proved, just not explained.
An example would be in ancient times everyone believed the world was flat. It was accepted truth.
Well, that didn't make it flat, did it?
Many things are proved later as science progesses.

I have found three types of dreams.
1. Symbolic dreams from the subconscious.
But, I don't believe a one size fits all explanation of the symbols. Usually they are personalized.
2. Brain junk.
A dumping of the general everyday accumulations needed to maintain mental well being.
3. Those criticised ones. Lucid, prophetic, being in real places you know nothing about but can find out many times are real whether in present, past, future.

Dreams are a very interesting subject to me as I dream in colour, often in lucidity, get insight from the symbols,
prophetic dreams and the exploration types of unknown places that I later find are true places just as they are in the dream.
Don't know about differences in AS and NTs.
My mom was NT but had the same dream ways as I do.

 

[convallaria]

For instance, most of my dreams involve me running from pursuers until I'm cornered at which point they kill me or I kill them, then I wake up.

I also had a LOT of this type of dreams. mostly I ran not alone, but with my younger brother or other helpless people whom I needed to protect from pursuers. often these dreams ended with the fact that I sacrificed myself for saving their lives. do you run away in your dreams alone?

Amateur interpretation, but could dreaming about being a different person with a different story be an issue of personal identity? Like in your subconscious you want to be, or wouldn't mind being, the characters you dream of?

I thought about it and this was my first guess. I'm not sure of the correctness of this conjecture until now. maybe I have problems with self-identification. but do I really want to be the people I see in my dreams? Once I dreamed that I was 37 years old man , I have no children, no wife, my friends died, I worked all my life in a chemical laboratory. I was in an old almost destroyed hospital and I was given documents that said that I had a terminal stage of stomach cancer. I felt just awful and was glad that soon I would die and my suffering would end.

I used to have weird hallucinations of flying (actually floating like a balloon) when I was a kid

i had this kind of hallucinations too. (when i was 14 maybe)

but I don't realise that I'm not me (i.e. I don't remember who "me" is) until late in the dream.

same! In a dream, I even have other memories. Once in a dream I even was reading a silent movie in german and i was thinking in that language. although in reality I knew only one word in german: danke.

The weird thing is that I seem to have several dreams in quick succession, especially when I drop off to sleep while watching TV, and, even though I have the sense that a lot of time has passed, when I turn back the TV to something I remember seeing, it's sometimes only a minute or two in real time, even though I remember having like five complete dreams in that amount of time. Maybe they're running in parallel or something.

the weird thing is that i have exactly the same problem...

We were surprised to find most people don't.

i`m surprised too
I thought that black and white dreams are anomaly. in my dreams everything is almost like in life and sometimes just like in life.

 

[Gritches]

I also had a LOT of this type of dreams. mostly I ran not alone, but with my younger brother or other helpless people whom I needed to protect from pursuers. often these dreams ended with the fact that I sacrificed myself for saving their lives. do you run away in your dreams alone?

I'm almost always alone in my running dreams, but in the rare instances I'm not I'm usually with an ex I still having feelings for and would also indeed follow the theme of protecting her from the pursuers, ultimately with my life.

I thought about it and this was my first guess. I'm not sure of the correctness of this conjecture until now. maybe I have problems with self-identification. but do I really want to be the people I see in my dreams? Once I dreamed that I was 37 years old man , I have no children, no wife, my friends died, I worked all my life in a chemical laboratory. I was in an old almost destroyed hospital and I was given documents that said that I had a terminal stage of stomach cancer. I felt just awful and was glad that soon I would die and my suffering would end.

Perhaps the aging man who had nothing and nobody and felt awful about it yet got relief from a diagnosis of terminal stomach cancer could've been a reflection about how you genuinely felt about life at the time? I should really take a closer look at dream analysis, this is getting interesting.

Funny story, I was in one of the worst depressions of my life when my doc told me I might have stomach cancer and they wanted to run the usual battery of tests. I checked it out and found out how low the survival rate for stomach cancer was, and I was so incredibly relieved and happy that it could finally just be over soon. Even though it was just at the "you might, we need to run tests" stage, I was sincerely hoping I had late stage stomach cancer. I wish I remembered what my dreams were like at the time but I bet they were about dying alone and sick.

 

[Gritches]

I've never heard that.
I've always dreamt in colour and so did my Mom.
We were surprised to find most people don't.
We thought it was natural and neither of us had
schizophrenia.
The dream studies I read said dreaming in colour is unusual and occurred in the people with a more sixth sense psychic type nature.
That held true for the two of us.

I had no idea people don't usually dream in color, that just threw me for a loop for a second there. The psychic thing would explain a lot, my mother also dreams in color (as far as I'm aware) and also dreams of things days-years in advance, usually short and useless snippets but it makes you wonder...

 

[convallaria]

Perhaps the aging man who had nothing and nobody and felt awful about it yet got relief from a diagnosis of terminal stomach cancer could've been a reflection about how you genuinely felt about life at the time? I should really take a closer look at dream analysis, this is getting interesting.

Yes, it is very interesting. I don't really remember how I felt at the time, but it really can be so.

Just apart from what I found out (that I'm dying of cancer), there was a story. I heard the nurses whispering about something suspicious. One nurse gave to another nurse the keys to the room in which the experimental drug was stored. I followed her and saw that the nurse was mixing in the food (it was something like pink porridge) this drug.

Patients looked awful and acted like vegetables, could not think. This medicine maimed them. I also saw many corpses in the corridor of the hospital (the corpses were covered with white sheets). One of them was my friend who died of the plague. They said it was an epidemic. Maybe it was drug from plague.

So after that, the nurses decided to inject the experimental drug to the sick orphan boy. I waited until late at night, kidnapped the boy so that they did not inject him this terrible medicine. And I carried the boy through the catacombs (or was it canalisation?) under the hospital.

 

[tree]

My favorite way to understand dream content is to
use the method of Gestalt Analysis. This has been
useful to me.

The meaning of the dream comes from the dreamer.
The meaning isn't imposed by an outsider: no "expert",
no book of "interpretations."

The dream originates within the dreamer and so
does the meaning.

 

[SusanLR]

In a dream, I even have other memories. Once in a dream I even was reading a silent movie in german and i was thinking in that language. although in reality I knew only one word in german: danke.

It's like a dream within a dream.
Sometimes I dream I wake up, but, it isn't me waking up.
I usually know it is not me. But, know it is my dream.
Parapsychology calls it dream interpolation.
A type of telepathy where you are experiencing someone elses experience while you are asleep like it is your own.

I always wanted to find someone this had happened to and one time I did. I was curious to know if the person you are dreaming the experience through felt anything.

A young man I only knew via the net in UK.
The dream was I had woke up and went about my morning business and was planning on going to see Uri Geller at a psychic fair. ( I knew in real life that he was going to be at a book signing psychic fair on that date.)

The young man and myself were chatting in a chat room the next night and I ask if had gone to the fair to see Uri.
I knew he wanted to and being in the UK thought perhaps he might get to go.
He said he did go.

Suspicious about my dream I asked him several questions about his experience. Starting with reading a newspaper at breakfast, then crying over a problem in his life, thinking about going to the fair but was depressed and went anyway.
I described a few things at the fair I saw in the dream.
The car I drove to get there. Waiting in line to see Uri.
And what Uri had signed and drew on the inside cover.

He was totally amazed as everything I described was what HE had done and at the same time as I was dreaming it.
I ask if he felt anything different during that interval.
He said No.
But, could not deny I experienced his experience and in the dream it was as if I were doing it myself.

 

[convallaria]

The dream originates within the dreamer and so
does the meaning.

this is makes sense

A type of telepathy where you are experiencing someone elses experience while you are asleep like it is your own.

i want to believe in this theory and I believe in what happened to you. but it's too difficult for me to find the difference between imagination and mysticism. I quite often encountered paranormal phenomena in my life, but maybe it's all normal phenomena, just science has not yet been able to explain this.

 

[Adora]

My dreams are usually in colour and as a child and even sometimes as I got older I would have dreams about distant planets or things like middle earth or even Ancient Greece but now my dreams are mostly nightmares due to past traumatic experiences and sometimes I will yell or cry in my sleep and my husband will have to wake me up,but fortunately at the moment It hasn’t happened a lot but I do go through periods where something will trigger it off and I end having nightmares on a nightly basis.

 

[Idahocalypse]

I tend to have very vivid dreams and frequent nightmares. My dreams in general are so strange that a couple of days ago I decided to start a dream journal to keep track of them.

Also, I experienced sleep paralysis for the first time several weeks ago and had a nightmare/hallucination(?) about playing a retro Pokemon game and being attacked at the Pokemon Center by a decapitated Nurse Joy.

From what I've heard, sleep paralysis tends to run in families. My mom has it more often than anyone else I've known, and when I posted about my own experience with sleep paralysis on Facebook, several of my other relatives told me that they'd experienced it at some point too.

 

[Misery]

I had no idea people don't usually dream in color, that just threw me for a loop for a second there. The psychic thing would explain a lot, my mother also dreams in color (as far as I'm aware) and also dreams of things days-years in advance, usually short and useless snippets but it makes you wonder...

Wait, what? People dont usually dream in color?

....Are we SURE about this? This is one of those things I find very hard to quite process or accept. It sounds... wrong somehow.

That being said, mine are always in color. Usually very bright and vivid. But moreso, mine are extremely surreal. Places made of impossible geometry where the laws of physics are fractured and bent. Things of nonsensical design everywhere. Often these places dont fit any particular description. Usually, in the real world, any given place can be referred to in a certain way... maybe it's the inside of a building, or maybe you are outdoors, or maybe at the bottom of the sea. Well, not in my dreams. The sorts of structures that show up often dont fit any of that. Like, "what the heck even is this" sort of thing.

Even when a normal structure exists, there's probably something wrong with it. I remember one dream that involved this building... big long place, made mostly of wood, looked kinda like it was designed by a maniac. Okay, normal enough, right? Except for the part where it floats in a void. Except the idea of a "void" isnt usually a background made of shifting, bent purple lines. Bright ones, too. The dream took outside of that building, as there was a sort of broken "walkway" made of floaty things that wrapped around it. But because it wasnt bloody weird enough, gravity didnt work there either. Had to move around like you might in a space station.

And that's one of the more tame ones.

The only sort of recurring theme I've ever had is that of a library. I use the term "library" loosely. It's more of an infinite labyrinth, but one where most walls have shelves built in, covered in books about who knows what. Like most of my dreams the structure of the place is very warped. There is no entrance or exit, as it has no boundaries. This type of dream comes around every now and then.

The odd bit is, as twisted as these places are, they make perfect sense while in them.


So.... yeah. Try making sense of any of that.

I wish I was making this all up.

 

[Gritches]

Wait, what? People dont usually dream in color?

....Are we SURE about this? This is one of those things I find very hard to quite process or accept. It sounds... wrong somehow.

Agreed, seems bizarre, I had never heard of it (though the subject had neverr really come up) until someone mentioned it earlier in the thread. That's what I'm going off of.