Thread: One long dream or many separate ones? How do you count?

wow, good question. I'd actually count each time after you wake up...because the other several parts making up a long dream could somehow be connected. I guess. o_o

Each time a completely different story starts I count it as a new dream. Sometimes an object from the dream before will carry over to the next dream. I can recall a few dreams that all had the same pair of scissors in them.

i count them by shifts in storyline or place.

for example, if i am eating out with my family in a dream, that's one dream.

if i then start dreaming of something totally unrelated, with different characters and a totally different setting, then that to me is another dream.

Good question by the way!

In non lucids I count whenver I completely new plot exists thats unrelated. In Lucid dreams as my consciousness relates everything I every time I fade out and fade back in as a new dream. But sometimes this doesn't work because I fade back into the same plot and scenery.

When I post in my DJ, I just count them seperately based on shift in mood or activity.

In real life, I consider them to be the same dream if there is a hint of similarity.

There is some logic in saying that each separate dream scene and episode could be considered a separate dream; however, whenever a dream scene fades out and then instantly opens up upon a new scene, one needs to wonder whether there is some connection between the two. Even if one, at the time does not recognize a connection, it would probably be rise to speak of these separate episodes as being of the Same Dream, as the dreams may derive much of their meaning by their conjunction.

For instance, I've spoken before of that one dream I had, with two parts -- the first part with an extremely ugly woman who could sing extremely well, and play guitar. Everyone was ridiculing her, and when I asked them to please be quiet so I could listen to the music, she suddenly suspended the dream action to tell me to my face "The Faculty most worthy of being cultivated is the faculty of True Discernment"... that dream scene faded out and another opened up in which I was just a disembodied presence in a moonlit arbor, and there below me was the Huntress Goddess Diana. Along came this proud godlike hero of a hunter himself who, desirous of impressing the Goddess, boasted that he was hunting and was so sharp with a bow and arrow that it quite would not give the poor animals a chance. So the Goddess then took the crookedness most wiggly arrow out of her quiver, and loading it into her bow, and turning her head away from the line of aim, released it as though quite arbitrarily. Following the sound of the woosh she traced the arrow to a bush and found the feathers of the arrow and withdrew it from the bush -- and there impaled on the end was a dead gamebird. "Chance", she said, "nothing happens by chance".

Seen as two separate dreams, the interpretation might differ than when they are considered as two facets of one Greater Truth. "Faculty of True Discernment" followed by "Nothing happens by Chance". By the conjunction of the two scenes, one supposes that one must have something to do with the other.

My dreams have been so short that I can't count that low.