Hey everyone. I'm a 19 year old undergraduate physics student currently enjoying the last fleeting days of my summer break, and therefore have all the time in the world to waste and so have decided to come here to explore a long-held fascination of mine - namely dreaming.

I've decided to post the next couple of dreams because they are similar in a few different ways:

1) They are fairly recent (both occurred within the last few months).
2) There were similar emotional themes of permeating desperation in both dreams.
3) A strange sensation that I was viewing my own future from within myself...there were not any moments that I can recall where my vantage point changed to an omniscient (or clueless) third person, which is quite common with my own dreams and many others as well, I believe. I felt more solidly within myself, although the environment in which the second dream takes place is quite surreal.
4) I remember specific names from both of them.

Now for the first dream, less interesting dream:

The unfortunate thing is that I had written this one down in Notepad, but I accidentally saved over it so I might have lost some details. What I do remember is that I was married to a girl I knew a couple of years ago and we had two kids, the older one named Andrew and the younger one named James. I remember explaining to some lady that Andrew was named after my cousin who had died (I do have a cousin named Andrew but he is alive and well). I actually had a dream about the wedding with this girl previously, but the only detail I remember is a feeling of slight regret, a bit of a rotten feeling in my gut. Anyway, in this chronologically later dream there was, as I mentioned earlier, a feeling of desperation and wanting to get out of the relationship. I felt as if I was slightly famous yet very worn out and unfulfilled at the same time. Quietly desperate for some sort of fulfillment. I've felt it before in my waking life.

The other image from this dream I recall was of being with my extended family (not the side of the aforementioned cousin) at Christmas. I received some sort of radio, or at least an electronic device of some sort, which I felt was related to my profession in this dream world. The emptiness hit me hardest of all at this point, I would say.

The second dream, which was a sort of half-epic dream:

This one I didn't write down soon enough after waking, so there are a few things missing I'm afraid...

I was working feverishly with two others (a man and a woman) on some sort of important scientific endeavor. The most memorable image was of a square room which was empty except for an empty well in the middle and some people as well. Early in the dream I was in this enclosure with some other people, the only two I remember being a friend of mine (we'll call him Dan) and an unknown Asian guy. I don't remember any of the details of what happened while I was down there myself, but later I was viewing this room through a glass window at a higher level and watched a bit of a scene unfold. Dan was fiercely beating on this Asian guy...it was revenge for something, I don't remember what. Eventually he knocked the poor guy into the well and some bones were broken as he hit bottom and I felt a bit sick. For whatever reason it crossed my mind that this sort of behavior must have been more prevalent in humans before civilization.

Near the end of the dream, I was talking to the woman I was working with. She was a beautiful Mediterranean-looking woman. The atmosphere at this point was very gloomy and the scene had changed entirely...I was talking to her in my bedroom at home with the lights dimmed. Whatever our mission was, it was now getting quite desperate...the walls were closing in, so to speak. It felt like if we failed, the world would meet some terrible fate. Paradoxically, I felt like I was out of the situation, at some other "level", really. I asked her for her name. I think at this point I had become somewhat lucid (I haven't trained myself at this, it just happens sometimes). I felt it was vitally important to learn her name before I woke up. She told me her name was "Skillé", so of course I asked her to spell it for me while I wrote it on a piece of paper...S-K-I-L-L-E, but the "E" has an "effete", she said. I somehow knew that "effete" meant "accent". I woke up after this.

I looked up the word "effete" and apparently it means "exhausted of vitality or strength; worn out; spent". It's an interesting coincidence that this word that I've never heard before perfectly describes how I felt in Dream #1...maybe I heard it passively somewhere and it came out subconsciously like that, I don't know.

Any thoughts?