Thread: How Have Outside Sensations Affected Your Dreams?

Originally Posted by Darkmatters

I had a really cool one when I was a teenager spending the night at my friends' house. I don't remember why, but the radio was on when we crashed out, and I started having a dream during an Oxy-10 commercial. Anybody remember those radio spots - it was a guy with this really deep loud voice , and I was hearing it really loud through the whole dream. I wove it into the plot - and it seemed like a pretty long involved dream - I was a spy playing life-and-death hide-and-seek in a theater with a bunch of shadowy operatives, and I was hearing this running monologue by their leader, who was an administrator sitting behind a desk. The crazy thing is - I could swear the dream was like 20 minutes long at least - but it all began and ended during that commercial. This proves to me that dreams can seriously compress time. I think they consist of brief little episodes cut together like a movie where an hour and a half can cover the entire French Revolution, ya know?

Actually, you're exactly right. Dreams make time pass quickly the same way movies do. According to ETWOLD, at least.

Sounds around me when I'm asleep always have very abstract influence on my dreams.
So with that outside noises never really bother me when I'm sleeping, they just get jumbled up and mixed into my dream.

Thunderstorms have influenced my dreams many times. Usually, they come through in the standard thunderstorm form. Sometimes, the sound of the thunder will come through as gun fire or a cattle stampede.

In a recent dream, the sounds from a trash truck outside caused me to transition into a different dream. I left a boring normal dream and found myself standing in the middle of the road in front of a huge off-road dump truck. Needless to say, I woke up rather quickly.

Hm, for me outside stimuli rarely do anything within my dreams. While listening to music while sleeping, neither do I remember hearing music within my dreams, nor does the kind of music affect my dreams at all.
That is, except for one time I guess. I usually like to listen to calm, at best even depressive music. The calmer, darker and preferably with as less hope as possible, the better and easier I fall asleep, for whatever reason. Even while listening to such music I usually have neutral to even positive dreams, I also never have nightmares, whatever the circumstances.
But this one day I had something melancholic playing again and when I woke up I had this ridiculously strong feeling of regret that even really paralyzed me for a few seconds, it seemed to be condensed out of everything I regretted in my life so far. Funny enough (or rather not) this was the closest thing to a trauma that ever happened to me, since the mental pain of this event already became physical. Since I count myself to the strong side in terms of mind it's no problem to me, but I doubt everyone would've seen something like this as something harmless.
I'm not sure wether the track actually caused that feling or just influenced it, but the track definitely played a role in it.

Edit: I actually remembered another case where music had an effect into my dreams. It was the track menu (yeah, creative name) from Frozen Synapse I was listening while sleeping, the track somehow called my control back into reality while I was underwater, within the only re-occuring dream sign for me, swimming baths. However it just stayed like that for a few seconds until my mind followed my control and I woke up.

Here's an interesting experience I've had with an outside stimulus affecting one of my dreams:

We get off the train and walk through the high-ceilinged train station until we get to the entrance of a bird exhibit. The exhibit consists of a series of crooked, jointed tubes through which visitors have to climb upwards. There are chains hanging down from the ceiling of the tube near the entrance. There are windows in the tubes so that you can see out into the birds' habitat.

I start climbing up into the tubes. There is a guy climbing in front of me. There are lots of small handles attached to the walls in convenient locations for climbers to grab on to. As I climb, I notice that one of my hands [my right, I think] is partially numb. My ring and pinky fingers, especially, feel like they've fallen asleep. This makes it more difficult to get a solid grip on the handles with that hand, so I have to rely more on my left hand and arm.

I woke up to discover that I'd fallen asleep with my forearms still resting against my ribcage, thus cutting off most of the circulation to my right hand and forearm. I realized that in the dream, when I had been climbing and noticed that one of my hands felt partially numb, it must have been because of the sense data coming through from my real body.

Last night, I dreamed that I was being attacked by my friend's cats while sleeping on their couch. The cats were clawing and biting at me through the blankets, and one cat was ripping the feathers out of my pillow. I awakened to find that two of the cats were chasing a bug around the room.

The sounds from the cats' claws digging into the carpet as they were running were clearly present in the dream as they attacked me.

Had a experience this night, after about 8 hours of sleep I took my mp3-player and turned a rain tune on. In one of the dreams it was raining into my room pretty heavy because there was some sort of slit above my curtain. In reality that slit exists but obviously only lets light through. Maybe I'm getting better at transfering outside sensations into my dreams.

I was dreaming that I stole a bunch of dvd's in a shop and worker there started slaping me. I started waking up and my cousin there was slaping me trying to wake up. It was pretty neat .

I've had this happen with sounds. My dog has barked in reality, and my dog appeared in my dream.

I've had situations like that in the past. I once heard the TV in my dream while it was actually on. However this doesnt happen very often. What happens often for me is the fact that I will actually go to the bathroom in my dream when I actually need to go the bathroom in real life.