Thread: Differentiation Between Dreams in the Span of Sleep

I think that's normal. Unless you wake up directly from a dream or shortly after, there is no way to tell for sure which dream came first, if it was one dream or more. The timeline of things happening in your dream is hard to keep track off, just because there is no point of reference. You can jump right into a scene, jump straight into another one, maybe same DCs or different ones.

In waking life, you can kinda back track your steps - now I'm at PC, just before I had lunch, before that I was cooking it, and so forth. But in dreams, most of the time, they are not progressing chronologically or with any logic.

I think you should just determine yourself whether it's a dream with constant changing of dream scenes or they are multiple dreams. If I feel that the events happened one after the other, I would think they're still part of the same dream although there's nothing to link them up.

Just yesterday when I was lucid, one moment I was at the void deck of a building, the next moment I was at a shopping mall and I can recall NOTHING about what happened in between. It wouldn't make sense to me that they are two lucids because I know my lucid dreaming capability and I know I can't get into two different lucids within such a short interval. I just know it's the same dream but I'm feeling empty about that lose gap or quick transition.

This is perfectly normal and happens to quite a lot of people
I personally have to write down my dreams in the order I remember them and then try and work out which ones came first and whether or not they were part of the same dream.

Originally Posted by Carrot

I think you should just determine yourself whether it's a dream with constant changing of dream scenes or they are multiple dreams. If I feel that the events happened one after the other, I would think they're still part of the same dream although there's nothing to link them up.

Just yesterday when I was lucid, one moment I was at the void deck of a building, the next moment I was at a shopping mall and I can recall NOTHING about what happened in between. It wouldn't make sense to me that they are two lucids because I know my lucid dreaming capability and I know I can't get into two different lucids within such a short interval. I just know it's the same dream but I'm feeling empty about that lose gap or quick transition.

ugh, I hate that

Dreams from different REM periods are separated by periods of waking up briefly (you actually wake up many times during the night). So if you can recall waking up after a dream, then the next dream is definitely a different one. If you can't recall waking up, then it's your best guess. But one possible piece of evidence could be that both the scene and your emotional state are totally different; this would probably be a new dream.

I agree with what you're saying and have that problem too. It isn't a problem except for writing in my DJ.

In my DJ, I'll generally label something a separate dream if it follows the same storyline (if it's in the same place, involves the same people, if I have memories from previous parts of it in the dream). But there are cases in which it's difficult to tell, like when two 'dreams' have entirely different storylines but still kind of feel like they're in the same place and have the same feeling to them... are those two separate dreams or the same one? So much isn't black and white, yet for recording purposes we have to draw boundaries.

It's a good question. It's commonly assumed that there's some rigid definition of "a dream" but that clearly isn't the case.