Thread: Questions on Third Person Dreaming and How Controlling What you Dream of

I've never really understood dreaming and will admit my reason to joining this website was to learn more...

For at least the past few years (mostly because I can't remember before then) I have almost always dreamed in third person--dreams where I'm basically watching people. I always seem to be in control of what happens and dreaming is my mind just making pictures of it (as someone who loves drawing, my mind does this throughout the day obviously, but these dreams always have the concept of being random sometimes, where I really won't know what is happening because I'm "not in total control of the dream".)

I go to bed, fall asleep, and the brain works. I usually dream about my own characters (like, as of late, have been designing for a story I want to write, so the characters and the scenarios always appear in my dreams lately). I'll dream up a setting with those characters and control most of what will happen throughout the dream but there are parts, like I said, where things will happen randomly like in daily life due to the actions of others.

I'm still baffled as to how this works--and I don't really understand it, despite what I try looking up.

Back to the third person. I am basically a spectator creating the environment and characters, aware of what is going on. Well, maybe it is a bird eye's view of the dream occurring, but that is somewhat besides the point...

And I always find it strange that I almost always remember what I dream throughout the night (dreams per night usually only being two that run pretty long), which is useful to me since I "watch my characters" and use the dreams for stories-that-are-to-be-created. Is it really hard for some people to remember dreams since not remembering them is a foreign concept to me...

Or is that just the varieties of human brains out there at work? Dreams are still kind of a foreign concept to me and any information on how third person dreams, how some people remember them, and controlling them work (without the dream being lucid as I have never gone through a lucid dream to my knowledge)...

Hi ReikiShutuagi, welcome to Dreamviews!!

I am also an artist/writer and I know what you mean about seeing dreams in third person - though I haven't dreamed about my characters yet (that might mean I'm not thinking deeply enough about them). If you feel very strongly about something then it will quite likely show up in your dreams, so it makes sense that your characters do. Be careful about using dreams to write stories from though - dreams are often made from whats called "day residue", which means bits and pieces of things you saw that day or in the past few weeks (maybe months). Just random things sometimes, but if you write your dreams down in a journal along with other things you did that day, you'll often be able to find connections later - such as things you watched on TV or in movies affecting your dreams. What I'm saying is, you could easily dream a storyline that's at least partly affected by some show or movie or story, and think of it as your own original dream. I just wanted to make sure you understand this, because people usually think of their dreams as 'their own original content', when often they're mashups made from parts of existing stories. Of course this is fine if they're mashed up enough...

Also, once you succeed in causing yourself to dream about something in particular (this is called dream incubation - you think very hard about something and intend to dream about it, and often you will) - you can then dream about that thing many times in the next few weeks or months. Personally I find my dreams run in trends - once I latch onto a certain dream theme it sticks around for a long time. This helps to explain why you dream so often of your characters.

You might dream in third person because you write in third person? When you think of your stories, do you imagine yourself being in them, as the main character, or do you imagine seeing it with characters who aren't yourself? It could also be that you consider yourself more an observer of life than a participant in it - this is a pretty common theme among people who dream a lot in third person or who are kind of passive in their dreams.

You have more than 2 dreams in a night - I believe there are 4 or 5 REM periods in a normal night and you have dreams in each of them - probably more than one dream in each. Plus in between REM periods you can have a different kind of dream, called NREM (Non REM) dreams, which are often just streams of thoughts or just a single image or seeing a pattern or hearing part of a song over and over (as opposed to the REM dreams which are like movies with full motion and sound etc). When my recall is really good I can often remember 7 dreams each night. Occasionally I've seen people report more than that. I think the 2 you remember are probably from the last REM period of the night, or maybe one from the last and one from the period before last. It's pretty hard to remember dreams from the earliest REM periods, unless you wake up after dreaming and fix them in your mind or write them down. (We actually have what are called micro-awakenings after each REM period, but they're very brief and we don't usually remember them when we get up in the morning).

Ok, well, sorry for writing War and Peace here..

Haha, thanks for the welcome ~

I thought it would be dream incubation after I read about it. I care a lot for my characters and when they appear in dreams, it's usually after the point that I've been drawing them literally the entire week. The dream theme... I think that's what I tend to do in dreams, especially as of late all I have been writing about is this one story I'm trying to plan out. So the idea has been stuck in my brain forever-how-long I've been going and it's stuck itself in dreams too...

Maybe on the part about third person. I constantly and always write in third person, since I don't like writing in first person. I never think of myself as a member of the story (well, except for one of mine which has actually appeared lately, but she's only somewhat based off of myself, things like personality). I guess it's the part of me "being the observer" since that's how third person is and you're not a member of the story, you just watch it unfold.

Seven dreams. That's a lot of dreams when I personally think about it... So either they can run kinda long or I just simply forget the rest of the dreams, hah.

Ah, I don't mind the long paragraphs~ Kind of an enjoyable read and it made me understand the subject more. ^^~

Originally Posted by ReikiShutuagi

all I have been writing about is this one story I'm trying to plan out. So the idea has been stuck in my brain forever-how-long I've been going and it's stuck itself in dreams too...

One of the things dreams do really well is help us solve problems we've been wrestling with. If you spend a good part of the day struggling to solve something you'll dream about it - in some way anyway - it might be in alternate form. Example - there are sevral famous stories of people who made discoveries or inventions and got some help from dreams. The guy who invented the sewing machine (don't remember his name - maybe it was Singer? ) was trying to figure out how to make it work, he couldn't understand how to get the needle to drive the thread through the cloth, then he had a dream of cannibals surrounding him with spears and he noticed each of the spears had holes through them right near the tip. He woke up excited and knew he needed to put the hole at the tip of the needle. And of course Einstein was able to visualize Relativity in a dream which was a major breakthrough for his theory.

In fact, if you have iTunes and can spare $1.99, there's an amazing Nova documentry called What Are Dreams? that goes into some detail about how dreams help us solve problems and how they've helped people create things: https://itunes.apple.com/us/tv-seaso...-4/id354319653

There's a part where the sleep researchers have a man play a skiing video game before bed and then he dreams about it (in slightly different form) and the next day he's a lot better at the game because quite literally he "slept on it" - so there's something to that old saying. It actually is much better to study and then get a good night's sleep before a test rather than pull an all-nighter cramming. It's in sleep that the brain sorts through the information and creatively solves it. In fact there's a very revealing segment with rats running mazes showing their brain activity during REM and NREM and exactly how their dreams help them learn the mazes. To me this is fascinating stuff. There's also a sort of companion book called The Mind at Night which seems to cover the same material, as if it's from exactly the same research sessions, though I never noticed any official connection. I recommend them both highly.