Dreaming of places you thought you visited in real life.

Ok, this may sound odd but i had a dream last night where i was in this place that i felt like i visited in real life, but this didn't occur to me when i woke up, this was being thought of in my dream, i was even telling myself to check google earth and sketch the place when i wake up. Very odd dream, i wasn't lucid but it seemed as though i was some what conscious, but i did have a lucid dream either earlier or later on. I believe i might have dreamed of the same or a similar place before, now i know i did, this wasn't one of those dreams that was pre-programmed to make me believe i dreamed about it before, weird dream.

I know what you mean - I do have "memories" in dreams of things - esp. places - that I have dreamed of before, but that do not exist in reality.
For example - there is a flat, where I used to live together with 3 other students - but in several dreams it had a basement - always lower ceilings and no windows and not nice - sometimes an exit to a garden, though.
Funnily enough - several times, certain people lived down there - like a friend back from school, and it was always only for interim - he was looking for another flat.
Or a certain forest that recurs without me ever having been in such a landscape like this - but it comes back.
It´s a bit weird - how can memories from one dream reach into another one - or several without any external context...?
Or is it just a recurring "translation" of some content of my mind into the same symbols - simple as that?

There´s also a sense of déjà vus included, and sometimes I am so close to becoming lucid - like realizing that I was there before, but that it was in a dream - but without going that one step further and testing, if I am in one again.
Frustrating..

I have a train station that i keep going to. Never saw that train station before in real life.

I experience similar things. Strange phenomenon.

There are a number of places I frequent in dreams which (from what I can remember) I've never been to in real life. For example, this strange outdoor airport that I'm always rushing to in my dreams, while all the airports I've been to in real life have been indoors and I don't know where my mind would even come up with the idea of an outdoor airport. :/. In fact I think my mind cycles through a few locations frequently. Even if the places would be described differently, there's still this sense that they're in the same spacial location. Which is hard to describe. For example if you think of a 'hotel room', I'm sure a certain image comes to mind of a general hotel room. Maybe there are a few. When you go to a new hotel room in real life, instead of discovering a new place, your mind probably takes one of those 'hotel room' spacial memories from your past and fits this new room into that model. Your mind doesn't have to do as much work that way. I've never heard this hypothesized before, it's just kinda my own little hypothesis which seems to be happening in my own mind. So maybe this same thing happens in dreams.

But I think the original question concerned memories in dreams of having done something in real life. I think I know what you mean. It happens to me rarely and when it does it's really weird, because it's like my long-term memory has been invaded. I have what feels like a real memory of something that happened a long time ago. I feel in the dream as though I've had that memory for months or years, while really I just came up with it likely less than an hour before in the dream.

Hm - yes and no.
But I like your hotel-room example - I´m sure we have our schemata of such things, and every time we encounter a new specimen, which belongs - we integrate some new data into it
Then we draw on that schema - to not have our brain deal with it all, as if it was in such a situation for the first time.
Saving processing-capacity.
That even might make us prone to miss out on differences, which lie outside of our expectations - the brain glossing over them, if they are not really intensely "out of order".


What I find strange in this context, though, is that I seem to be able to remember something from a prior dream, while I am in the next one.

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Originally Posted by PsychotiChaos

Ok, this may sound odd but i had a dream last night where i was in this place that i felt like i visited in real life, but this didn't occur to me when i woke up, this was being thought of in my dream, i was even telling myself to check google earth and sketch the place when i wake up. Very odd dream, i wasn't lucid but it seemed as though i was some what conscious, but i did have a lucid dream either earlier or later on. I believe i might have dreamed of the same or a similar place before, now i know i did, this wasn't one of those dreams that was pre-programmed to make me believe i dreamed about it before, weird dream.

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As you say - there are dreams, where I only believe, that I was in this and that location in another dream* before, and when I wake up, it feels, I didn´t ever dream of that before - I just thought so in the dream.
*Why on earth I am able to have such a thought of another dream in a dream and not get lucid from it - only my subconsciousness knows..Attachment 5775

But there are also ones, where I dream of a place, that I really do have dreamed of before.
Maybe it´s even the same with the above scenario and I have forgotten that dream, where I was there before, and I really do remember things from one dream to the next always, when it feels that way.

I know this goes against some concepts of dreams - but I´m pretty sure it happens.

Sounds very convoluted, my post - hope it is understandable..:roll:

...So common...
Many times not only do I feel like I've been at that place, but I feel like I have had the dream before. Sometimes I get the sensation that this dream world is the only place I have ever been, and I forget that the real world exists. I forget that there is a reality out there in which I cannot fly or move things with my mind.

I once had a dream that I was a small child again, playing with my toys. My grandparents raised me at that age. I miss them dearly. I would give anything in the world to speak to them one more time. Yet, in this dream, they were there, and I was furious with them because they wouldn't play toy cars with me.
Yes, not only did I fully believe that I was that age again, but my emotional maturity was set to that age. And even further, I didn't feel happy to see them. I was completely unaware that they had ever died. It felt completely normal for them to be there, and I was yelling at them for not playing with me.
In my dream, I literally hated them, for what (at the time) seemed like a completely legitimate reason: They wouldn't play with me.
As soon as I woke up I was in shock, not by the dream itself, but by the reverted state of mind that I had just experienced. It really was very trippy. For a few minutes, if only in my mind, I WAS a small child again.

Interesting - I do dream back to being a young teenager (going sharp towards 40 IRL..) but I havn´t dreamt any further back - at least not lately.
But yeah - similar mindset - like wanting to impress the boys with how tom-catty I am and stuff..lol
Didn´t ever work of course..hehe

This happens to me a lot. It is very strange.