"Nothing is more boring than other people's dreams."

The title is a saying I've heard many times more often than once that I've never quite related to. Personally, I've always liked hearing about other people's dreams, and being able to somewhat "dream vicariously" through them. Dreams have always fascinated me anyways, from the aspect that they represent the unbound imagination of the mind to that you can actually remember something that didn't happen -- in vivid detail.

I can imagine that this is rather a biased place to ask the question, but what do y'all think of this saying? :D

I don't know if you can relate to this: It's kinda like whenever a friend sends you a bunch of Youtube videos of music and/or things they find funny, but, when you go to look at them, you just don't find the content that interesting or entertaining. Eventually, you become indifferent when they keep sending them. You simply don't experience what they experience.

Personally, I look at dream reports a lot, not because I find the content interesting, but because I'm looking for patterns.

Also, dreams do happen. It's a very real physical process, technically.

I like to read dreams from people that I know, and have some kind of relationship (like friends).

I think Earthatic explained quite well why people are so indifferent to hear people's dreams. I must say, I am guilty of feeling this apathy at times. Sometimes, it is hard to relate to other people's dreams because of their nature. But I do enjoy sharing my dreams with others, so I understand the importance that I make an extra effort to relate to other people's dreams and to gain some enjoyment out of it.

This is so relateable. I spend so much time reading and re-reading my DJ compared to anyone else on the site.

I think for dreams to be interesting to others, at least one of the following criteria must be met:

You must know the person on at least some personal level. This may lend you to understand why they may have dreamed of what they did. For sake of example, If someone tells you that they dreamed of riding a horse, then you probably don't care less. If you know that person, and you know that they strongly dislike horses/equestrian, then you might be slightly more interested in the details as you try to figure out why they might have dreamed of this.

That or the person's must be at a very high skill level of lucid dreaming. Lucid dreams, I find are much more interesting to read and talk about than nonlucid dreams. You might find that you are inspired by the skill level of the dreamer, or their powers in the dream world, wishing to replicate them in their own dreams. If someone is flying through outer space, then you will probably aspire to want to do that as well and therefore have an interest in their experience.

You may also be drawn to any persistent characters of dream guides they may have. Congruency of characters and themes, and dreams that develop 'story arcs' are sure to draw people in, since they are much, much more engaging than just random events occurring. Though you may not know the dreamer personally, you will start to get an idea of what they are like by their behavior and the things that manifest in their dreams. In fact, I think this is actually the biggest reason why dreams often seem so uninteresting to other readers, because they lack this congruency.

When I read the title I went like: "Yes! Yes, that's absolutely true!" My interest in my own dreams is way out of proportion with how cool I find other people's dreams. And then I read that you were actually questioning that claim :P

I think that all forms of dreams are interesting, whether they're my own or not. You can almost always learn something from someone else's experiences when it comes to normal or lucid dreams. They may not be exciting sure, but they're definitely not boring.

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Originally Posted by SpykeTheGamer

I think that all forms of dreams are interesting, whether they're my own or not. You can almost always learn something from someone else's experiences when it comes to normal or lucid dreams. They may not be exciting sure, but they're definitely not boring.

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Yeah - I generally agree with this; it sums up what I think very well :)

I dunno, I just always wondered why some people have been so averse to hearing about dreams (*cough* parents :lol:). But I think Earthatic explained it perfectly. I guess I just never felt so "bored" by any dream anyone's told me -- maybe I'm just different :)

Also like Earthatic said, I do like to analyze and discover certain concepts in other people's dreams as well, but I still like being able to enjoy them and get a good laugh at the same time.

Thanks for all your interesting responses!

I sometimes find other people's dreams interesting, but I don't tend to take the time to read about them. I think it's mainly because I find my own dreams so much more interesting that I see no need to.

The reason my own dreams are so much more interesting to me is because they're specifically tailored to me. They come from my own mind, so every single one contains only content that means something to me or is something I relate to. Other people's dreams, or for that matter, any stories or information, fiction or nonfiction, may or may not be something I care about. But with my own dreams, it's all stuff that I find interesting. I never have to hunt around or browse for something that isn't boring.

That isn't to say other people's dreams would be boring to me, but I just don't typically bother to check them out since I always have my own that I can experience first hand, I guess.

I enjoy reading about them, but listening to them? Not so much. I had a college roommate who, immediately upon noticing that I was awake, would barrage me with drawn-out descriptions of her nightly adventures. This often led me to forget about my own dreams. Very annoying.

I have a music analogy. If someone has just heard a great new song and tries to sing it to you, it could go one of two ways. Either the song has a strong/catchy melody and you enjoy hearing the person sing it, or it is a song where the melody is not what makes it great, and so it would be boring to hear someone try to sing it to you.

With dreams, if they have a strong and interesting plot or interesting story elements that can be related easily, then it's fun to hear about. If the dream was more about the emotions or sensations and the "story" makes no sense, then it is probably not so fun to hear someone try to explain it.

It's all about the limitations of verbal explanations when trying to share a harder to explain experience.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. It kind of makes me wonder why I joined to post here in this forum and talk about my dreams. No self pity. Just honest reflection. And in a way trying to view from another perspective than my own. If dreams are only relevant to the dreamer, then how can people really help interpret someone else's dreams? And those dream encyclopedias?

Or what if the meaning to a dream turns out to be something embarrassing? Can I be judged poorly based off what I share from a dream? And others too from what they share? If so, maybe we should all guard them, our dreams, like our deepest secrets.
Or is it even important to remember what we dream? Should I even be interested in it? I guess I am, but I know a couple people who aren't interested in even their own dreams. One lady brought this up in a conversation in a meeting. This was a while ago, long before I found this forum or the website that linked to it. She shared that she came to realize her dreams were meaningless. A waste product of the brain, just like waste products from the digestive tract. Unimportant. Just meant to be forgotten, and that writing journals not something to be wasted with. I gathered by her conversation and tone of voice, that dreams must had been something she was interested in much earlier in her life. Perhaps she did write down her dreams, or find them with great meaning at one time. Somehow as she grew older, she lost interest in dreams. She seemed to be at peace with her decision and that perspective.

The other person has more interest in dreams, but doesn't appear to weigh them as heavily a focus as this forum. Trying to become lucid in a dream? Why? Just let it do its thing. That's his idea. That person had a time in his life that his dreams were so real, like an exact playback of the previous day, that he had to search for something to figure out it was a dream or he'd go crazy in his waking life not knowing what was dream and what was real.

I generally find dreaming very fascinating by itself and believe it to be one of the most worthwhile part of my daily experiences. I enjoy reading dreams of others just as much as I enjoy dreaming, but only if I form a bit of familiarity with them and feel it's interesting to follow their dreams. Just like reading novels, I wouldn't have time to do anything with life if I end up reading all novels ever published. If I like an author I may read their novels one after the other. Same is true for dream experiences. To me their experience is not part of my "experience" and so it has a fictional quality to it, but the added sense of knowing the stuff I'm reading are fruits of our ability to experience dreams.

Bugfolk:

Those were some interesting, and in my mind valid, thoughts you shared up there. Here are a couple of mine:

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Originally Posted by BugFolk

... If dreams are only relevant to the dreamer, then how can people really help interpret someone else's dreams? And those dream encyclopedias?

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In my opinion, people really can't interpret someone else's dreams, at least not without meeting the dreamer personally, getting to know about them and their particular lifestyle, and then asking a series of careful questions about what the dreamer thought about the things they were dreaming. Dream interpretation is certainly possible, but it is a very intimate process that does not translate well to posts on a forum.

And yes, those dream encyclopedias are junk; just ignore them. Everyone should. Sure, it is possible to develop a set of archetypes that everyone shares (i.e., dreaming of water, losing teeth, getting lost, etc), but those archetypes are mostly meaningless by themselves, sort of like signposts with no words on them. It is the attachment of the dreamer's personal context that makes the archetypes mean something that matters (i.e., what is the dreamer doing in the water? what did the dreamer feel when her teeth fell out? what was the world like in which the dreamer was lost, and how did the dreamer react to being lost? and most importantly, what is it in the dreamer's waking life that these signs might really be pointing to?), and that cannot come from one of those dictionaries.

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Or what if the meaning to a dream turns out to be something embarrassing? Can I be judged poorly based off what I share from a dream? And others too from what they share? If so, maybe we should all guard them, our dreams, like our deepest secrets.

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That is an excellent point.

I did a lot of dream interpretation work years ago (in direct contact with the dreamers, of course!), and these days I often note an embarrassing "signpost" cropping up from dreams reported here. I doubt many people (including the dreamers) will notice that they are, say, talking about their inner weaknesses, biases, needs, or fears when reporting a dream, but someone might. And someone might judge.

The truly paranoid among us might even imagine that the dream journal pages are nothing more than a data mining operation, assembling the details about a dreamers' likes, dislikes, and general personality trends into a specific personal profile which they can then sell to the highest bidder. This is of course most certainly wrong, since the algorithms probably don't exist yet for accurate profiling, but it does leave pause for thought.... especially when you consider the level of importance sites give to reporting dreams.

I personally don't have a dream journal on line, and rarely post my specific dreams here. This is mostly out of laziness and the innate conclusion that I really don't believe my dreams would be of any real interest to anyone but me, but I have to admit that publicly sharing the moments of extreme personal intimacy that dreams often are is something that I feel very uneasy about doing... this is just me, of course!

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Or is it even important to remember what we dream? Should I even be interested in it?

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Yes, and yes; especially if you are interested in lucid dreaming.

Haphazard as their content may be, dreams still represent a good chunk of your conscious experience. To ignore dreams as inconsequential is like throwing away a potentially significant portion of your life; that never seems like a good thing. It is better, I think, to learn to remember and appreciate your dreams, incorporating them into your memories and, by doing so, expanding your life a bit.

Also, and almost as an aside on this thread: In order to lucid dream, which for me is an excellent end in itself, I believe that you must make your dreams important; learn to remember them, record them, and make them an important facet of your waking life.

So yes, I think it is important to be interested in your remembering your dreams.

And note that I didn't even get into remembering your dreams as tools for interpretation, introspection, and personal improvement which is a whole other potentially valid reason to make them important. But that is another subject altogether for me, and one that is open to lots of argument, especially because I believe that many, if not almost all, dreams, really mean nothing at all.

Thanks. I keep going back and forth on the whole journaling idea. On one end it is useful, but on the other I am too lazy to write it down unless the dream is so pressing it more less forces me. One thing I've been noticing in my lucid dreams is this tendency to want to write down my dream, only to realize I am still asleep, in my dream, like as if falling under the false awakening category.

The one lady and her disinterest in dreams, her viewpoint is very foreign to me. It was something she brought up rather randomly. In a way it would have been nice to hear more about how she came to her conclusion. I've always been fascinated with dreams ever since a small child. They used to terrify me and prevent sleep. Most particularly was that period of time between closing my eyes and the dream onset. I would either get flashing lights, zigzag/wavy lines, streams of glowing grainy like things floating in the air, monstrous images or fall suddenly into REM sleep, without being fully asleep. I never did like being in near complete dark because of this. I developed a skill early on to nearly wake up and change dream scenes to escape. I seem to have lost that ability to some degree, but have found ways sometimes to continue a dream if I am determined to get the plot sorted out.

But yeah some dreams I feel like wtf...They are so awkward, disturbing or too incoherent to share. I fear if I share them I may be viewed as schizophrenic or something like that. My dreams can be sadistic sometimes. The more angry and upset I am over something (think news story, horrible documentary), the more my mind wants to replay it in full gory detail or enhance it somehow. Ugh.... Just no. Please no. Make it stop.

Dream control: I've yet to fully control a dream when asleep, but it seems the more I think about my dreams and the more connection I make to my waking life, and my waking life to the dreams, then that affects the scenes I get in future dreams.
If I think it through I can pinpoint some dream symbols, but others still confuse me. Like going to a restroom and finding I can't go anywhere because whatever layman who built the place, either forgot to put stalls in them or is a sadistic sob thinking it would be a good idea to just place toilets randomly in rows (or worse yet have the toilets all facing each other in a square or circle) with next to no space between them. Then to make it worse, it seems when I go in there, the restroom is almost always crowded, or enough that if I were to sit down, I know I'd bee seen. I search around for an alternate restroom, but it is always THE ONLY restroom I can find in my dream world. If there is another, I'm either too far away from it or it is just the same layout. Ugh. I'm left with the urge to go pee for the rest of that particular dream sequence because I refuse to use the restroom. I say no to poorly planned restrooms with no thought for privacy. I hope this isn't some embarrassing dream, meaning I am some odd freak or something. I had one of those last night. It was supposed to be a private house, only for me to find out that it wasn't. It was being shared by several people because it was a public place, that my mom or someone bought believing otherwise. Several toilets in one bathroom. Check. Overflowing toilet: Check too. Me: Check out. Try to get the heck out of there. At least there were stalls, but still no doors on them. Not good enough. Yeah that is one awkward reoccurring dream theme that I wish would end. I hope it doesn't make me some sort of freak for dreaming it.

^^ I think it is an excellent idea to keep a thorough dream journal, especially at the beginning of your LD'ing journey. Taking the time and making the extra effort to write down as many details of as many dreams as you can remember, and doing so right when you wake up (before the dreams are discarded by your awakening brain), is very helpful toward two very important ends related to LD'ing:

* Consistent DJ'ing will make your dreams more a part of your waking-life by giving you an opportunity to store them not only in the journal but in long term memory (a curious side-effect of handwriting your DJ).

* Adding a few moments for writing down your dreams each morning should help you develop stronger strong dream recall, which helps you with things like recognizing dream signs and noticing during the dream that you are in a dream scene that you once had before.

As an added bonus, dream journals can be wonderful, even enlightening, reading years later. I have spent many hours reading old DJ's and have greatly enjoyed reading about my old adventures/explorations, and being amazed at how well I remember them, once reminded.

So -- though I do share your issues with posting it publicly -- a dream journal is a good idea. And, judging by your urge to record what you are dreaming during your LD's, your unconscious might agree!

I too have those troubles with rest rooms; I would bet that a lot of people do. I have a very simple, yet practical theory about them: You cannot find a bathroom, or the one you find is too gross or poorly designed to use, because your physical body really has to go, and is providing a dream scene that prevents you from finding an excuse to act out your physical urge in the dream. In other words, your dream is preventing you from having an embarrassing accident! This probably happens fairly frequently with lots of people, so if you recorded that in your public DJ, you would probably get more "Been there, done that's," than you would "WTF's."

Oh, and:

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Most particularly was that period of time between closing my eyes and the dream onset. I would either get flashing lights, zigzag/wavy lines, streams of glowing grainy like things floating in the air, monstrous images

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This stuff is actually hypnagogic imagery (HI), which is basically random imagery that is produced as you make the passage to sleep and dreaming. These are things you might see when practicing WILD -- which I suppose is what you were inadvertently doing back then, and that is sort of cool! Throw in your experiences of "fall[ing] suddenly into REM sleep, without being fully asleep," and it looks like you did indeed have quite a bit of experience with WILD and LD'ing years ago, which seems an excellent background for pursuing it now. I don't know if you're interested in doing so, but I thought it worth mentioning.

LOL. that was kind of what I was wondering about the bathroom dream. Considering that only Once in my life, did I ever find a 100% normal looking bathroom in one of my dreams, close the stall and sit on the toilet. That ended with something way too lucid to be a dream. Yeah, that one time was very embarrassing. Woke me up *instantly* Physically running and unable to make it to bathroom. That was because I fell asleep with a complete full bladder. I was too exhausted and thought well, I've never had an issue and wouldn't. At least then on I know not to go to bed with an omg full bladder got to go pee and expect my body to just hold it for another 6-9 hours. Embarrassing lesson well learned. Haven't had that ever since. But yeah I've had LD where I finally out of desperation might actually use one of the toilets. My waking self gets uneasy, but so far they've only been dream generated. If I do wake up, then I will end up making to to the bathroom. If I don't, then I'll get the urge shortly after waking up.

The WILD stuff sounds interesting. i never really investigated it. I still have it time to time. Possibly when I am exhausted. In order for me to sleep, I have to get myself exhausted by either exercise or staying up long enough. I suffer insomnia. I tend to live almost like a non 24 hour cycle. I'm not blind (which I heard happens with lack of visual cues). I tend to feel tired and sleep the wrong hours in the day. I'm wide awake from about 6pm to 5am usually and tired in the morning-mid afternoon. If anything alters the schedule, like staying awake a full or near 24 hour cycle (like I did yesterday) or having to wake up early to work, then I may get some disruptions. The outcome of last night was falling asleep around 7-8pm and waking up at 6am. Normal for many, but unusual for me. And i am still fighting fatigue and may crash again soon.

One of my most vivid sudden onset images, was I just closed my eyes and a few minutes later was going though a stream of images, like a real life slideshow of parts of houses and things I might have looked at. It went too fast for me to linger on any particular image. It looked like the experience was trying to show me a slideshow of my life. As an older teenager, that was scary, but kind of fascinated me. I can't remember if I was on an antidepressant or not. They upped my dose on one around the time and the result was disturbing. Dream like thoughts flowing through my mind non stop, feeling like a river and the complete inability to actually sleep any time I wanted. 48 hours of non sleep. Just my eyes closed and trying to fall asleep but my mind racing on several thought streams and unable to focus on any. Needless to say I got off that quick.

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First nightmare I remember: 4-5 years old. I was floating around a house in the neighborhood. Graphic detail, almost like an out of body experience. Black specks started forming all over my visual field. The specks grew into holes, that generated a loud whoosh. My body felt like it went on vibrate, and I got up unable to move. Sleep Paralysis i am pretty sure. But I also had problems seeing with images forming in the dark even if I wasn't asleep. All that I needed to do was be tired and try to sleep. It could happen just before or if I woke up to use the bathroom. I was absolutely terrified in the middle of the night because of this. I'd turn and look into the dark void (hallway) on my way to the bathroom and see the flashing lights and zigzags follow me, or appear wherever I looked. If I kept a light on, then it would go away.

My mom has something similar. It did not help to go to her because whenever I woke up from SP or a bad dream experience. She only strengthened my fear of the dark by sharing her sleep paralysis experiences. She'd get physically touched, jabbed and poked during them. She could feel things breathing on her and hear voices. She'd go into prayer and believe a demon was attacking us. Yep. Terrified for my life right there, LOL.

I'm glad to know such experiences are from the mind and not real. I used to have similar SP, but after I overcame my fear over them, they faded to more mundane type themes.

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P.S. I went back to bed after typing the above. Spent a while with my eyes closed too tired to move but not tired enough to sleep. I got random images, then random sound forming then intensifying into scenes, and those scenes becoming stories. If this is the kind of stuff you're talking about wow! Okay I'll try to get whatever I can recorded, but it does fade fast.

I like hearing other peoples dreams but don't like reading them. I'm not sure why, could be because I find reading to be a chore and just not as fulfilling as listening to someone talk about it. People are generally more expressive with better recall when speaking about their dreams.

I've led people to interesting insights by asking them what they felt during the dream... then when last they felt that feeling in waking life. The dream imagery can often be interpreted as an expression of that feeling - generally very metaphorical of course. It sometimes helps them see that event in waking life where they felt that way in a new light.