Traits of incredibly enjoyable dreams

**9sk** · 07-31-2018 03:49 AM

Here's an interesting question as an introduction: Which do you find more common, incredibly enjoyable dreams (5/5 rating) or lucid dreams? (for me LD is three times more common)

I analyzed my ~60 5-star dreams and tried to grab some traits out of them.

Occur after productivity/learning in real life. Some examples are The Sixth Sense which influenced the Golden Age, a real life social problem that caused Serendipity, and the day of orientation at VA Tech (my college) where I dreamed Action! Romance! The interesting exception to this are during my cruises in real life, which did not have any five-star dreams, hinting that vacation is not the key to having them.

Companionship Focus. In no 5-star dream have I been completely alone. This is further supported by the fact that in one-star dreams, I am either alone, or those that surround me always give off a negative impression. In fact, companionship is so important that I actually seem to need more than one person most of the time, because more than about 80% of five-star dreams focus or feature on more than two characters.

Gender focus. (Arguable) Out of all my five star dreams, although 14 contain only males as main characters, and 19 contain both female and male (or are merely ambiguous enough to give off that illusion), 23 dreams have females as the main focus of the dream. At 40%, a decent proportion, it is clear females have a significant impact on my dreams.
Fantasy element. While I have had a lot of realistic dreams overall, most of my 5-star dreams are impossible and wacky.

Conflict. Only 15 5-star dreams have no conflict of any type that needs to be resolved. This makes sense: problems must be overcome to feel achievement. In fact, even these 15 exceptions have some type of advancement of relation involved or a fun activity within them.

Light/dark balance. While there are some five star dreams with scenes in the dark, almost none of them are entirely located in such a situation. They always have a bright setting to contrast against this to represent hope and joy. In contrast to this, the vast majority of one-star dreams are in a gloomy or dark location.

Novelty element. There are lots of five-star dreams where new things are introduced. For example, My heroine (the first five-star) had the first suggesting romantic interaction, as well as finally saving me from the flood in my nightmares long ago; Out-witting the robbers had some character lying for the first time; SLEIGHT OF CARDS was highly unpredictable; SOAR was one of the only times flying had succeeded; Action! Romance! had a unique combination of two genres; and most notably OZ&SHIOM has three goals accomplished in one dream, a very rare achievement. 5-star dreams also have very few repetitive or shared traits, with the only element constantly showing up being kissing girls I like.

Vague location. Admittedly, most dreams are not very clear, but even with lucidity assisting in this dream, views seem to be secondary--the interaction and feelings are key to having a five-star dream-- despite photo realism being possible at times (albeit never in a 5-star dream). The times the view is clear, it is most often extremely fantastical. (OZ&SHIOM one of the major exceptions to this theme, with most of the part after being lucid being quite clear in contrast to usual 5-star dreams)

"Softened ending". Only one 5-star dream has ended on a cliffhanger in a conflict, and most have rather wrapped up decently nicely with a touch of emotion (kisses are the most obvious one, but music is key too). Usually, this touch is not the focus of the dream (in other words, it is not the best part). The only exceptions where the ending ended in an emotional climax rather than a touch-up were SOAR; ACTION! ROMANCE!; Space Adventure and SERENDIPITY.

Lucidity Relation to 5-star or vice versa. While the minority of 5-star dreams are lucid (only about 45%, at 25 dreams thus far), this is massive compared to my normal 15% rate of lucidity. It is entirely plausible that lucidity in itself makes a dream good. Even the other way around, 25 five-star dreams out of 83 total lucid dream stands at 30%, almost five times more than the overall rate of only about 6% five-star dreams. The fact that I have had only one lucid nightmare also further asserts the relation of lucidity to dream quality. However, note that five-star and lucid dreams are sparse and as such the statistic may be skewed. As I have more five-star dreams and lucid dreams, the pattern will be much clearer. (I will most likely only truly consider this statistic once I have reached both 100 lucid and five-star dreams)

Feeling of accomplishment. A lot of really annoying dreams are one-star or even two-stars because my power is limited or I cannot complete a task. Some great examples are how in The Fish and the Superheroes I was unable to go across some netting to get to some skyscrapers, while OZ&SHIOM had me directly access said skyscrapers. In another, I failed to declare I was the crowned prince of Darius, while another five-star dream made me the owner of a hotel which was named "Darius".

Importance of conversation. This is arguable as a pattern has yet to clearly appear, but only 9 out of 60 five-star dreams are wordless (no important conversations), while a little more than half of my 13 nightmares are wordless. Information is difficult to convey without clear words, but I believe pain is easier to deliver than joy, explaining this "data".

What traits do your incredibly enjoyable dreams share? Do you notice any trends out of yours?

**DarkestDarkness** · 07-31-2018 11:23 AM

A very interesting analysis, which I liked reading. My previous dream journals are extremely disorganised and have very poor notes regarding parts of the dream contexts that would require explaining, so unfortunately I can't, at the moment, do such an in-depth analysis of my dreams.

I personally don't rate my dreams on any sort of scales, for me this would be like rating my life's experiences; good or bad, they are what they are. But perhaps I'm different in that I very rarely feel excitement or joy in the way that most people seem to exhibit it. So, I don't think I can say I've ever had "incredibly enjoyable" dreams, because I cannot relate directly to this feeling, so I'll instead approach this based on dreams that I found more memorable.

Either way, I can guess reasonably well from most of my previous accounts that most of my dreams' contexts are relevant to the mood of the dream itself, or perhaps are the way they are because of the mood. It is difficult to establish the causality between things I don't directly have conscious access to.

But in my dreams things like light and darkness always, always, come in sequence to one another. The question is always about how long the sequence is, rather than whether it will happen, because even in dreams that are entirely day or night, there is a constant gradual change toward the other. And the entire mood always shifts somehow.

My speculation is that this has to do with sleep phases, and in my case, because of my condition, my sleep phases are abnormal. My alpha waves intrude on my delta activity, as per the report on my sleep, also stating I have a higher amount of deep sleep than is considered to be normal.
This could explain why I feel like I dream less than others but this is conjecture on my part, since I do not really understand the sleep mechanisms that well.

That digression aside, most of my more memorable dreams are the sort I consider to be more "supernatural" (not the same as surreal to me), that seem more directly related to my own personal story in life. When I say supernatural I mean with entities like angels, or animals that interact directly with me somehow, or completely abstract dreams where I'm "me" but just "know" something at a nearly sub-lucid state, if that makes sense; such as one dream about my father's dying age, of supposedly 83, which I cannot know yet whether it is premonitory or not, since that's still about 10 years from now.

**9sk** · 07-31-2018 02:09 PM

interesting how you rarely feel happy (perhaps it is a dopamine chemical problem in brain), but can you feel fear in nightmares?

**DarkestDarkness** · 07-31-2018 07:33 PM

Perhaps I exaggerated in my explanation, I do feel happiness, but not with the sort of "exploding with joy" feeling, and even when I strongly feel a positive emotion it is rare that I display it in the expected manner; people often say that I seem indifferent to things, but the reality of it is more that I have not developed a normal emotional mechanism for expressing it like others do. Though I am a bit indifferent to some things too of course.

I would agree that the idea of a chemical imbalance is a possibility, but there's more to my brain, as there always is with anything else...

Anyway, as for fear, yes, intense fear and the like used to be absolutely normal in nightmares (and waking life), but I don't really have nightmares anymore. In fact, see my latest dream journal entry for more context. That dream should easily have been a nightmare just for the first bug that appeared, let alone all the spiders that I saw after.