is your brain able to create complex narrative structures/ stories

hello all

this morning i had a really complex dream, it was a prequel for pirates of the carribean.
basically my mind created a whole new film for how the characters get to where they are in the begining of the first film. kinda like the most recent star wars film, where everything is linked/ties up at the end.

i was amazed at how my mind was able to create all the relevant characters, and story structure, and how all the events led the particular characters to where they needed to be ie, jack sparrow ended up on a raft.........


so has anything like this happened to you:?

Well, I have had epic dreams before.

But nothing really relating to movies or shows... at least similar to what you experienced.

Think back to when you were a child, I'm sure, like all of us, you played with some sort of action figure, or something similar, as children even, we create large back stories out of nowhere for our playthings, when we're older, why couldn't we do the same?

ah those were the days, when we had so litle to worry about.

Where do you think stories come from in the first place? Why do you think movies and literature have evolved into what they are today? They certainly don't mimic the real world in their presentation, pacing, ect.

I believe that, as humans, we have invented "the story" to resonate with our basic instinctual thought patterns and dreams.

My mind is good at making me think it's creating a complex narrative, when it's actually just showing a nonsensical series of events that have nothing to do with each other while playing dramatic music and stuff like that. :(

I have had this happen quite a few times. Sometimes it'll be 'movie-plot' based and sometimes I'll just have my own little mini-series of dreams that over a few weeks span, the dream takes off after events that happened in the dream episode prior to that.

I have had too many damned crazy dreams that would make interesting short episodes. I've had dreams where I'm in a movie as well. One time I was in Event Horizon, but the story was different and some of the original cast was gone and some fictitious cast was incorporated into the dream.

I was in the haunted space ship and I was running from the crew members that turned evil. I managed to find an escape pod (I tried to concentrate on there being one) and I successfully launched off the ship and ended up propelling back to earth. Upon entering the atmosphere, the escape pod burned up and I fell into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of New Jersey. I was picked up by a fishing boat and hauled into shore. I got onto the beach and walked up onto the boardwalk and was enamored by all the boardwalk vendors. I was looking at a display case from one of the vendors and when I glanced to my left, I noticed someone wearing a space uniform and he had a mask on. I tried not to make it obvious that I saw him and began walking away. [in the movie Event Horizon, the space ship used a 'gravity drive' which created a black hole that the ship would enter to travel to another location, etc.] A huge tremor shook almost everyone to the ground and I looked up at the sky and it looked like the sky was opening up. My mind was thinking, "oh crap the ship must've activated the gravity drive". In a brilliant flash of light, everyone vanished. There were no vendors... just remnants. The sky was DARK. The entire environment and atmosphere of the dream just went from sunny and warm-feeling, to dark and gloomy. It was a ghost town. I knew something really bad was about to happen, so I used my exit strategy and woke myself up.

Yeah me too and I'm always amazed with how my mind can create such cool plots and scenes. I still remember this dream I had when I was 8 years old, I was in Neverland, the one from the movie "HOOK". It was sooo real and so fun and the very next night I continued the same dream! After that I tried for several nights to get it back but I never did.... now my goal is to get lucid and find that dream again ;)

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Originally Posted by dreamingofdreaming

Yeah me too and I'm always amazed with how my mind can create such cool plots and scenes. I still remember this dream I had when I was 8 years old, I was in Neverland, the one from the movie "HOOK". It was sooo real and so fun and the very next night I continued the same dream! After that I tried for several nights to get it back but I never did.... now my goal is to get lucid and find that dream again ;)

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Ever fall in love with a dream character? You know that expression 'the girl of my dreams'... Well, I've fell in love with many fictitious women in my dreams and I've woke up trying to get back into the dream. Sometimes for nights I would think about her before sleeping, but it never panned out. Not to sound gay, but a remember twice when I was a little younger (maybe even like 6-7 years ago, so still mature) that I woke up really upset enough to tear up when I realized that the girl I had so much in common with was not real.

A tidbit about me. I am not into drugs and whatnot, but a compound I became addicted to on the West Coast took me down and I stopped it before it got too bad. I was hooked on methamphetamine for 3 months. I moved back to the East Coast and admitted myself into a nice rehab clinic over here in Jersey. I had the weirdest sleep and the weirdest dreams ever when I would fall asleep. My brain was so depleted for the longest time, when I would doze off in the waking life, I would have dreams. My norepinephrine, dopamine, and seratonin were pretty much null and I had come off of Cymbalta cold turkey (the most painful thing I've ever went through in my life). I would have about 12-15 memorable dreams per night.

Havn't fallen in love but defenitly in lust and yes the realization that it was just a dream can really crush a kid

As for the drug thing.... that's crazy. I'm glad you made it through, in the past I've taken the more organic substances such as mushrooms and the dreams I have after I've come off the shrooms and have gone to sleep are very wild! I'm interested if other people have had dreams like that with the influence with drugs.

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Originally Posted by dreamingofdreaming

Havn't fallen in love but defenitly in lust and yes the realization that it was just a dream can really crush a kid

As for the drug thing.... that's crazy. I'm glad you made it through, in the past I've taken the more organic substances such as mushrooms and the dreams I have after I've come off the shrooms and have gone to sleep are very wild! I'm interested if other people have had dreams like that with the influence with drugs.

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It crushed me and I was 18 years old :(

Do I ever!! When I was about 12 years old I wrote a story that was about 120 pages long and based on a series of repeating dreams. When I was 14 I wrote another long story and again at 17 and 20 (there abouts).
I no longer write (except for occasional poems) but I still have epic dreams on a regular basis.
When I was a teen I LOVED playing Mario at my friends house. I actually dreamed about new versions of the game that actually came into existence. I was somewhat psychic back then, but in all honesty I think it was actually a perception of the games likely evolution. That happened on three occasions and I was amazed each time lol.

As for love... yes. I was in love with my "dream guide" (Jeff Tassin) as a young teen. And throughout my early teenaged years I dreamed I gave birth to triplets and I fell so deeply in love with them that I lost my sanity somewhat for awhile. I dreamed of them throughout the years back then and I watched them grow into young children. It's odd now... I don't even remember their names any more.

I was a very strange teenager! :D

I've had such an intense dream life ALL my life that I've often felt certain that I have a sleep disorder (like a mild case of narcolepsy)- because that's one of the symptoms. I had a sleep study done and I'll learn the results on Feb. 10. But now I'm certain I'm such an incredible dreamer because I'm almost always sleep deprived lol. When I do fall asleep it comes quickly and hard.

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Originally Posted by Zhaylin

Do I ever!! When I was about 12 years old I wrote a story that was about 120 pages long and based on a series of repeating dreams. When I was 14 I wrote another long story and again at 17 and 20 (there abouts).
I no longer write (except for occasional poems) but I still have epic dreams on a regular basis.
When I was a teen I LOVED playing Mario at my friends house. I actually dreamed about new versions of the game that actually came into existence. I was somewhat psychic back then, but in all honesty I think it was actually a perception of the games likely evolution. That happened on three occasions and I was amazed each time lol.

As for love... yes. I was in love with my "dream guide" (Jeff Tassin) as a young teen. And throughout my early teenaged years I dreamed I gave birth to triplets and I fell so deeply in love with them that I lost my sanity somewhat for awhile. I dreamed of them throughout the years back then and I watched them grow into young children. It's odd now... I don't even remember their names any more.

I was a very strange teenager! :D

I've had such an intense dream life ALL my life that I've often felt certain that I have a sleep disorder (like a mild case of narcolepsy)- because that's one of the symptoms. I had a sleep study done and I'll learn the results on Feb. 10. But now I'm certain I'm such an incredible dreamer because I'm almost always sleep deprived lol. When I do fall asleep it comes quickly and hard.

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That's pretty crazy! I mean... that's cool though about your dream life, etc. I have felt sometimes that I'd rather just be asleep all the time and not deal with reality. Then I realized I was atypically depressed ;( At one point in my life, I would sleep 18-20 hours a day and have non-stop dreams. I would never hit the restorative sleep phases. I was like this for about 2 months.

That's pretty intense as far as the 'having kids' is concerned. I've never heard of that before.

Yes, that happens when I try to change aspects of my life just to see how they'd be. Basically my whole world is changed by me doing that, so it's an alternate reality of how I think my life would be. I'm usually pretty surprised at how I'm even able to come up with some of the things that happen, and how the dialouge of others seem so exact. The amazing things our imaginations can do.

iv also found that dreams expose our worst fears / worries to us, that we may not have realised.
eg, im planning a trip to africa and am leaving on 10th of may. i had a dream where i went off on the trip and NOTHING was organised and i was stranded in africa with no money.
that then made me make sure i was organised for the trip. so the dream actualy helped me in real life. HUZZAR

Actually, I have had this happen to me before. But rather than my mind making up a prequel to some existing story, it made a sort of epilogue - once I dreamt of Gilligan's Island (anyone remember that show?), some time after the events that went on throughout the series.

Basically, the castaways were all rescued, and the newly discovered island was turned into a tropical resort that became a popular vacation location. The dream mainly focused on Skipper, who returned to the island years later with feelings of nostalgia...as well as sorrow for seeing what was his home for so long turned into a tourist attraction. It was pretty deep.

...As for the falling-in-love-with-a-DC thing, it's usually just about me being in the beginning stages of sexing up a pretty girl, only for me to wake up almost immediately (with me desperately trying to fall back asleep and reenter the dream, but to no avail). However, once I dreamt I saw a long-lost childhood friend (nonexistent IRL), and...well, a tsunami of emotions came over me as a result of "finally" seeing her "again"; a profound affection for her (much deeper than your run-of-the-mill romantic love) was one of those emotions. You could imagine my disappointment upon realizing she was just a figment of my imagination...