Thread: 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

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

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.