Thread: Why don't dreams have an end?

I am not talking about just any random dreams, but ones where it is kind of telling a story. Some you just walk around doing stuff but some have a real obvious story to it. I have had story dreams where they end but like 98% of the time they don't. Even worse, most of the time they end just when its starting to get good.

Also if your a person who normally gets up at the same time everyday, you will know that your body can tell what time it is. If you get up at 10 everyday, theres a pretty good chance you will wake up then without even trying. So it sounds like your body knows how long you will be sleeping for, so why would it plan a story dream that it knows you will never finish?

whoa... I have no idea o_o

I never even thought about it.

My guess is that it's to try and keep us sharp in trying to obtain our goals and to motivate us to reach further for our goals. I've been lucid a few times in a storyline dream and I decided to follow the storyline because it interested me. Now, if I were non-lucid, the dream would have ended earlier. But thanks to my lucidity, I could hold on to what was happening and even move faster with a bit of dream control here and there. I dunno, maybe it can be motivation to go lucid for people too. To have some closure on those storylines. Just a thought.

No story ever ends. It does not matter. It reminisces inside the subconcious forever even if it is forgotten. There is never an end only a continued beginning.

My contemporary issues teacher teold me his dreams always end wiht the words :THE EnD" at the end of them...

Oh boy maybe he should tell you his dreams as a giganto storybook for kids with pictures.

I made a post about this before. I once had a dream where the story ended and credits started showing up.

It's probably because your mind plans an epic story arc that would take several hours to play out, without taking into account that dreams cannot last that long.

Yea but shouldn't it know? I mean, if you can connect random events in a dream into a real story, then how can it not know how long your normally sleep?

Maybe it simply doesn't care about ending. The subconscious does not have logical thinking patterns, I think.

Can you measure a dream using fixed defintions like beginning and end? from a starting point to the finishing line?

Circles

It's a dream isn't it. It's not going to be all organized with an beginning and an end, usually dreams are just a little off in the organization department.

[/quote]Maybe it simply doesn't care about ending. The subconscious does not have logical thinking patterns, I think.[/quote]

Originally posted by greywolfpoet
Maybe it simply doesn't care about ending. The subconscious does not have logical thinking patterns, I think.

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Oh there's no point coming?

Thats true for a lot of them, but some dreams do have a start and you seem to be heading towards an end. That is what bugs me, its not like your having random events and I want an end. Theres a story going and there should be an end. Say your fighting a bad guy for 20 minutes(might seem like hours in the dream) then your just about to face them for the final battle and boom, you wake up. If you stayed in the dream 2 more minutes you would have got to the end.

The entire dream might be leading up to a point and when you get there, you just wake up instead. Some times I noticed I start to become semi lucid at the end, maybe because I am starting to wake up. When that happens I start thinking about what I would do but then I never get to do it, because I wake up.

Originally posted by Alric
Thats true for a lot of them, but some dreams do have a start and you seem to be heading towards an end. That is what bugs me, its not like your having random events and I want an end. Theres a story going and there should be an end. Say your fighting a bad guy for 20 minutes(might seem like hours in the dream) then your just about to face them for the final battle and boom, you wake up. If you stayed in the dream 2 more minutes you would have got to the end.

The entire dream might be leading up to a point and when you get there, you just wake up instead. Some times I noticed I start to become semi lucid at the end, maybe because I am starting to wake up. When that happens I start thinking about what I would do but then I never get to do it, because I wake up.

Give your subconcious a break sheesh. It needs to win to. You would have beaten the guy if you didn't wake up and that just wouldn't have been fair.

maybe that's why we have lucidity, so that if we can work out that we want the end of a dream, in order to prevent ourselves missing the end if you like, we have to go lucid and get some control over it. i've often wondered with lucidity if we can control how much control we have?
if you get me.
Don't worry if you don't. Not many people do!!
i've got visions of people going, 'wha-?'

hard question. Probably because most5 people aren't like me. (he he)

But even if your body knows what time to wake up the subconscious might not realize it. And if you're that desperate, think about what happened last time right before you go to sleep. it's my best guess on how others could continue a dream from a nigth before.

In your dreams you beleive that everything is real. So in your dream your not playing out a story, your living another day in your life.

Some of these "story dreams" can be damn intersting. I once became lucid during such a story, where I needed to escape this huge mansion/castle/fort/whatever, and there were people and commandoes hunting me down. I chose to continue the story instead of starting to go wild with controlling things - I actually gave up on my lucidity for that story. It turned out to be pretty crappy from then on, shouldn't have done that

I go along with the story practically every time i'm lucid for the most part, but then i will twist some stuff just to make it more interesting. If you want to play out a story and still have fun, make sure you keep doing things that influence the story a little bit, but not too much, and not just leave it alone either (leave it alone and it is hard to maintain lucidity)