Thread: How would you define a vivid dream?

People keep talking about vivid dreams but a vivid dream
can be different for everyone
Which characteristics would a vivid dream have in general?

For me and probably for most other people, vividness is what you call clearness, sharpness, more seeable and you can see everything better. Everything seems brighter and more understood. Say if you had to wear glasses, and your vision was blurry... In some dreams, your vision won't be blurry, and it'll even be more clearer than the glasses you have!

Basically, a vivid dream is a dream where everything is clear, you can see every little thing and it seems WAYY too HD for real life, you can have better vision than a person with good eyesight, it's pretty amazing.

That's how it is for me, it could be different for others but that's how I would explain a vivid dream, and that's how I define it. I hope it helps you on anything

Vividness for me is not only an attribute of the visual. In fact, visual memory, while important, is secondary to awareness/personal-presence vividness. How much do I feel like *I* am *there* in entirety, living and feeling the experience like it's a waking experience? A vivid dream for me is one where the memory of the event has no tangible difference in "feeling" compared to waking memories. Where I wake up and think "hold on, you mean *that* was a *dream*!?" Usually high awareness/presence comes with excellent visual memory, but it's not guaranteed.

To paraphrase The Matrix:

[Having a vivid dream] is just like being in love. No one can tell you you're in love, you just know it. Through and through. Balls to bones.

[Having a vivid dream] is just like being in love. No one can tell you you're in love, you just know it. Through and through. Balls to bones.

Great quote!

I agree with FM: while there is certainly a "sharpness" aspect to vivid dreams, we can only appreciate this quality by being present and aware. Many dreams (even ones we remember vaguely) were visually sharp. Our awareness allows us to remember this quality later.

^^ In fact, I'm starting to believe (and have for some while now) that all dreams are actually always experienced as-they-happen, "vividly." How much the memory fades before you recall is determines ultimately its final level of vividness. Getting this feeling more and more often is one of the many benefits of continuing to seriously work on dream recall.

I think this is mostly true, though I have had a few LDs that were very hazy. It only occurred after my second use of galantamine, so I attribute that to perhaps my acetylcholine system being burned out. Not sure though. I know your experiences have been different.

When I think about a vivid dream, the word that most closely matches vividness to me is "intensity". This intensity can be one of color, but is not always about visuals. It can be an intensity of the other senses as well as an emotion. So, you can have a very vivid dark and terrifying dream for example. I also try to think about it from the perspective of neurotransmitters. Vivid, intense dreams usually mean your neurotransmitter levels are up (such as after taking certain supps), and also brain cells are firing more rapidly.

One way to boost dream vividness may be achieved by using emotions in the dream. For instance, try increasing your level of euphoria and observe if it makes any difference on dream quality.