Hey dreamers,

still new here. I am about to go to sleep - took 2.5mg mg melatonin about 20 minutes ago. Kinda feeling some effects. Wanted to talk about dreaming before I went to bed to get my mind on the subject.

So question [to you]:

What is the earliest dream you can remember?

Personally, the earliest dream I can remember is back when I must have been ~ 6 years old. It has been a dream I have always been able to remember and I am not sure why.

I am at my old house and my mom begins to vacuum the floor. She doesnt want me getting in her way so she tells me to go play outside. I go outside and it is a sunny and bright day but then a seemingly giant hawk begins to circle above and swoop down towards me. I run towards the door of my house and bang on the door to get in but my mother cannot hear me over the vacuum. I am pinned against the door and the hawk comes down at me for a final blow.

That is all that I remember.

The dream itself is pretty uninteresting. But I do ask myself a question about the dream that I do find interesting. How old was I when I dreamt this?

I am 25 years old now and I can almost always remember having this memory. I can only guess at my age because in the dream I was in my old house - the house i lived in 1st grade and before. After that we moved elsewhere.

So because i dreamt of this house i believe that i must have been around 6 years old. But that could be the farthest thing from reality. I could have had the dream much later in elementary school but because I confuse the memory of the dream...with the memory of the house it is impossible for me to determine the actual temporal/ spatial relation to this memory.

This brings me to a further point. I have a lot of old and seemingly mundane memories of very early childhood - though to describe them to someone else they are mundane, but to me the still hold that strangeness to them that something was not right.

How can I know that any phenomenological experience I had as a child in the early years is not merely a distorted memory of a dream I had?

I have a memory..again before I was 6 years old, going to the park with my family. I was embarrassed to meet any other kids because I forgot to wear underwear that day. It is mundane...but to me, the feeling that rose in me then that I can still recall now - is similar to those "i find myself naked in awkward situation dreams" -

so the more I think about it the harder it is to know the certainty of these memories.

anyway...dream dreams dream. Hoping for some vividness tonight. Seems like the older I have gotten the less vivid my dream are. Trying to reverse that these days.