New here...need experienced input on dreams after tragedy.

[mompa]

Hello everyone. I don't know how to address my situation with you all in a subtle manner so I'll just put it out there and hope for the best. I lost my sweet daughter to suicide in October 2012. I'm sure I don't need to explain the unbearable grief. Before this happened in our family, I found it hard to even imagine what parents went through when their child made this choice. She was 27 and absolutely the center of our entire family's attention. My question has to do with the bizarre dreams I've had, one in particular, that have occurred since she left. I pulled up out of sleep the other morning, half awake but still within my dream. I felt as though I was sitting in a chair facing a wall a though the dream was just blackness. There was a male voice talking to me in a non-stop, monotone kind of voice. He just kept talking without stopping to take a breath or between sentences and during the dream, I remember thinking 'he's explaining everything in existence' but when I woke up, I only had the memory of his voice and the sense of the profoundness of what he was telling me...not the actual memory of what he said. I've never had a dream like this in my life. It was totally auditory and no visuals were involved at all. It was the strangest feeling to awaken from this dream and I can still remember his voice, speaking so rapidly with no breaks and the feeling of awe I had at what he was revealing...yet I don't remember what it was he said. If anyone can help with some interpretation of this, I would appreciate it so much. The last three months have been a hell of sorts and for some reason, I feel like this dream was intended to MEAN something to me, to give me a measure of peace. Thank you all very much, carrie

[gab]

Welcome to Dreamviews! Sorry, that it's not a happier occasion that got you here. Well, strange dreams and strange experiences are our speciality here. But sometimes is just not easy to know, what exactly happened. What you describing -"pulling out of the sleep, half awake, but still within a dream". As we falling asleep, or just waking up from a dream, the line between those two worlds blurs and we can either see images or even dreams, while we are half awake, half asleep. And if we manage to keep this awareness even after we fully enter the dream, we end up in a lucid dream. It is a dream, in which we know, that we are dreaming. Both could be very vivid and feel like real, waking life. The images as we falling asleep are called hypnagogic hallucination, and as we waking up hypnapompic hallucinations, or HH. Now to your HH/dream. I have read from experienced oneironauts and people skilled with OBEs, that you may receive information in a dream/OBE, that you feel is very important. And while you are in that dream/OBE, you understand the information given and it makes sense to you. But often when you wake up, you don't remember any details, just the feeling of importance. Well, it was explained, that it's ok to not being able to recall what happened. Because the instructions were not given to our consious mind, but to our subconsious. So you do have the knowledge of what was being said to you and your mind/body will start to act according to the instructions. (If indeed this dream was such a dream). For example, person that had some health issues expressed his wish to see a doctor while in OBE/LD. He was taken to an infirmary and a tattoo with instructions was applied to his arm. Of course, it was not there when he woke up. But it doesn't matter, because his higher self, his soul received the instructions and if possible, will act according to them. I hope, this helped at least a little bit. Please feel free to ask more questions, especially, if you think you would like to give this lucid dreaming or OBEs a try.

[Darkmatters]

It sounds like what's called an NREM dream. If you're familiar with REM sleep, it's the period of Rapid Eye Movement, during which we have the most familiar and memorable kinds of dreams, the ones with full moving visuals and sounds that play out like movies in our heads. It's now known that we dream when not in REM as well, and these are known as NREM (Non REM) dreams. They have a different quality, usually they're just a stream of thoughts with a single visual like a still image, or no visuals at all. These dreams are much harder to remember, I've only ever been able to remember a few of mine and I think it's only the ones I waked directly from as you describe. Some of mine were songs playing over and over in my head - usually a song I've heard recently. But sometimes they're just thoughts of my own, example in one I saw a still image and was thinking about a story I could write (I do write stories, so this isn't unusual for me to think about). What you described sounds like it could be a similar type of dream though I'm not sure. NREM dreams are harder to remember because they take place in the deeper levels of sleep - usually when awakened from one of these dreams people are very groggy and disoriented. Whether it was a REM or NREM dream though, it's actually quite common to have dreams in which information is seemingly being imparted - often it's something important like the key to understanding everything, or how to fly, or something like that. But upon awakening the dreamer can't remember anything of the actual information, only the sense that it was being imparted. This could be because dreams consist of a lot more than just sounds and visuals (the components that movies are made entirely from) - they can directly invoke memories (real or false), thoughts and ideas. Example sometimes a dream has a sense of urgency - you just know you have to find your friend before the world ends and you can see everything falling apart around you rapidly. Or simply knowledge of some fact, like you just know someone is on the top floor of a particular building though you weren't told this and the knowledge wasn't imparted to you in any other way - that knowledge was simply a part of the dream from the beginning. It's important to understand that dreams consist partially of these kinds of things, because if you think of them as being like movies then you don't understand how knowledge or memory can work in a dream. Dreams essentially consist of everything our experience of reality consists of (after all, they're built by the same mental apparatus that takes the electrical signals from our sensery organs and uses them to construct an inner world which we take for reality - it's just that in dreams there are no signals coming in, everything is simply invented by the mind itself). So it's actually quite common to dream about the experience of being told something or of being flooded with information in some fashion, without that information itself actually being part of the dream. Rather it's simply the experience of recieving information that you're dreaming about. And since in dreams the logic center of the mind is shut down, you don't even realize that fact.