Thread: Persistant geography in the dream world

It probably will be if you want it to. Unless of course that one road gets cleared clean and you forget about the new side road. My mind links things up too, but not nearly as well as yours... my dream geography is as good as my RL geography... scary, but legible

ya man i know exactly what your talking about. A few weeks ago i considering even drawing a dream map.

Originally Posted by lespaulsRcoo

ya man i know exactly what your talking about. A few weeks ago i considering even drawing a dream map.

I was considering the same thing. It's scary how many of these places eventually hook together!

Originally Posted by skysaw

I've been thinking a lot about this lately. Over the years, I find that I often dream of a place I had dreamt of before. Many times it is a place that doesn't actually exist, or it's a real place but with some very different features or is connected to the wrong roads, etc.

There are certain of these places that come up a lot in my dreams, and they are always the same. But then when I started last week to try and recall them all, I started noticing something very interesting... They all connect to each other in a logical way. That is to say, I could theoretically travel from any one of them to any other by way of imaginary roads and paths that were established in my dreams.

As I tried to remember more, visions of a hundred different places my brain had invented started to come back to me, and all of them were connected via my personal persistant dream geography. Generally speaking, most of the locations are near the house I grew up in in Takoma, Wash DC, but they branch out a bit, going as far NE and NW to Vermont and Ohio, and South to some parts of Virginia. There are specific real-life roads that if I follow always come upon the same dream-only buildings or landmarks. There are stores I visit in my dreams that are always in the same imaginary locations. There are strange paths through the woods that connect different places, train tracks I sometimes walk on, and even areas that are always snow-covered.

The interesting thing is that these places rarely change at all over the many years I've been visiting them. I only really started to think about it because one place in particular changed in a recent dream... the road we were on was a bit overgrown, and trees had fallen blocking it. Then I noticed that someone had cleared a side area that led to a familiar highway... getting me right back on familiar territory.

Now I'm just wondering if that new side road will be permanent.

Oh join the club I experience the same things old neighborhoods and present ones that are about 20 miles apart connect to each other and everything is in tact just how I remember them.

I have found that when I focus on the landscape of my dreams I tend to remember dreams that I had long forgotten about or never remembered to begin with! Dreams geography does seem to map itself together. Wow, wouldn't that be cool if someone made a map of their actual dream world, damn that would be so awesome. Then they could explore it in a LD and see if its accurate? Food for thought!

Yeah I have built a mall in my dreams, been in it atleast 8 times in different dreams. Im starting to remember all the little details of it.

Ah! Malls! My worst non-lucid nightmare! There are about 7 in my dream world that I can remember perfectly, it's fine to be there when lucid because I know all the tricks in which ever mall but when not It's like getting lost in a China town that lacks the crowds! Though... it did help me find my first Asian food market in my dreamworld....

This process of "building" a landscape (or dreamscape) seems very logical with the way our minds work in real life. If you think about it, our minds are constantly creating a map of our location as we move throught each day, week, year, etc. This becomes more apparent if you drive.

Think about going from your home, to the store. Do you actually sit there and read all the street names and memorize which roads to take and hope you make it to your destination? Not likely. You use landmarks. The end of the drive, to the end of the street. End of the street to the next block, left at the post office... etc. Even when going someplace new and following instructions, your mind will anticipate what should come up next based on the expectation of a map you're following - or even your own sense of direction. So our mind may render out a route which it has not yet experienced.

So, while you experience dream locations, your mind is simply doing it's usual routine in constructing a map (world) of these locations. What's cool is the wonder of where the decisions for these places to be mapped at come from. In waking life, you could follow a map, make a wrong turn and miss your destination. But, in a dream, is there such a thing as a wrong turn? Wouldn't your mind make something up? And if it does, where does it come from.....

I only really started to think about it because one place in particular changed in a recent dream... the road we were on was a bit overgrown, and trees had fallen blocking it. Then I noticed that someone had cleared a side area that led to a familiar highway... getting me right back on familiar territory.

Definitely some room for dream intepretation there.

I agree with your theory, Joe. The thing that was so fascinating for me was when I began to go through my world in my head while awake, and only then realized that every one of these hundreds of locations could be reached from any other solely by dream routes I had already invented. It's such an interesting subject!

Originally Posted by Tornado Joe

What's cool is the wonder of where the decisions for these places to be mapped at come from. In waking life, you could follow a map, make a wrong turn and miss your destination. But, in a dream, is there such a thing as a wrong turn? Wouldn't your mind make something up? And if it does, where does it come from.....

That's so true... if you make a wrong turn you could really have discovered a short cut to another location, a new location entirely! I really do have to wonder, where do these places come from and how are they linked? [My assumption is that if you can take a road and get to another location that there might be some relevance to one another, but I've still yet to find out how they're relevant in specific]

Very interesting TornadoJoe now that I think about it its true, since I started driving physical landscapes seems to be much more important to me, and no I don't remember the street names but rather put together a logical map in my mind by landmarks and the general landscape. Next time I have a dream that spans a landscape I'm going to try and map it out, maybe even do it a couple times and see if there is any connection.