I had a dream, when I was a young teen, about being the single parent of a daughter (mother died in child birth). I remember the 18 years of raising that child better than most of my own childhood memories: taking her home from the hospital, first steps, signing up for elementary school, taking her to school every day, watching my child grow up. Getting into disagreements, teaching to bike, the panic of the first day of her period (she tried to hide it because she thought she’d be in trouble). High school, school clubs, prom, college applications. We got into a disagreement on her 18th, and she told me I was a terrible paren, that I’d failed even being friends with her, which was the opposite of how I thought it was going. She appeared in the front door with a suitcase, and walked out stating she’d never see me again, and the dream ended. To this day it still shakes me, but not as hard as it did when I woke up that day, broken for being a bad parent that I didn’t see.

A “dream” (?) I had a month after my father was killed. A long story, apologies for the book.

To start with, for clarification, I have always been a lucid dreamer, going back to childhood. Not every night. Not every dream. But every time I had realization in a dream that I was dreaming, I could control circumstances and events of the dream the entire rest of the time I was having it. Every single lucid dream. Without exception. Likely a few hundred times by the time this happened, just shy of my thirtieth birthday.

I was dreaming of playing backyard football with my friends as a kid. It’s a happy memory, and I dream about it now and then. This particular night, I was in lucid mode. I was having fun doing whatever I wanted (throwing 200 yard touchdown passes, running around like an Olympic sprinter, what have you… I kind of return to my ten year old self in this one).

Before one play, the football suddenly deflates and goes completely flat. Weird, I think to myself… I don’t feel like I caused that to happen. But whatever. I tell my friends I’ll change the football out, and we’ll get back to it. In my mind, I summon up the equipment shed from my campus recreation officiating days back on campus in college.

I open up the shed and step inside. It’s just as I remembered, of course, but kind of dark, not much light is bleeding in here from outside. I do a 180 toward the door to flip on the light. And I felt everything change. Everything. And I didn’t cause it. I also hadn’t looked at it yet. But I felt it.

Instant warmth. Comfort. A sense of peace that I can’t really describe… language isn’t really sufficient.

I turn around and see that I am in the foyer of a beautiful house, full of warmth. It is pure wood tones through and through.

I realize that I can really smell the air… The woods, and the ocean, in a perfect balance. I recall never having a sense of smell in any other dream, lucid or otherwise. I’m not panicked or worried, this place is just too peaceful for fear to be. Just confused.

Lying on a table next to an open window is my favorite cat from my childhood, Pudding. I give him a scratch right behind the ears in his favorite spot, he purrs, rubs into me… like hey buddy, missed you. Almost like it hasn’t been almost twenty years since he died, the last time I saw him. Realization dawns.

Realization that I still know that this is a dream. Or at least I thought it was. But if this is still a dream, and I realize this is so, why is all this stuff happening without my control? That’s certainly never been a thing in a lucid dream before.

And why am I smelling the fresh air of a forest that is twenty feet away from the ocean? Why do I have tactile feel of my furry buddy who died years ago? It feels like reality. Crisp, sharp, full of senses normally non-existent or dulled in normal dreams.

I catch some movement to my side and turn. Walking down the stairs, with a smile, is my dad. He’s clean, unhurt, in perfect shape… not at all like he was in the hospital when I last saw him, beaten up and brain dead. Before I even know what’s happening, he’s got me in a hug. I’m too stunned to react much.

“You’ve always been too stingy with the hugs,” he says. The feel of him, the sound of him talking… so real. I realize fully, finally, 100%. This is no dream. I hug him back, delighted.

As I pull away, all I can say is, “Aren’t I dreaming?”

He gives me the look he has always given me when I ask a completely stupid question. “Are you?” he says, all good-humor-light-sarcasm.

“But how… where are we?”

“My place,” he answers. “I needed to talk to you. Let’s go in there.”

He leads me down a side hall into a study. The few seconds while we walk, I’m still trying to reassert control. Open the floor and have us plunge through. Have him start dancing a jig. Have the house catch on fire. Anything to have proof that this is all a dream. Nothing works. As we enter the study, he tells me, “Morgan, son, seriously. Let go and relax.” He gives me that wry smile he gives when I’m being ridiculously amusing. “You’re not dreaming. Sit down.”

The room is supernaturally strong with the smell of cedar. Of pine. On the bookshelves, I’m noting some of my Dad’s favorites. Tolkien. Stephen King. James Clavell. A light bulb goes off over my head. This house is pretty much what my Dad would build if you gave him a perfect house button to press to make it come into creation. In a way, it feels like a piece of him, as real to me as he was right at that moment.

I take a seat in a wonderful leather bound chair. He sits across from me and says, “after this, we are going to talk about some things, and you won’t remember any of it consciously. But I had to tell you.”

And we talked. I felt the hours. I don’t remember the specifics… he was absolutely right about that. But I remember some feelings. Happiness and relief that he is okay here. Some good times… I think it was a good talk. Some sadness. I remember him hugging me goodbye. “I love you son.”

I woke with tears pouring out of me. Things “awake” felt… less real somehow, but still as they always were. I spent the next couple hours talking to my wife about what happened, in the middle of the night.

In the following days, I went back over my experience in my mind, while it was fresh. I came to the conclusion that it was most likely not a dream, because it was so unlike any other dream I had ever had before (or have ever had since). I left a small chance in my head (like maybe 2%) that it actually was a dream, because I’d been grieving pretty hard, and maybe there was some weird chemical imbalance in my brain chemistry or something. I was even slightly miffed at dad that he used this experience on me, and not my younger sister (who was taking this as hard as I was, if not more so).

Then, in July the same year, my mom fell ill and passed away. And I hit the wall of pain all over again. But this time, with a sliver of peace that I didn’t have last time. I realized that this is why Dad shared this experience with me. He knew this was going to happen, and soon.

I’ll never forget the gift. The view into the other side. The transition that makes my grief for those who have passed into a selfish thing… that I trust that they are fine, and I’m really just sad that I’m not going to see them again for a long while.

Quite often in fact.

It’s pretty nice as I do a lot of creative work so if I’m struggling for inspiration I’ll usually take a nap or just go to bed a little early with a notepad nearby.

The crazy part is since I started taking meds for my ADHD it’s basically every night.

Edit: Most of mine are surreal or hyperreal though if that makes sense. By hyperreal I mean that every detail, every sensation, everything is there. Every single tiny sensation, except they are all cranked up to like 11.

For example: There you are standing on the edge of a cliff looking to the vista below. The trees sway with wind and life, flowing like seaweed caught in the current. The winds reach your face as a soft caress, lightly brushing your cheeks and running it’s fingers through your hair. The smells of earth and water fill your lungs with each breath with a slight chill. The sounds of the trees jostling and the wind swishing consume all sound but your breath.

You close your eyes to take it all in.

Your breathing deepening with each breath.

You feel your self slipping backwards away from the cliff but you know the ground will welcome you.

You gently stop on the moss covered ground. It’s like velvet on your skin.

Running your fingers through it you feel every little branch.

You let yourself fall deeper in sleep as the darkness consumes you.

The smells leave your nose, the wind leaves your hair, the velvety moss loses its touch.

You wake in your bed, feeling more rejuvenated then you have in days.

I once went to work, did all my normal work routines- Went to meetings, filled out my time sheet, requested time off for the holidays, rejected some code, etc. When I got back home I suddenly woke up and was pissed because now I had to actually go to work and do all that shit hahaha

Two.

Once I dreamt I was stabbed, and I can still feel the sensation of a blade tearing my flesh, despite having never had more than a nick.

Plus a super real, super long dream that spanned decades. I lived an entire other life. I grew up with a best friend either named Emma, or Emily. I saw her every day. We grew up together, had families alongside each other, lived our entire lives. I still miss her, despite the fact that she never existed.

As a kid, age 8-10 or so, I used have a recurring dream about a girl who lived next door. I would go play outside with her. We’d play something different every night. The funny thing was that I had no girl living nextdoor. I lived in a rural area outside a small town with no families with kids around.

Years later I see this girl in a bar, we’re both 17 at this point. She looks exactly like the girl from my dreams, only a bit older. We’re now married and we have 2 kids.

I had a dream about watching my dad die in a factory accident (he worked a lot of factory jobs in the 80s and early 90s).

I could smell the machine oil, hear the thump of the presses (feeling it in my feet, too), and even remember the brief bruised feeling in my shoulder when the paramedic shoved past me to get to him.

It felt so real and vivid, I felt very strongly for the longest time that I’d had a premonition about how my dad would die.

It somehow even sticks with me every now and then, despite him having passed from brain tumours 13 years ago this month.

Weird.

Every so often I remember my dreams (I don’t usually remember them but I know i had them) and they’re always really, really bizarre. Never scary in the classical sense, to me at least, no nightmares, just intense and bizarre experiences.

One that stands out is that I was in a cave and the cave dwelling tribe had a king that was dying. I was to become their new king, and the king wore on his head a crown that was the head of a giant centipede, with the body of it running down his back. So the king dies, and they take his crown off his head and place it on mine, and in that moment I realize (via the centipede “talking” to me in my mind) that the centipede rules these people by controlling the mind of the king, that my mind would now be erased/meld with the mind of the centipede, and as I reach for my sword (?) to cut the centipede off before the process can happen I know that it cannot be stopped, is irreversible, has already happened and that the centipede cannot be killed. Then I woke up.

Yup. I had this dream on May 8, 1994:

—start—

Reports are continuing to come in… they are confirming that the United States of America has just been taken over and is now under South African rule. “Control Panel Warfare” is what they are calling it. Rumors that the President has attempted suicide are circulating around the globe. “It’s all done through computers,” someone said. They have taken over with computers.

Everything will change. There will be no more homeless. Effective immediately this is now a police state. We were all in a room when my mom came in and announced this information. I think we were in a conference room at the hospital where she works. As she announced this terrifying news, the tone in the room went from joking to a stomach-turning sour in a matter of seconds. The look on my dads face… he was horrified. No one could believe their ears!

I thought an announcement this shocking would only come from the news that nuclear war has just broken out and we only had a few more moments to live. The news that the U.S. had just been taken over was incredibly shocking, yet at the same time I thought to myself that it was only a matter of time before something like this happened. So I guess I was horrified and not surprised all at the same time.

—stop—

I’ve not thought about this for a few years but yes. When I was a boy, I used to have a recurring dream of myself climbing this surreal-y tall climbing frame type thing. It was in an empty field. It had four repeating sections like a rope swing, rotating bridge, thick net, monkey bars, climbing wall etc. Stuff you’d typically find on an assault course or game show. It was even padded with the foam and vinyl you find in kids’ play areas. I’d have that dream most nights and would always fall out of the thing after 2-10 sections had been climbed. Well, I had resigned myself to continually climbing this thing each night and being awoken once a night as I hit the floor after falling. I’d always start at the height I fell from the previous night but progress felt minimal. Then, I finally reached the top. I remember looking around this field atop this ridiculously tall structure and feeling this great accomplishment. I genuinely couldn’t, and still can’t, believe that I got to the top. There was a massive slide from the top. I don’t think I could properly express just how long this was from the height. I rode it down and that was the last time I dreamed of it. I kind of miss that dream.

This is gonna sound so fake it’s ridiculous, but at least it’s short. This was about a decade ago when I was about to go to college, so that factored into the setting, but the other part? No idea. Basically, I was riding around my college campus on the back of a raptor, saddle and all. I was having a blast, and everybody thought it was so cool that I had a badass dinosaur to ride around on, because obviously nobody else did. That was the whole dream, zero plot, nobody got eaten, just me and my raptor buddy having a grand ol’ time stomping around campus.

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I have what I call movie dreams, sometimes they are fantasy, sometimes they are more non-fiction. Sometimes I am myself, other times I am a character and there’s even been a few where I am merely the camera -as I’m im not in the dream just observing. One of the fantasy ones that stands out was pirates fairies and elves, but in space. I was a shapeshifing fairy that was tasked with protecting a group of elves from pirates. I was setting decoys and running from and fighting pirates.

Totally. A few actually. Some of them I had when I was very young such that the dreams themselves are really the only memories I have of the time. All nightmares. One of my newly born little brother in a pram on top of a hill being let go and me running to try to catch him before he hits a car. It was on a real hill that I occasionally see if I’m around that area again, but was so realistic that it’s my only/best memory of that hill.

Another was basically a zombie apocalypse and me being around while my dad turns (I must have seen some zombie film on TV or something). Another being chased by apes and spiders with the dream ending with me sinking under water and spiders jumping in the water and knowing how to swim downward to get me (eeek).

Two! Both when I was between 10 and 13 or so.

The first I had walked down the street to my friend’s house, knocked on the door, his mom answered and I woke myself up because I spoke out loud “can Shane come out to play?” The sound of my own voice woke me up because I was talking in my sleep.

The second was more or less the same. I left my house intending to go down to Shane’s house, but I tripped off the curb and woke up.

I’ve also had a recurring dream since I was a child that I would wake up in the middle of the night, fall out of bed and instead of simply hitting the floor I fell miles and miles through dirt and rock until I landed in a weird prison carved into dirt. I would be deposited into a dark hallway I couldn’t see the end to in any direction, an along one side of the wall were jail doors of cells. I could hear moaning and screaming and felt intense fear. But I would always wake up there and never “explore.” Not really realistic, but I still sometimes visit this dream prison and it still creeps me the fuck out cuz I don’t know what it means or why it’s always the same except for the place my bed may be.