How I dream, and a dream

[Johnny Vietnam]

Hi All

A few things, all my dreams seem to be lucid, I'm always aware in the back of my mind that I'm dreaming, I never feel completely...unconscious. I don't know if that's the word I want to be using.

All my dreams seem to be very convoluted and complex. They aren't like some dreams I see posted with one thing happening or one word. It's almost like it's a story I'm living through. I'm aware of it, I know I'm dreaming, I just don't manipulate the world I'm in, a choice I think I'm making. The dreams are long, sometimes they span years, and I'm living a life and doing sometimes mundane things which don't seem to hold a "meaning". I couldn't begin to tell a whole dream of mine only a synopsis, I only can hold on to parts of it as I wake up as I quickly forget most of it unless I really concentrate. I'm sometimes surprised that this takes place over a span of hours.

If I wake up in the middle of a dream, I can continue it, if I think about it as I go to sleep, I sort of resume the paused dream. I don't know if that's common, but I think it's neat and useful, if I was interrupted and I want to know what happens next!

I've tried to use books to interpret my dreams, but they all are themed around one word or words, and I can't really encapsulate my dreams in one word.

For example, a recent one that I can recall with some detail:

I had this dream where I was a detective on a police force in a fairly large city. I was tracking a serial killer, who was committing brutal murders, like completely awful killings, and throughout the dream I was at crime scenes trying to decipher this, to find the guy. The weird things was, the important thing wasn't that he was killing people, was his connection to me (That's what I felt, not everyone else in the dream of course, they wanted to catch the guy). He was trying to send me a message. This dream took place over several "months" as in, I flash from scene to scene, me eating in a diner talking to my partner, the next crime scene, me thinking about the connection, but it wasn't happening in like a day of course. Almost like a movie?

And I was getting close. I was piecing it together, somehow I'd known him from an earlier part in my life. I had a partner in the dream (another detective) and I voiced these to her and she was of course skeptical and gave me the "the case is just getting to you, get more sleep" sort of thing.

Alas, it ended before I could reach it's conclusion I was awoken but an exterior noise, and could not for the life of me continue it no matter how hard I tried. The odd thing is for the subject matter, I wouldn't call this a nightmare. I wasn't frightened at any point during the dream, it was like watching myself in a movie, I knew I was dreaming and I just wanted to see what happened next, wanted to see what my brain had thought up...

This has gone on long, but I wanted to know if anyone else has really long and weird dreams like this and what they mean or is it just my brain just doing something important at the end of the day.

Thanks