Recurring dreams about unreal places

[cimorene]

How many of you have recurring dreams in places that don't exist in real life? I don't mean that you've read about in books - I mean that your mind has simply made up, like an ordinary dream place except you keep going back to it.

[Poll #1120062]


As for me, it's like I have a whole fantasy version of my hometown that doesn't really exist in my head. There are recurring high school dreams set in a high school that doesn't exist, that I've never been to, and recurring trips to the mall, especially to a large Sears and a large JC Penney primarily with my aunts and cousins on my mother's side. There's also a recurring strip mall in my dream - rather a sinister strip mall in fact, where it's always a little gloomy and there's a rubber stamp store and a coffee shop that I never like going into, in my dreams. Last night we went to a paper store and a big craft store in the strip mall in my dream.

And then there's also this sort of recurring beautiful fantasy landscape, like a steep hill and a screen of brush and trees and around a corner to the bank of a river, with a steep crumbling bank in several layers that you can climb all up and down and a lot of small islands in the water. It's very beautiful and it certainly doesn't exist. It's located off the beaten path at a sort of petting-zoo kind of farm outside of my hometown that also doesn't exist, but recurs a lot anyway. The last time I dreamt about it I discovered - to my astonishment - that just down the bank in the other direction was the house of my father's step-cousin Caroline, the lady who used to take me contradancing every week in Massachussetts.

Comments

[aynatonal.livejournal.com]

Specific places don't recur in my dreams, but I do have a lot of dreams that are set in museums. It's just a different (imaginary) museum every time.

[basingstoke.livejournal.com]

I have a whole imaginary version of Pittsburgh that I dream about. Recently I've added an island archipelago and a subway, which is interesting. There's a huge and futuristic mall. In my dreams, I live in a total slum one street away from a bustling commercial area and university. So when my car breaks down (which happens all the time, since I'm worried about the state of my car) I have to walk home from work through tangled residential streets, through a posh walled courtyard, and then down into a tunnel populated by Shady Types. My actual apartment, in my head, is on the third floor of a dorm-style building; it's either only one room, or it's a freaking mansion the size of a residential house, or it's a massive rambling rickety Victorian with a greenhouse and a spiral staircase.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

That's so cool! Yours sounds cooler than mine. Do you have a particular recurring cast of actual acquaintances?

[basingstoke.livejournal.com]

Strangely, no. I always dream in the same *place* but I'm not always even ME. The other week I dreamed I was Methos being chased by the horsemen, and this other time it was a scifi story with floods covering the earth and whatnot and we all had to run up higher and higher in the building and it was all panic!

Or it's zombies, or some generic life dream like doing laundry or going to work or moving.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

You dreamed you were Methos! Awesome! That's quite entertaining.

Wax has a cast of recurring imaginary characters, including a pet snake named Igor and a background serial killer. In real life, she's terrified of snakes.

[vellum.livejournal.com]

only two separate times that i can remember, and only recurring twice for both of them.

[perfectwh0rl.livejournal.com]

I'm forced to comment because of the awesomeness of this subject, my apologies for butting in - i'm a random, well meaning lurker :)

This is very dear to my heart, i adore dreaming and dream places!!!

I have several places i return to. Mostly certain landscapes - in one place there's a very specific tree i love to be in or near and i get excited when i realise where i am and that i'm going to visit it. Another place is a river coming out of a wonderful stone arched tunnel just down the hill from one of my childhood homes. It flows off into dense wild woodland, in real life this area is actually coast and beach, and the wooded area is the sea! Bizarre, but it makes sense when i'm there :)

Also more frequently of late, a coastal town that's very sunny and peacefully pretty, with a nice little gallery cafe. Very restful.

My mum and dad are dream companions from time to time, and sometimes ppl from waking life are hanging out doing stuff, but i only remember having a recurring cast when i was a wee kid. They were my friends from before i was born(!) One has BIG HAIR like Ray Toro :DDD
From time to time there's an alien invasion underway, and i think it's usually the same aliens. I only see the ships, with one notable exception being the time i saw tall goblin/elf type aliens...their ship was a completely silent WW1 bomber, bigger inside than out, and they were trying to herd people into it. Um.

[annlarimer.livejournal.com]

Good God, I thought it was just me. There's a whole mapscape that I wander through. I can even tell you where most of it is in relation to the real world. And I have a sinister strip mall, too. D:

[cimness.livejournal.com]

Ahahhaha. I wonder what's so awful about strip malls! But whenever someone's trying to kill someone it's there. There was a hardware store there once and they were selling this like, four foot tall crockpot that was the scene of a murder. Yuck.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's so awesome! I wish I had recurring imaginary friends, but my recurring cast is mostly made of people from real life. Sad, that.

Vitamin B6 megadose can result in too vivid dream recall...

[perfectwh0rl.livejournal.com]

... I kinda believe these dream things are REALLY HAPPENING.
I think there are a few different types of dream: the thinking-and-processing-stuff dream, and the REALLY HAPPENING alternate dimension we visit astrally...there may be more but my money is on the latter. It's funny to think about these places while awake, even when i can't recall all the specifics there is a definite *feeling* that accompanies each place. Sometimes it feels like homesickness.

I love hearing the dreams of my wakinglife!friends, i love it when i'm *in* their dreams - like, and then what did i do??? lol

I've been thinking about this more since your post and remembering certain familiar cityscapes i haven't been to in a while. One is a very different futuristic Aberdeen where i have a flat up high amongst all these domed rooftops, and i think there's a weird remote little village up in the hills *somewhere* - i remember the trek to get there and the remoteness of it more than the village itself...suffering a little amnesia! (http://www.xkcd.com/203/)