Dreaming – Page 3 – Auxiliary Memory

Do You Dream About Dinosaur Attacks?

By James Wallace Harris, June 29, 2015 (Updated 5/9/21)

I hope this doesn’t reveal some sort of deep embarrassing Freudian complex, but my whole sleep last night was filled with dinosaur dreams. Ever since I was about five years old I’ve had occasional dreams about dinosaurs. They aren’t real common, but they happen now and then, and they vary in details. Last night’s dreams were somewhat typical. I’ll be with a bunch of other people, at home, school, work, outside in a city location, on a crosswalk, etc., and suddenly a dinosaur or dinosaurs would show up, and everyone panics.

In the dream we all know the way to avoid being eaten is to be lying down, don’t move, and be quiet. But there’s always someone nearby that keeps blabbing or moving around that draws attention to the dinosaurs causing me to fear for my safety and makes me very annoyed at the noisemaker. For some reason, the dinosaurs won’t notice us if we don’t move or make noise. I never get eaten myself, or the people I know, but I’m always afraid some dumbass is going to get me, or us, killed. I’m always annoyed in these dreams that other people are not freezing and shutting up.

The funny thing is I had these dreams all night long. Even after I got up and went to pee, and went back to sleep. Even very early in the morning when I was waking up over and over again, every time wondering if I should get up. Each time I fell back asleep I had another dinosaur dream. It was one scene after another, with different groups of people, in different locations, and in each scene, there was a dinosaur attack. One scene involved my sister, and another my wife Susan, but it was always strangers causing trouble. I don’t think I ever saw a dinosaur eat someone, but I knew they were in the distance, so the panic to hide was strong. These dreams last night weren’t quite nightmares, but they did involve a kind of anxiety.

If dreams are sorting through the day’s events and filing long-term memories, what did I do yesterday to deserve dinosaur dreams last night? And do other people have dinosaur dreams? I hope these dreams don’t indicate some kind of weird psychological disorder.

When I was young, I guess around five, I had my first dinosaur dream. I lived out in the country in South Carolina in an old two-story house. My family didn’t use the second story, but my three-year-old sister and I would go up there to play, but it was creepy. I would dream about those upstairs rooms as if they were evil. That was one of my earliest reoccurring dreams, along with dreams of flying. But it was during this time that I had my first dinosaur dream. I and other people were working in this huge gravel pit, and we were slaves to dinosaurs and had to stand in dinosaur shit as we worked. Later on, when I saw The Flintstones, the pit we worked in reminded me of this show. But this dream was three or four years before The Flintstones appeared in 1960.

I’ve always wondered when I first learned about dinosaurs. My oldest memories of dinosaurs are from these dreams, but how did I learn about dinosaurs to dream about them? I remember as a kid after I started having these dreams, of playing with plastic dinosaurs and learning their names. My little buddies and I liked to collect and trade these plastic dinosaurs, and we seem to know all about them. I don’t remember being taught about dinosaurs in school, or even reading about them. I’ve always assumed knowledge about dinosaurs is imprinted in little boys’ brains, like some kind of ancestral memory.

I’ve written about dinosaur dreams before, back in 2008. I had completely forgotten I had written this, and the dream I described. The dream back then was somewhat different, a more science-fictional version, because people were protected from the dinosaurs by force fields.

Does dreaming about dinosaurs mean anything? At Dream Moods, which has a page explaining animal symbols in dreams, it says this about dinosaurs:

To see a dinosaur in your dream symbolizes an outdated attitude. You may need to discard your old ways of thinking and habits.

To dream that you are being chased by a dinosaur, indicates your fears of no longer being needed or useful. Alternatively, being chased by a dinosaur, may reflect old issues that are still coming back to haunt you.

I wonder if I have a problem with outdated attitudes? But this commentary seems no more scientific than astrology. I am not the only person troubled with dinosaur dreams as reflected in the Yahoo Answers column. It’s odd, but a couple of people who replied copied the statement I quote above, and it’s repeated on other websites. Just shows how bullshit spreads across the internet. At least at the Dream Dictionary, they had something a bit deeper, but still on the woo-woo side. It reassures me that other people have dinosaur dreams, so I ain’t the only crazy one here. In fact, there are many dream interpretation sites that cover dinosaurs in dreams, and many people posting about dreaming of dinosaurs. At Jurassic World, they even have a page collecting dinosaur dreams.

Are dreams even symbolic? I have no idea. It seems my dreams are saying something very big will destroy me if I stand out, and that other people are constantly being destroyed for making themselves known. Hunkering down and being quiet sounds rather cowardly to me in waking life. When I was young and had nightmares I used to kill anything that tried to hurt me. The violence of my dreams was disturbing because it was like the violence of modern video games, but these dreams were decades before such games were invented.

I can’t think of anything I did or experienced yesterday that would trigger dreams about avoiding death, or large issues. I had a nice quiet day of reading books and listening to music, and then last night my friend Anne came over for dinner and we watched Empire Falls, an old HBO mini-series based on the Richard Russo book. Empire Falls is about a man with a repressed past that never speaks his mind. I did identify with Miles Roby, the Ed Harris character because I hold things in to avoid emotional conflicts. Are the dinosaurs of my dreams potential emotional conflicts? At least this theory works with dreams because the way to be safe in the dream is to be quiet and avoid attention. Also, the people who get eaten by dinosaurs are the loud people who won’t shut up.

This is embarrassing because now I am revealing something.

I guess I’ve got to wait for the dinosaurs to show up.

JWH

Update 5/9/21:

I had a dream last night where aliens were attacking people in the same way dinosaurs attack people in the dinosaur dreams. Instead of eating us, they zapped us with some kind of energy gun. I’ve had similar dreams where giants were attacking people, and they killed people by crushing them. In each of these dreams hiding is the key to survival, and those people who stick out are the ones caught by dinosaurs, space aliens, and giants.

I realize now that the role of T-Rex, space alien, and giant are the same in all these dreams. They represent the bad things in life, threats that kill people. And the message of the dream is some people do survive by avoiding these dangers of life. Evidently, my subconscious is telling me to keep a low profile because that’s the best way to avoid getting hurt or killed.

However, I think last night’s dream was inspired by reading chapter 3 of Being Mortal: Illness, Medicine, and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande. That chapter was scarier than anything Stephen King ever wrote. It’s about how our bodies decay as we age and how we become less capable of taking care of ourselves. This was illustrated with horrifying case studies. Gawande does give an overview of how society has helped the elderly over the years, and what people can do to help themselves, but death is the only escape from this fate. There is no avoiding old age by hiding like I do from the dinosaurs, giants, and space aliens.

I Had a Dream–But Was it Mine?

Are dreams a form of communication from our subconscious? That sounds much too mystical for an atheist like myself. Last night I awoke from a dream with a strong sense of message. Essentially my dream was telling me that the important things we do in life are those we do with other people. That two or more heads are better than one. I can barely remember the dream now, but I know I was trying to do something in the dream, accomplish some goal, but it might have been as trivial as playing a game, and a woman told me we can only get ahead by working together. That struck me as profound – at least in the context of the dream. I have a vague memory in the dream that everyone was competing against each other and getting nowhere. But I have no idea at what.

Now I’m not going to start a religion of cooperation, but instead I’m going to ask: who is the author of my dreams. Quite often I wake up and feel like I’ve been jerked out of a complexly plotted story. I don’t feel “I” was writing the story. I haven’t read Freud or Jung, but I get the feeling that my subconscious is more thoughtful than I’ve ever given it credit for before. Now I don’t feel possessed, or think I have multiple personalities, but I feel there’s an unconscious thinking machine in my head processing data while I’m not paying attention. In recent years, I feel it’s doing far more than processing random data, but is the novelist of my dreams, making sense of a random series of scenes?

Reality doesn’t come with a story. It happens. If a dog chases a chipmunk it’s not a scene in a story, it’s just another event in reality. Humans want to make everything into a story. The reason why there are so many JFK conspiracy theories is because people can’t just accept that Lee Harvey Oswald just happen to be in the right place, at the right time, with the right experience, to kill the president. They want more, they want it to fit a story.

I need to read up on recent research into the subconscious. I’m wondering if decades of reading and thinking about writing hasn’t affected my subconscious. I can’t help but believe that it’s getting better at plotting. In recent decades I feel my dreams are shaped more like stories, with good plotting.

But was my dreaming subconscious sending the conscious me a message last night? It’s obvious that cooperation produces more success than lone wolf endeavors. I wonder if my dream is commenting on my retired life, where I spend a lot of time alone. I don’t know. It could be my story telling mechanism is reading the dream that way. It could be I was only competing in some kind of game in the dream and the woman was trying to convince me to work together to win.

JWH – 11/22/13

What’s the Resolution and Frame Rate of Dreams?

Last night I woke up with a bout of insomnia. I was in a strange state of going in and out of consciousness and I had some very vivid dreams. What was fascinating was I was just conscious enough to realize how my dreams were working. An image would pop into my mind, and then very quickly my mind would provide a story for the image. I didn’t hear words though. It was like a telepathic storyteller was narrating my dreams and I just thought the explanations of each image as it appeared. And those explanations animated the images into a sequence of events – so the dream felt like a movie, a story.

The first image was looking down at my legs and seeing one boot on and one foot just in a white sock – I assumed I was jogging.

I saw an image of my friend Laurie – and assumed we were jogging together.

The next image was me running down a street alone – and then telling myself I’m on a strange street and I need to turn back to find one I know.

The then I saw a series of strange streets – some urban, some suburban – and I assumed I was completely lost.

The next image was being in a movie theater – I thought I came in to ask directions

Then I saw strange people – I was asking them what street was this movie theater on but they didn’t know.

One guy looked like he had Down’s syndrome – so I thought the group was of special needs people.

The next image was of a black woman – she said something about the rules and I thought I had been committed and was on a day trip to see a movie together.

The next image was running in a corridor, and I thought I was escaping.

The next image was me running with boots on both feet – and I thought how much I loved Frye boots

There was more – but I forgot

The point was my dream was a series of images, and a narrative was added to them to make a story, which made the dream flow. I think because the images came close together, the narrative, or narrator, tied them together, but the images really weren’t related.

Over the years as I’ve been working on writing fiction I’ve often thought my dreams came up with good story ideas. Now I’m thinking that the dreaming mechanism in my brain is a fiction machine. The brain generates random images while I sleep and the storytelling portion of my brain ties them together with some kind of meaningful narrative.

Some dreams are more vivid than others. I wonder just how many pixels a dream image has? And what is the frame rate of my mind for generating new images. There are times when I think I am seeing a movie segment, but I think my brain is often lazy and just puts up a few images. I’ve had some very powerful dreams, ones where I thought I was awake and everything looked and felt absolutely normal, but I was still asleep. That suggests the brain is capable of producing HD Dreams. However, it still might have been single images and not a movie, and the narrative was HD powerful.

Today I was listening to music with headphones and almost dozing off, and I realize the song was inspiring a video like sequence on my mind’s theater screen. It was rather strange and small, but it was an animation of a crowd of people running, and then they all got on horses, and continued to chase something. It was a fleeting vision. It looked like a very low resolution YouTube video.

All of this makes me think of how often we fictionalize random images and thoughts. If you’re laying in bed at night reading and hear the bushes rustle outside your window most people imagine all kinds of scenarios. It’s a burglar, it’s a raccoon, it’s the neighbor’s cat – we seldom get up and look. We just make up stuff in our head to explain the input.

Think about how often you make stuff up to explain a random stimulus. Think how often everything we believe is just made up stuff.

JWH – 10/14/13

Beautiful Bassett Hound and Really Big Lobster

In my dream I was outside, in a public place. There were no buildings. I saw a few trees in planters. A man stood talking to a group of people. I was one of them. We sat on rock benches and I felt I was in a class. The man talking was a teacher, a Socrates like character. I see the last page of a book. The teacher asks us about the last scene of a book. I’m only vaguely aware of the title of the book, but throughout the dream I struggle to grasp the title. Eventually my confused mind labels it The Great Gatsby. I turn to the back of the book and read the last scene.

“Hey, I don’t remember this scene, and I’ve read this book three times!” I exclaim without hearing my voice. There are only a handful of students around the teacher and we’re all quiet. The teacher pushes us for an answer again. I make a suggestion that I know is wrong and stupid as soon as I say it and the teacher gives some wise reply that shoots me down. In the dream it almost feels like I’m saying real words, or even reading real words, but really it’s only vague concepts and squiggles that look like words. Communicating in dreams is like telepathy.

I can tell there are two characters in the scene. I reread the scene again. For some reason an image of a giant lobster interrupts the dream and I flash on this idea. “One of the characters in the scene is God.” The teacher agrees and the other students start talking excitedly. I study and study the scene but can’t figure out what’s happening. Has a character died and gone to heaven and is talking to God? Or has God come down into the world to tell him something?

Then I have an image of a beautiful bassett hound running, with its huge floppy ears flying around its head. I don’t connect any meaning and all I feel is the desire to buy a bassett hound – could this be a form of subliminal advertising? Then I return to the outdoor classroom and struggle to make something out of the last scene again. We all make suggestions but the teacher isn’t happy but I feel somewhat pleased that I discovered that the mysterious character was God. The dream fades away and I awake.

It’s fascinating to play amateur scientist and try to discover how dreams work. I think there is a mind that experiences dreams that is different from the mind of the waking me. I call it the narrator. This narrator may be a mechanism that the waking me also uses, but I see “the me” of dreams separate from “the me” who is writing this. When you are in a semi-wakeful state you can observe this narrator in action. Random images will appear and bits of meaning will pop into your mind. Dreams appear to be built on a series of still images or crude moving images that the narrator comments on. The narrator makes up meaning for the images. The dream me acts on those suggested meanings.

Take for instance the dream above. I saw a man standing and with a handful of people sitting around him. The narrator informs me without words, “a teacher and his students.” That image could have been anything. The narrator sees the last page of a book and supplies, “the teacher wants to know the meaning of the last scene in the book.” The sleeping me, that is the mechanism of self-awareness, is very dormant but I relate to one of the students. The “me” in the dream isn’t aware of the narrator – it experiences the series of images and thoughts the narrator provides as a whole story.

On rare ocassions I’ve had vivid dreams where the waking “me” is the dream “me.” However, it’s an illusion. If the waking “me” tries to guide the dream it will destroy the dream. The sleeping “me” is passive and must watch the dream like a movie. If the “waking me” tries to think and override the narrator, the dream will fall apart and I’ll awake.

I think the narrator mechanism works in waking life too. If you are at a restaurant and see a young couple sit down nearby, the narrator might tell you, “See that couple, they are on their first date. See how they act nervous…” The narrator can be very convincing, even to the point where you believe it and think what you are seeing is real. This is why cops say they saw a gun when they didn’t. The narrator can see something and tell the cop it’s a gun. The narrator can be very powerful. The narrator thinks much faster than normal self-aware thinking.

Usually dreams relate to the previous days events, but the above dream doesn’t remind me of anything that happened yesterday. I was an English major in college, so the dream does make sense to me. I’m used to trying to figure out what books mean. I’m used to the anxiety of having a professor put pressure on a class to supply an answer. The Great Gatsby is a book that is taught a lot, and last week I read an article suggesting it was the great American novel. I have no idea why the lobster and bassett hound popped into the dream, but the narrator quickly used the one image and made it fit into the story. Maybe if the bassett hound would have stayed long enough the narrator would have made up a new story for the dreamer, a new dream.

Fiction and story telling seem to be at the heart of our minds. We look out at the world and see trees and mountains. It doesn’t take long before we’re making up stories about fairies living the in the trees and gods living on the mountains. Zen masters try to break their students of this habit – to see the world as it is without the stories, but that’s a very hard habit to break. Think of the war in Iraq. Imagine all the stories created by all sides of the conflict. Just think, the Sunnis and the Shiites are killing each other over stories made up thirteen centuries ago. It’s no wonder that some people believe that even our waking real world is a dream, a nightmare.

And finally, at a meta-level, notice how I can take tiny events in my life and turn them into a narrative structure. Observe the narrator.

Heaven, Hell, and the Other Places

I died in my dreams last night. No biggie, I’ve died in my dreams several times over the years. Dying in dreamland is intense. Yesterday I was having some minor heart trouble and last night I dreamed my heart stopped. I felt myself falling. My last thought was, “Here I go” with a sense of complete acceptance, and I let go. All details around me fell away, and the final thing I was aware of was a dull gray light. Everything stopped. That’s when I woke up. It was quite a relief to wake up and be alive. I love being alive.

Dreamland is such a strange place. I’ve died before, and once came to, floating up towards heaven before waking up. My cousins and I had been riding in the back of a station wagon and we were hit by another car with a tremendous bang. Then blackness. Going to heaven was the scariest dream I ever had. I think it was my first time to die in a dream. I’ve since died a few times from endlessly falling into hell. It’s easier to die the atheist’s death where I collapse into black nothingness. It’s always a trauma to survive death and come to in again, and still be in dreamland. Sometimes the shift is to a pleasant new life but the transition is scary. Other times its overhelming and I wake up in a sweat and panic. Then there are times when I come to and I’m living again on another world or in another life. I don’t believe any of these events have real relationship with reality, but I can see how lots of wild ideas got started in the real world over the centuries.

On these other worlds I’ve been flying creatures, swimming creatures and tree swinging creatures. I’ve always assume my brain created these roles for me because I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy. I remember one time dying and ending up in bed with an attractive matronly woman in her sixties, whom I eventually realized was God. Now that was unnerving. What would Freud have made of that? I was over fifty at the time, but I still wonder if God had any age of consent laws to deal with. She had been jolly, warm and caring and when I woke up, I was reminded of when I was a kid and how I felt about big soft grandmotherly women with ample bosoms.

I wonder how many concepts have come into the world from dreams. Reincarnation feels like an idea generated by dreamland. Did people think of talking animals before they dreamed of them? I remember a beautiful dream of being a part of a troop of monkeys, and being in love with a girl monkey. I never knew if we were Earthly monkeys, or monkey-like creatures living on another world. Did we imagine aliens living on other worlds or did our dreams paint those sense of wonder creatures in our mind. I tend to believe that all mysticism comes from dreams or hallicinations, which to me are dreams that leak out into the waking world. Primative people talk much of dreamtime.

I am reminded of a title of a book about Philip K. Dick – “What If Our World Is Their Heaven.” I’ve been to many heavens and hells, to many alien worlds, in my dreams, and I’ve never visited a world that could top our world no matter how wild my imagination got. If there is a heaven, it is this world.