XKCD: It's more than a comic

Every other person's experience of sleep paralysis I hear about is the dream rationalizing it as "something is holding me down". Mine are "I can't break out of this dream! Every time I think I've gotten up, eventually I realize that was the dream!"

Fortunately, it only happened a few times during my first few years of college. After that, it never happened again.

I sometimes have sleep paralysis. The good thing is that I usually recognize it and try not to panic.

I sometimes have common dreams like going somewhere (sometimes being late, though that's more rare since I'm out of school and don't have that strict of a schedule) but cannot reach it because something gets in the way. It has a more usual variation that I go somewhere, then I realize I'm going in the wrong direction, I start to backtrack, but I end up in the wrong place again, so I backtrack again but end up in yet another wrong place and it goes on.

I also sometimes have recursive dreams when I seem to wake up but it turns out I didn't. It usually happens with bad dreams, with the experience "Phew, I was just dreaming... oh now, it is happening again!" I might realize that I didn't actually wake up, I try, I think I succeed, but again, not. It usually goes 3-4 iterations.

Most of my dreams, however, is quite normal. That is, it's not recurring, and I don't remember most of them the next day. The more I think about it, the more likely I will remember it for a longer time. I once tried writing them down, but after a week or so it became really frustrating having to turn on the light after waking up in the middle of the night.

There is a recurring kind of dream I have, though they are very different in content. I call them films. It's when I know in advance, at least to some degree, what will happen. Sometimes I can even go back and change a scene. There are ones where I'm a protagonist, but other times I'm the viewer, looking at it from an outside perspective. Once it looked like an actual film, with a title text similar to '90s comedies. I tend to remember these "films" more than other dreams, probably because I find them more fascinating, so I think about them more than usual.

I have had the usual dream when I'm naked in a public place and nobody comments on it, but it's not that common. The dream about having an exam and having forgotten everything, along with the slow realisation that my last exam occurred decades ago, is a bit more frequent. My foray into amateur acting has also given me the occasional dream where I suddenly find myself on stage, with no props, no costume, discovering my text (which is apparently thousands of pages long, as flipping through it never allows me to reach the same line twice), and the audience waiting (I had the same ones before my Ph D defense).

Other stressing dreams include discovering I'm suddenly and inexplicably horribly late for an important appointment, missing something vital, and the recursive dream where I'm dreaming I'm waking up late, then dreaming I'm waking up from this but still late. I seem to have an inner fear of lateness.

Usually I don't remember much of my dreams. I have a variant of lucid dreams where I'm vaguely suspecting that I'm dreaming, but it mostly manifests as me being able to moderately affect my surroundings, mainly to get some superpower of other to resolve an issue (for instance, I manage to travel back in time or teleport in one of the stressing dreams). I had for some time dreams where I was able to fly, finding it hilariously easy to do and noting that this time I was not dreaming.

My nightmares usually involve horrid bugs, Nausea Fuel on my body, or something completely non-threatening that is inexplicably frightening. The closest I get to having a Catapult Nightmare is diving under the covers when waking up from a particularly scary dream (and yes, I'm still doing at 40).

I've had the "film" ones before, sometimes as "video games", but where I know how things are supposed to go because I've dreamt them before (I don't actually know if I have in some cases). What's mildly nightmarish about it is that trying to interact with the plot leads to things going awry, sometimes until I'm stuck on an empty set, chasing the plot which has moved on, leaving the area empty of life and ready to be erased for the next set. :-P I blame some of that on reading Xanth at an early age, where dreams were actually done on something like film sets. That and The Dark Tower, although that's more of an impression thing... my first time reading the first book (only one I've read), it felt like a world that was where the plot had been, and that Roland was always trying to chase the plot and be back where reality was moving forward.

My dreams, when I can remember them, tend to be big sprawling epics like a video game, where there's lots of exploration and different characters. They all make total sense inside the dream, and then within about thirty seconds of waking up I realize how bizarre it all was. I almost never have anyone from my real life inside dreams.

What's funny is that my gaming has dwindled down to about 20 minutes a day, but my dreams don't seem to have realized that yet.

I like how Black Hat Man said that when his dreams suddenly include a horse appearing on a hilltop, bad things are about to happen. Who would have thought that Black Hat Man, of all people, was scared of Nightmare Moon? XD

I have had video game dreams too, where I'm in the video game. I suspect this is fast becoming a universal dream for young people, especially children who have grown up with them from birth. This has no doubt also influenced how we see ourselves in dreams, for example I have had dreams in third person view, where my viewpoint was behind myself somehow. I think films have had a similar effect on people's dreams, altering the way we experience the world.

I've also had dreams of surfing the internet, another one likely to become universal.

Some other universal ones are reading a book and trying to read back to something, only to find that the text has suddenly changed, looking into a mirror and seeing a strange face, flipping a light switch but the light not responding/behaving oddly, and generally electronic devices not behaving as they should.

I also have those often (minus the mirror one). Strangely enough, while I played a lot of video games at a time, I very rarely dreamt I was in one. I do, however, dream fairly often that I'm in a movie, series or comic, or multiple ones at once (a recent one involved me being in a merging of Star Trek, Star Wars, DC and Marvel).

edited 18th Jan '18 8:06:08 AM by C105

I've never had a dream like being naked in front of people or failing a test or anything, but I do have dreams every few months featuring dead family members. My brain has to leap through a few hurdles to justify how no they weren't really dead. It ends up very convincing and I wake up half sure that they're still alive. Odd feeling.

edited 18th Jan '18 11:08:53 AM by Arha

The film thing also happens to me sometimes. I always know what will happen next, but I don't feel as if there's any decision-making involved: it happens anyway. Sometimes it feels foreboding, even if what will happen next is nothing bad.

The nighmare I remember best is one from when I was very young - maybe in the first year of primary school, or possibly even before.

I'm in the living room, watching the news, and there's a report - with video footage of the event, somehow - of a little girl, maybe about 4 or 5 years old, wading in the water, a bit less than neck deep, when suddenly a giant squid attacks her and drags her underwater. There's splashing, adults run into the water to try to save her, but the news anchor says that the girl has not been found.

Suddenly, I'm back in the scene on the beach (it looks very much like a beach that was very close to where I grew up, where I'd regularly go swimming with my brother and a friend or two who lived in the area). This time, I'm the girl, wading in the water, and of course I know that the squid is about to attack me - and it does, and there's nothing I can do. I'm dragged under the water, I hear the adults rushing towards me, but I know there's no saving me at that point.

Then I'm back in the scene on the beach - except this time, I'm the squid. I'm approaching the girl, and I don't want to attack her - I'm exactly as terrified as I was when I was the girl - but I can't change how the events unfold, so I attack the girl and drag her underwater.

Then I woke up.

Later, when I've remembered that dream, I've felt a little bit impressed at my younger self for having such an active imagination. Of course, there are no squids here, so I must've seen them on television or something, or maybe read about them in a pop science magazine that my parents used to get every month.

I can trace the drowning element of the nightmare back to specific events in my childhood. That beach was mostly safe for kids because it didn't get deeper very quickly, but there were a couple of sort of pits in the bottom, where it'd suddenly get deeper and then rise back up. They were not deep enough to be dangerous to even school kids, but I fell into them a couple of times when I was about 3-5 years old, and at that age I was small enough that it went, with one step, from well below my neck to about the level of my eyes. (I was probably not supposed to be walking so deep that it reached even to my chest, but you know, kids.)

I couldn't really swim at that age, and if I had remained calm I would've realised that just standing on my toes and taking a step backwards or sideways would probably bring my head above water again, but every time it happened (I think two or three times) I just panicked and started splashing desperately.

One time, my mom rushed in the water to pick me up. Another time, an older boy from the neighbourhood saved me, after taking his shirt and shoes off first. (My mom had been fully clothed when she saved me - so obviously, she was more scared about the situation than the boy had been.) Of course, I was never allowed in the water without adult supervision, and usually there'd be more than one family from the neighbourhood on the beach at a time, so there was no real danger. I've always liked swimming, so I wasn't really traumatised by these events; but clearly, they did manifest in at least one nightmare.

edited 18th Jan '18 11:21:15 AM by BestOf

Yeah, I often have dreams where I'm either an uninvolved observer like I'm watching a movie, or I'm allegedly a major character but I'm not really making any choices. And I often repeat events because I want them to happen differently, but they usually don't. Sometimes events just repeat for no reason.

A reoccurring dream for me in stressful times is discovering that one of my teeth have become loose, and panicking over it. Similar to the losing your teeth dream, but not quite. That or dreaming that I'm late for some interview or appointment. The rest of the time my dreams are just random or I can't remember them after waking up, though I know that I dreamed of something.

One time I had a dream where my tongue fell out and I just folded it up and put it in my pocket because I didn't want to alarm anyone.

While I never had (or at least I don't remember) any bad experience about water, I occasionally have dreams about jumping in the water, swimming upwards, but never reaching the surface.

Anyway, new comic.

The lady is hilariously weird. XD

Well, she's telling the exact truth, albeit with some metaphorical liberties.

Dreams of swimming underwater probably have to do with sleep paralysis, because it can make you feel floaty.

Scientific Paper Graph Quality.

Hmm, I'm sensing a bit of pot-kettle humor there. Just a wee tad.

As in, this graph really only has four generic data points, but has a nice flowing curved line through them to suggest a continuous data set between them?

Admittedly, this is not just a Powerpoint thing, but it certainly has made it easier to do. Especially when it is the DEFAULT setting for inserting graphs.

Also, this:

edited 22nd Jan '18 8:42:01 AM by Redmess

But people don't use powerpoint to make graphs directly, do they? Normally you insert graphs from Excel into powerpoint.

As an office product, you certainly could if you wanted to. I've made graphs in Word when I was in high school.

Before program suites with shared functionality were the norm, it was easier for the average user to make an ad-hoc graph or image in Powerpoint than it was to import them.

OLE was a thing even back in the '90s.