I Am Amused By the Workings of My Brain.

[abracanabra]

In my dreams, half the time I'm male, and half the time I'm female. One-quarter of the time, I'm much older than my real age, and half the time I'm younger. I find this interesting. Last night, I was an older man, kind of a retired-badass sort of character. Also, there was river surfing on 2x4s, which totally wouldn't work in the real world.

...

Some combination of my mule-headed stubbornness, devil's-advocate tendencies, and "I can write anything"-itis results in my brain clicking over into plot-generating mode as soon as somebody issues a challenge, or doubts that a story type can be done well, or mentions how rare a certain kind of story is. That's how I got a Highlander parody involving the evolution of mallows nesting in my story idea file. Can't somebody just pay me for my plots?

Comments

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I think I'm usually myself in dreams, but don't generally notice what gender or age that signifies. When I've looked into mirrors in dreams it's been to see some other face than the one I wear while waking, but not the same one twice.

[cloudscudding.livejournal.com]

Really? Huh, I have sort of--split--dreams a lot of the time, where I'm both the person in the dream but also watching everything all at once including myself, so that's how I know.

Somewhere I read that when people dream strangers, they use the faces of people they've seen, because the brain can't come up with new ones. I find this--dubious.

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

I often have those split dreams, too. One of the weirdest (and disproving a common superstition) is when I died in a dream, buried under a mudslide, but then shifted perspectives to another dream character.

I suppose people could be found in real life who looked like strangers in our dreams, but I don't think that would prove anything either way.

[cloudscudding.livejournal.com]

I'm amused that this is the second "don't fear dream death" response.

And yes, there are a limited (though large) number of variations on a standard theme when it comes to faces. Almost everybody has a nose.

[prof-vencire.livejournal.com]

I am... essentially never myself in my dreams. Ever. It's incredibly rare. Similarly, people I know are almost never in my dreams, rarely even inform the character designs in the dream.

I fondly recall my dreams of being a girl. I am pretty sure that sex as a girl doesn't feel like essentially an inverted penis, but as a 12 year old it was surprisingly enlightening so far as getting the intellectual understanding of girl-sex and the emotional understanding to match up.

I even MORE fondly recall my dreams where I'm post-gender or optional-gender. In one, I did leave my favorite penis at home on the night of a big date with a person who preferred being the female side of the plug-outlet equation. In another, I was attracted to the glowing metabolic lights and pheromone aesthetics of the shapeless thing that worked down in... what was essentially accounting, if accounting were equal parts math pattern recognition art and martial prowess. Yt was a damn sexy post-gender entity. And so was I, for very different reasons. I actually still feel slight affection when I think of yt. And I hate all the pronouns for post-gender. They just don't... sound right.

[prof-vencire.livejournal.com]

And a good friend of mine loaned me their penis for the date, so that was fine. Though their preferred penis-style and mine? Very different. There's was more spartan, very elegant, all white, shiny. Mine was a bit fancier and more complex. But you make do with what you have, I suppose. And it was awfully nice of them to lend it to me. So, no complaints.

[cloudscudding.livejournal.com]

Suddenly I feel that my dreams are far too mundane.

[mapache]

In the dreams that I remember, identity is often very fluid. I'll drift from one character to another without realizing it, or simple be a third-person viewpoint. Really odd were things like the command-line dreams I occasionally had when mudding too much back in the late 90s (and to a lesser extent, obviously CGI dreams after playing too many video games).

Oh, and you know how people say when falling in a dream, you should wake up before you hit the ground? Lies—it's totally awesome. After surviving orbital reentry, I hit the African savannah and left a mile-wide impact crater, then had to dust myself off and start running again as the machete-wielding Maoists from the Aztec pyramid space station caught up to me and came running over the nearby cliff…

[cloudscudding.livejournal.com]

Fantastic--one less thing to worry about! (Not that I *was* overly worried about dying in my sleep, mind you.)

[seabream.livejournal.com]

Highlander and the evolution of mallows? Your sleeping dreams, mundane perhaps, but not your waking ones. "pay me for my ideas" - funny enough that for all that one needs a good screenplay to get hired, so little (in terms of dialogue as written) of so many screenplays make it to their on-screen versions (with many exceptions being writer-director productions). Of course, that doesn't make the screenplay any less work. (p.s.: noting that andpuff has blogged her brief experience screenwriting (in between her day job as a _hmm_ normal(?) fiction writer [I'd say novelist, but she also does short stories, poetry etc... and 'screenwriter' still overlaps with 'fiction writer'. I wonder whether they're still authors.]) around April 2007)

So, out of curiosity, is "retired-badass" functionally the same as "retired, badass"?

Are you mostly you, broadly speaking, in the dreams when your age and/or gender aren't?

I'm another of those who tends not to be in the subset of dreams remembered on, or in process of waking. I'm not even in them in the sense of being a viewpoint character. Generally I dream in something like a directed, medium focus, third-person omniscient. Directed meaning that I know that I'm dreaming, and can choose what I'm attentive to, though not what is happening in the setting.

[cloudscudding.livejournal.com]

More "retired from being a badass."

I always feel like myself, though in dreams I often have memories or history that me-outside-of-dream does not.

I wish I could get back to directed dreaming. Mostly tha would entail a lot more recording of dreams.