do we live a shadow life in dreams?

The maps seem to change as I read them, and bear no relation to any real place, yet they seem completely familiar as I look at them in my dream.

quite often in these dreams if i'm visiting a record shop it's rough trade, but it's the old rough trade shop in kensington park road and it's always 1976 and they've got demis roussos playing on the speakers.

but the more peculiar and disturbing series of dreams i have are those involving laura. these happen extremely often, and in them we seem to be leading an entirely normal life as though nothing had happened. this life progresses in logical parallel, night after night, even though i know there are things which happen in them that L would never have done IRL and there are sometimes clear references that, somehow, we split up (in august 2001) and have come together again. in those variations of the dream she is usually a lot more cynical about me, and more than somewhat disappointed in me. and yet at other times there are references which clearly indicate that this is all happening in a parallel past - an alternative universe 1989 or 1994. but any familiarity (routines etc.) is purely in the context of the dream, as opposed to what went on IRL. i am sure that this is all simplistically freudian. but many is the time when i wake up into a hostile and lonely world and feel that the world i was dreaming was immeasurably preferable to the one in which i have to "live."

this is slightly wandering and doesn't really answer the question raised, but it's the closest thing i've experienced to this specific thing.

but yes, repeat-dreaming a BETTER shadow life totally fits into this as well

It's a bit like the Welsh Dream.

(and the thing that feels like a continuity - ie common to other earlier dreams - is the "memory of strange mental episodes in my past", not the specifics of when these happened or how)

(ie i wd classif this as a TYPE of anxiety dream, recurring in different narrative garb, i guess)

I also have one where i'm tied to helicopter blades.

I dont re-dream a life inside that house though, sadly - its only appeared the once ;(

a) very confusing when it's about my current life and I wake up and realise that the past six hours didn't actually happen

and

b) very disturbing when it's about my earlier life and things I'd rather not experience again.

the first time i went there was with my parents and brother and a friend, we travelled there by boat and the harbour was this huge yellow cave with all other boats in it queueing up for the people to get off on the beach. since then i haven't been there by boat, usually by train, occasionally road, once or twice by foot - it's always the same train station, one where the underground and overground systems coincide, though you sometimes have to run to make the connection to the overground part that swoops up through and around the buildings (this part reminds me slightly of a town called sha tin in the new territories in hk, but it definitely isn't sha tin). sometimes i have missed the train, but there's always another one eventually. there is a green line and a red line but they aren't the district and central lines. the trains themselves have green and red on too.

once me and the russian and the belgian were looking for a place to live there, we found a flat that only had one room but it was a massive room with 2 of the walls replaced by floor-to-ceiling windows and it was right on the water, out the front was wooden decking and a ladder to get in the sea so we decided to take the flat. i went in the water while the other two were inside discussing rent and there were sharks. i was frightened but stayed calm and tried not to splash, but the sharks just circled me and escorted me back to the ladder like a sheepdog does with a stray sheep, then disappeared once i was out. usually none of my irl friends/family are there but occasionally some show up.

often i have done awful, wrong things in these dreams or awful, wrong things have happened to me and i am escaping/hiding - i've frequently kidnapped my own child (i have no child irl) and once had to run along the rocks in a storm below the train tracks on the way to the city to escape, once i was hiding in a toilet clutching this child to me and "they" were in the next cubicle. once i had killed someone but i knew "they" wouldn't catch me if i just jumped from bed to bed along this endless wide corridor in a hotel without touching the ground. my mum was in that one and i could not make her understand that i had killed a person, she wouldn't believe me and just tried to reassure me that it would be ok, but i knew nothing would ever be ok again.

the terror and the guilt in the dreams are immense and very very real, i always wake up very dislocated from these dreams and they stay with me for days. the land in my dreams seems more lawless than this one and there is more riding on things somehow, it is more desperate.

i like the idea that if i could remember dreaming in the dream if it would be this life i dreamed of and i would be thinking about this shadow life i lived in this city with a river and all these grotty indie dives i went to.

oh! the breakfast factory i dreamed of once is in the same dream-land too. in that one i could fly, i went too far out over the sea without realising it though and got scared when i turned round and could hardly see land, but i headed back and approached the city from the air this time and got breakfast from the breakfst factory.

maybe it means i want to break free and want a more lawless existence, dropped out from routine.

or maybe all these dreams reveal is that i have a secret desire to be keanu reeves.

I need more coffee. I've been so tired I've not been remembering my dreams.

like there is not simply a landscape that we revisit in certain dreams - not that that isn't interesting in itself - but a narrative thread also

Do I need to call an exorcist for my girlfriend?

Another recurring dream is being at the top of either a stairwell or a cliff or the mast of a ship (the latter being the scariest because not only is it very high up but it moves around as well).

One strange but common dream is being at a festival and getting lost and because it's a festival there are all sorts of weird and wonderful things going on. This ties in with another regular dream I have of crawling through a series of tunnels to get from room to room. I'll find a hidden passage in a building I'm familiar with, crawl through it and find myself in a really nice special room that only I know about. Once I dreamt I was at a festival and instead of tents, people lived in large cardboard houses made of these crawl tunnels.

Similarly, I've dreamt that I've been on coke or acid (drugs which I've never taken).

ok so i woke out of a dream about being a tired and harassed magazine editor -- something that of course also happened to me in real life for a while -- and realised as i thought about it that i had been dreaming about a run of magazines i had been editing that were bad and failing, and (now awake) that i staightaway associated them with an earlier run of magazines i had been editing that were bad and failing.

in other words that both runs existed only in dreams, and i think there have been more. that this aspect of me has been regular but a mostly forgotten shadow life: the magazines i actually edited (which were ok -- doubtless many thought otherwise but the mag is after all still going 30 years later) plus repeated anxiety-ridden dreamruns of mags with were a comically flailing and humilating disaster, which nag at me subconsciously

(this is probably a thread where you have to go back to the OP for context) (or you can just ignore it lol)

eighteen years jesus

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPQgfaB3S1c

I have a dream oxford very much like in the original post, a particular part of the city that bears a vague resemblance to the original but is fairly consistent across dreams (including a large covered tunnel going across a major road from a shopping centre, which echoes a long gone much smaller one irl. I haven't been to this dreamscape in quite some time though.

I don't have such a specific london, but I do have a nightmare london underground which is horrible and mazelike and full of insane escalator routes and passages that shrink down to an impossibly small size through which I must travel.

I have the same London Underground swirling around my unconscious mind! Many of these pedestrian tunnels have piles of rubble in them. Often there will be people who glare at me as I pass.

Cormac knows what's up:
https://nautil.us/the-kekul-problem-236574/

My theory is that your older memories are an interconnected long term database with tags - short, loose categories that group and connect these memories.

Dreaming is your brain taking recent memories out of the temporary storage where they start out and filing them away with the older memories in the long term database. More importantly, dreams are your brain tagging the more recent memories so that they can be connected and anchored to the older memories in the database.

The dreams don't track with the real memory (places look different, etc.) because the dream isn't just the new memory, it's the tagging and amalgamation with older memories.

I find familiarity in dreams comes from a "double dream" (my term) - a dream that immediately repeats a second time, often with a slightly different conclusion. This is the brain running the new memory through the database again to make sure the connections are secure. It feels familiar because your brain just processed the same memory.

i don't remember my dreams well, but i have a lot of them

i take prazosin every night to deal with the ptsd nightmares. actually, idk if "ptsd" is the right word, since it implies the trauma is past. like, is there a word for mid-trauma stress disorder? there should be.

anyway. i still have nightmares sometimes. for me dreams are kind of a way of subconsciously processing the stuff going on in my daily life. the nightmares kind of make sense. sometimes i wake up from a nightmare in the middle of the night and i gotta use my dbt skills to kind of process whatever was going on in the nightmare, to recognize that i'm ok and that whatever it is i'm having a nightmare about is something i can radically accept.

when i'm not having nightmares, most of my dreams are quite ordinary. my life in dreams is often more ordinary than my waking life. it has a lot more in common with the life i used to live in the Before Time, but without the crushing gender dysphoria that was my constant companion during those times. it's kind of pleasant, nostalgia for the kind of life i never quite had. and then i wake up and everything seems quite strange and horrific. ever since 2016 i've had a hard time convincing myself that my waking life is real, that this isn't just some sort of wildly implausible prolonged dystopian fantasy. i can't quite make _sense_ of a lot of things. plus, traumas recur in my everyday life the way people have recurring nightmares about certain things. that doesn't help.

complicating it further is that sometimes i will have a dream inside a dream, i'll wake up and be relieved that whatever i was dreaming was only a dream. and then i'll wake up again and be sad that _that_ dream was only a dream. like there's a sort of layer cake:

reality
dream state (pleasant)
dream state (nightmare)

i'd like it a lot if dream state (pleasant) turned out to be actually real and my life right now was a nightmare that would just go away. no offense to anybody else in this benighted shared reality.