A popular rumor says that we have thousands of dreams every night, but we only remember a minuscule fraction of them. I've always been interested in dreams and the connections that they have to our inner thoughts and feelings. I have also met multiple people who claim that their dreams have predicted real events in their lives and had similar experiences myself. I remember as a kid having sleepovers with a cousin the same age as me, and always asking her what she had dreamt about after we woke up. Curious about the types of dreams that people remember, I had 11 people tell me their most memorable dreams experiences to date.
*Note: some submissions have been altered for grammatical clarity and/or length.
"Some friends from high school and I are in our local museum overnight when the T-Rex comes to life, and it looks like it did when the dinosaurs were around. It starts chasing us and eventually we escape and we're back home. Then, the T-Rex shows up where I live and starts chasing me. I try getting on a school bus to escape but it destroys the bus before I can get on. After chasing me for a little while it corners me. It breathes fire on me and then I wake up."
"About a month ago I was having doubts about my relationship and I decided to take a nap to stop overthinking. My dream was about me being single and hooking up with someone I used to date. When I woke up from the dream, that same ex had texted me while I was asleep."
"I can't explain it, but when I have these vivid dreams, I seem to leave myself and my ego and just travel to other places - especially when they are reoccurring. I always feel a very at home and calm feeling which is hard to explain but it's almost like I'm traveling through time and understanding varied versions of reality. It's hard to explain but I feel like where I go in my dreams is significant and it's kinda scary sometimes."
"I had a recurring dream that my house was on fire and my mom chose to save her favorite quilt instead of me… maybe an example of my fear of not being good enough?"
"For two months I would have the same dream about being in an Amazing Race type of competition, but each night I got a little bit farther in the dream. On the very last night, I had that dream, I got all the way to the end of the competition and was super disappointed to learn I had been in a Walmart parking lot all along."
"I had a dream my mom ate my nephew."
*TRIGGER WARNING*
"I had a recurring nightmare almost every night for almost four weeks straight. It involved my best friend, and I dreamt that she would kill herself. It was never done the same way, or the same time of day, and how she did it was never the same. I was also in the dream, and it was almost as if I was trapped in a glass box. I would try to escape to stop her, but I could never get out of the box. I would yell, scream, cry, you name it. She heard me, and she acknowledged the stuff I was saying, but every single night, she killed herself, and there wasn't anything I could do. I think the meaning of the dream is that I can't save everyone."
*END TRIGGERING CONTENT*
"I recently dreamt about being in a home in LA with open walls looking at the beautiful ocean and sun. When I went to take a picture to share with a friend, the waves came in and destroyed my picture opportunity!"
"I tend to have the most vivid dreams when I eat citrus before bed."
"I once had a dream about attending this Battle of the Bands concert at school and had a fun time dancing. Two days later, my school announced that there would be a Battle of the Bands concert at our Global Issues Network conference, and when I went there everything was exactly the same - from the songs to the band members' faces to the decorations."
"I was a freshman living on campus and sharing a room with a good friend of mine. I had stayed up late doing homework, but she had gone to bed early. I had also been helping her with math homework earlier in that day. I was working on a paper in my bed when I happened to glance over and she was staring at me, wide-eyed. It scared the shit out of me obviously, because it was like 2 a.m., but I asked her what was wrong, and she was just muttering nonsense. She kept saying "the f equation! THE F EQUATION!" and I was like "Dude what are you talking about?" She then sat straight up, looked me dead in the face and said "you KNOW what I'm talking about," when I had no idea. One of the weirdest things I've ever witnessed."