Mutterings and Musings

Perchance to Dream

PROMPT: In your entry today, write about dreams. Do you dream often, or do you rarely remember your dreams? What is the strangest or most memorable dream you have ever had?

I've found that if you keep a dream diary you are far more likely to remember your dreams on a more regular basis and remember them in more detail. It becomes a self-perpetuating cycle: you remember your dream, so you write it down; you (appear) to dream because you write it down.

Myself and two friends kept dream journals when I was at university; we found that by keeping dream journals we all learnt to remember our dreams, and because we were all very good friends and found each others dreams utterly hilarious we ended up keeping a group journal. Within a few weeks all three of us had gone from 'I only dream occasionally' and 'I don't really remember my dreams' to vividly recalling dreams three or four nights a week.
It was diary-keeping with these two friends that I found out that a lot (most?) of people dream from their own point of view; i.e. I am me in my dream and you are you in your dream.I don't often do that. I frequently dream either from third person point of view (as though I'm watching television) or, if I'm dreaming in the first person, as someone. And that someone can just as easily be an animate object or animal as it could be human.

But probably* the weirdest dream I've ever had requires some context. It made it into the group dream-diary, so I would have been 20ish.
So; a 20ish, white British girl, overweight, introverted, studying a STEM subject somewhere around 2010. My dream?

I was Hulk Hogan. Yes, I was Hulk Hogan; wild flowing locks, 'tash and all**. On the run from the CIA, deep in the Vietcong jungle. [No, I didn't seek therapy after this, but perhaps I should have done.] I distinctly remember bullets whizzing past me and getting slapped in the face with lianas and having to monkey-bar across a river - yes, an actual monkey-bar in the middle of the jungle and I could cross those bars faster than the trained CIA operatives behind me could shoot their damn AK-47s or whatever they were.

And I don't think we were even watching anything too cranky on TV that night....

*and yes, only probably.
**I'm serious, this genuinely only ranks as probably my weirdest ever dream.