I've been planning on responding to this thread again for days now, [@The Harbinger of Ferocity], pretty much the moment you replied to me, but things have (as I'm mentioning in the couple of threads I'm dealing with now from my backlog) been getting worse on my end lately and it's prevented me from having the time to do so. I was going to read over what everyone has said and give my insight, but I'll need to limit my responses for the time being as well as their detail.

I actually relate to the people who don't recall a lot of their dreams, though - regardless of what little sleep I sometimes get - I still believe that I always have some sort of dream. A lot of people claim they don't actually dream, but I feel they simply don't remember them -- it's actually not uncommon for a person to forget their dreams the moment they're coherent, to the best of my knowledge. I've already mentioned that I have this problem, though it seems far more common when my dreams are useful to my main story project -- it's almost as if something in my mind is actively trying to prevent me from being able to use the revelations I obtain from my dreams, though I can't for the life of me tell you why.

The dreams that actually end up remembering as usually nightmares or ones with more bothersome memories from my past, though admittedly I actually don't remember many dreams at all these days. When I was younger, I actually had a lot of really screwed up dreams that were vivid enough - and stuck in my memory enough - that I actually know what it feels like to go through certain things I've never experienced in full depth in reality, so I actually have a lot of nightmares that've invoked trauma within me on a similar level to what would happen if those experiences had been [i]real[/i]. I've actually taken a few elements of these experiences and converted them into my project in various ways.

This is one of the tamer examples, but I've had a recurrent (to the best of my knowledge) dream where everyone around me - including the people I knew - all had glowing red eyes and were trying to kill me. I'd run from place to place, defending myself along the way, until I'd eventually get to my dad's place (he was the closest person in my life, but was dead by the time I started having this dream), and then he'd actually be alive still but would turn out to [i]also[/i] have those red eyes. This is usually when the dream would wake me up. Certain elements of that dream have been used as inspiration for certain aesthetics or concepts in my project since then, though admittedly I haven't had this dream in several years now.

I'm noticing a lot of people mention lucid dreams here, but I honestly don't have enough recollection of my dreams to tell you whether or not I always have total control over them. I can pretty much guarantee that my dreams feel like reality though, to the point that it's one of several reasons why I question the reality around me in the 'real' world. Sometimes my mind will question things that seem strange (such as my dad being alive, to go with the previous example) and sometimes my mind won't. I don't have enough memories of my dreams to tell you which is more common, but rather just that I know my dreams always feel real. I also find that when I'm in the right mind state I have an exceptional amount of 'mind over matter' control in my dreams. A very recurrent dream from my childhood involved me standing at our beach shore (we lived on the outskirts of what could be considered a small beach), and I'd basically walk into the water, tell myself I can fly, and I'd be able to levitate and float across the entire riverbed.

[quote=@Vor]
PS. Do you guys dream in black & white or colour? I always dream in colour, but I have friends and relatives who keep telling me that they dream in greyscale. I've read interesting theories on the subject, from reasonable to totally outlandish ones. Guess it's yet another mystery of the mind we haven't been able to solve yet.[/quote]
I dream in colour - at all times to the best of my recollection - but I'm actually wondering if people who have a long history watching old movies (which were in greyscale) might dream in greyscale due to it. It's not uncommon for dreams to be heavily influenced or based on whatever you're doing, watching, or thinking about prior to falling asleep, especially if those things were something you had a lot of time subjecting yourself to.