Pleasant dreams and nightmares
 

"One definition of "nightmare" is a dream which causes one to wake up in the middle of the sleep cycle and experience a negative emotion, such as fear."

So basically... no matter what the nightmare is about (dying,being chased by a psycho etc.), it always causes one to wake up feeling really bad. We have all had nightmares, so you know what I mean, right?
When you have pleasant dreams they make you feel all nice and happy and normally you sleep well.

Why am I talking about this?? Because I had a conversation with a friend and he told me something weird, at first I tought he was lying, but he seems to be telling the truth.

He said there's something weird about his dreams and nightmares, for him it is the opposite...

When he has a pleasant dream it causes him to wake up the same way one would wake up from a nightmare. For example; He wins the lottery and he's about to recieve the money and then he suddenly wakes up feeling the same way as if he had a nightmare.

When he has a nightmare he does not wake up, he keeps sleeping peacefully.
For example; A guy with an axe is chasing him... his reaction in the dream is almost always something like "Oh! A psycho killer... should i run or wait?"
then the killer is about to chop his head off with the axe and his reaction is "oh.. am i gonna die? whatever..."
He even said that he doesn't wake up when he dies... he turns into a ghost or something.

This is really fucking weird... why the hell does that happen? It's really confusing, I tought you were supposed to always wake up from nightmares, specially if you die in the nightmare.

Is this normal? Is he lying??
Or is he turning into a vampire or something???

EDIT: Let's talk about weird dreams !

I've died in dreams before without having woken up. However only if you get killed in some mundane way, such as an explosion. If you're in one of those dreams where you're being chased and whatever's chasing you catches you, you tend to wake up. I can only remember two dreams I've woken up from recently: one was where my teeth were all falling out for no reason, tho other was about a mutated baby (And was more WTF-worthy than scary). But yes, quite often things that should be scary aren't, and stupid things scare the shit out of you.

In a lot of dreams I'm flying around to escape from some type of danger that everybody else can't get away from, or doesn't notice. I also find that I can always fly in dreams. Not being able to fly used to be a big thing that made them scary, and if I was able to get into the air I'd still be low to the ground, and 'bouncing' rather than really flying (which I've read is how people normally dream about flying), low enough for -whatever- was chasing me to grab my ankles. However, I no longer find this happens. :shifty: I can also fly through walls if I remember I'm just dreaming.

Dreams are weird.

I can only recall one or two nightmares I've had, in the traditional sense. More often I have dreams that are disturbing but don't involve the kind of immediate danger that would jolt me awake. For example, when I was a kid I remember dreaming once that my family and I fell into some kind of opening in a giant's hand and ended up swimming in this seemingly bottomless pool of blood... it played a role in the kind of sleep problems I've always had because it was shit like that made me not want to fall asleep again.

As far as what I feel after I wake up, as soon as I realize I was dreaming, it sort of depends on the content of the dream vs. the state of my actual life. So like, if it's that stupid fucking dream where it's late in the semester and I suddenly remember I'm enrolled in a class I haven't been attending, it's like, "Oh yeah, I'm not taking classes anymore, ha ha ha suckers," but if it's an awesome flying dream and I wake up and I have no real career prospects despite years of schooling... well, it's a bit disappointing.

I actually wrote up a description of what I dreamt this night and wanted to open a thread about weird dreams. So here it is.
But first, on actual topic, I don't think you need to be worried about you're friend. Even if he turns into a vampire or whatever. You shouldn't overanalyze dreams. Especially not the following dream which consists of me watching a movie.

Anyway, I had a dream... (or nightmare? Y'know the awakening wasn't very pleasant)
In that dream, I bought a set of Southpark DVDs. Probably some season box. And when I opened the first DVD case it turned out it was a really fancy case. Seriously, it was like a maze. I pulled here and I saw a still reproduction of a scene from some western, and if I pushed this I could see some fighter ship from Star Wars. What's even weirder is that I didn't even find a Southpark DVD in the case. But multiple others. I only remember Terminator 2, an untitled one with the special price of 0.00 and the notion that if it costs 0.00 [insert currency here] then why the bank details are printed below the price (they were). The DVD I watched was another one. It was A Ben Stiller and that blonde guy movie. Only they replaced Ben Stiller with Will Smith. The premise was that they recruited the Will Smith Character to do some secret agent job, presumably because they found him walking over a street or something. And yes, he was recruited by that Owen Wilson guy (I checked to find out his name). So those two were the main characters. It became pretty clear that there would be some love comedy involved because a girl character appeared. Suddenly they were doing some work at a club. To observe some bad mob boss, I think. Naturally Will Smith was all serious about the job, y'know the guy they recruited from the streets. Owen Wilson however was all into hitting on girls and stuff. Then people began to shoot each other. Amidst all that shooting people were still dancing, and Owen who was now laying on the ground after dodging one or more bullet/s in bullet time, saw the girl character I mentioned earlier. Not that she was in danger, she had sex on the dancefloor. Yeah what. It was still in Hollywood fashion, meaning you couldn't see any of the real action, but that's not what you'd expect in a movie Starring Owen Wilson and Ben Stiller Will Smith. Anyway, Owen got really mad that his love interest had sex with some guy on the dancefloor. I can understand that. It's not like I found any girl I was ever into having sex with some guy on the dancefloor in a club, but that really sucks, Owen. Suddenly they cut to some hotel room where Will and Owen were talking. I just as suddenly noticed a fancy cigarette lighter in the DVD case, but that's not important now, but it will come to play soon. Anyway, they were talking about something, possibly related to drugs when they went down to some lobby type room on the third or fourth floor of the hotel. Shooting thugs of the bad guys suddenly appeared. Again. For some reason Will was down at the pool and Owen was up in the lobby type room and observed what was happening around the pool. Will was under heavy gunfire. This is when I thought it would be a good Idea to help them. I now stood next to Owen and said to Will "Take this cigarette lighter, I want it back though". I threw it and it fell into the pool. "Okay, Will, this is not too bad, just get that lighter out of the pool, I don't need it to light my cigarettes, I don't smoke, but it looks really nice, so I want it back." Without hesitating for even a moment Will jumped into the pool and collected the lighter. Then they were on the top of a train who was flying in mid-air. Fighting back some more thugs, but this time with martial arts. When the thugs were gone they argued over how to stop the train. After several failed attempts they started arguing again. I saw a building in the background coming closer and closer. Will and Owen yelled at each other. Then, a sudden stop. Will and Owen were now falling to the ground, blaming each other to be responsible for this fucking shit. Then, it was 5:10, my alarm clock rung. And I thought "FUCK, Will still got my lighter."

As an excuse for this mess I present cute kittens to you.http://img97.imageshack.us/img97/737...tyoverload.jpg

EDIT: I'll now proceed to taking a shower.

I generally have some messed-up dreams. Some of them are messed in a cool way, some in a not-so-cool way. Just had one last night that I wrote notes on because it'll make for a good story, which was itself a segue from a fairly normal one involving me, my aunt, my brother, and my cousins watching a movie and being really impressed that the creators managed to find a chord that you could feel in your entire body. It was actually a really neat sensation.

It's really rare that I actually wake up because of a dream. The last one I can remember waking up to was one where my grandma was dead and her ghost had this really empty expression, like there was nothing there, and she was haunting my room and I KNEW she was haunting my room and had to throw open the door and jump on her to catch her, only it knocked her through the wall and outside where she started walking away.

My dreams dont have plots. They're just me, flying around in a dark empty world with twisted geometry, searching for something without knowing what. :(

I have action movie dreams. Like seriously, my dreams are like summer blockbusters. I once had one where my city was invaded by Tyranid, and I had to go fight a Hive Tyrant with a sword. Another time, I had to have a pitched kung fu battle with a gang where the leader had a functional gun sticking out of his forehead.

My nightmares... tend to be deeply disturbing.

I had a nightmare last night where I was in a house with a girl I had a crush on in high school. I went upstairs to get something, and when I went back down the place had gone Silent Hill on me, and I had to fight my way through like 30 floors of zombie-infested dungeon to get to her. 'cept I woke up partway through and couldn't make myself roll over for fear that a zombie was waiting there.

Hah that's how my dreams seem to be. (Although lately it seems they've been fueled by my Metal Gear obsession...)

The weirdest dream I've ever had was one where I was dreaming I was dreaming. I was in a really bad situation, and in my mind I knew that all I had to do was wake up. So I "woke up" but found I was still in that bad situation, which was freaky as hell because I thought it was real. Finally I woke up for real and it took me some time to get my bearing and figure out that I was safe in my bed.

When I was in middle school, I would regularly have dreams about my best friend dying. Some of them were so realistic that I would wake up crying and want to call my friend to make sure she was okay. :sweatdrop

Guys, I am gonna tell you about underwater dreams i used to have;
I used to have these dreams almost on a daily basis..like 8 years ago.
I was swimming underwater and it seemed like a lived there .
I never left the water, I never saw the surface but for some reason i knew the sky was gray and there were electric storms all the time.
From time to time I found ruins of sunken cities, the weird thing about the ruins is that they didn't look like the ruins of an ancient civilitation.
They looked like modern day structures, there were skyscrapers, old factories and sometimes i would find children playgrounds.
It gave me the feeling that it was the future and I was the last human around (although..if I lived underwater I was not human anymore, right?)
Sometimes I saw a light in the distance, no idea what it was but i always followed it and it never lead anywhere important,
but one day the light led me to one of the playgrounds, there I found a girl.
She was silent all the time and she wanted me to follow her around.
I kept asking her stuff but she never spoke, suddenly she stared at me and made me feel like we had met before in a previous life or something.(yeah, dreams are weird) For a moment it seemed like she wanted to tell me something important but she just kept quiet and gave me a kiss. Then she dissappeared.

After that dream I never had the underwater dreams again, but i saw that girl again in other dreams. She looked a bit different but i could always tell it was her.

Those dreams were so real..... and so fuggin' weird.....

@InsaneGenius:
For some weird reason stuff like that happen a lot in my dreams too...i mean, opening a box and finding that the contents are totally unrelated to what i was expecting to find inside.

@katiuska:
Yeah.. the "disturbing" dreams are usually worse than the "normal" nightmares

@BitVyper
I envy you! Mine are never that awesome, mine are just incredibly weird and random!

@The Argent Lord:
I had a zombie dream once..... (after playing Resident evil 2 for hours),
I was running away from zombies but they caught me and ate me.
I woke up and yelled "AWESOME!!!!" , for some weird reason i always considered that dream pretty cool!

@CelesJessa:
Metal gear dreams? Woah! Sweet!!! Wish I ould dream about Snake kicking bipedal tank ass!!

@bluestarultor:
Ghost realted dreams are always weird and almost never make sense...
Your dream must have been really creepy.

@Zanaril:
My underwater dreams were similar to your "flying around" dreams.