For circa 60 years, I believed that there were two types of dreams. Dreams in which the dreamer sees activities the way he/she sees them when awake. The dream self sees activities in a 170 to 175 degree angle in from of him & has some awareness of activities via peripheral vision in the remaining 5-10 degrees. This is the most common type of dream for me. My child hood nightmares were from this vantage point. Dreams in which the dreamer sees himself from a vantage point not available while awake. For me this second vantage point is circa three feet higher than my head & is behind me about 30-40 degrees away from directly behind me. In this type of dream I almost always watch myself doing something embarrassing. For example: Walking naked on a High School or college campus. The I who observes is embarrassed; The I who is being observed does not seem embarrassed & none of the people in the dream seem to notice or care about my being naked. Recently, I have had dreams which were analogous to watching a 3D movie. In these dreams, I am spectator & do no see myself in the dream movie. Do other Posters have all three types?
No. My most common dream format is rushing through a building, usually with another person who knows where we are and where we're going, although I never find out why this is happening. We're usually walking, sometimes running, occasionally on motorcycles.
I used to record my dreams, over more than a year, to learn about collective human symbolism. For the most part, I would be in dreamscapes, looking around and observing the data, in the third person, so I could remember things when I awoke. Sometimes in dreams, things would be sensed, but not seen, creating a feeling type sensation, instead of the more common visual or audio input. This is more in the first person. As I did this more and more, I became more conscious in my dreams, and could often influence the direction and outcome. Why not make the dream, nice or interesting? The nature of the symbolism started personal, with the dream connected to things that could be traced to my conscious memory. Later, the dreams symbols became more collective generating symbols that were more mythologically unique; archetypes. Cause and effect would sometimes backwards, dreaming about unique things a day before I would read about them. Later, my research into dream dynamics, would occur while I was awake. This was like day dreaming, but I would still be jumping around like in dreams; I was even more conscious within dreams. This is where it was easier to do experiments, using the dreams to learn how the firmware worked under the hood of the dream engine. This much permeability to the unconscious mind, made the collective unconscious become far more active, since it had a captive audience.
What about the dreams of hypno-gods dazing you and sub conscious dream paralysis with a scary dude running at you?
