Sociopath Community

My dream worlds tend to be a mix of Cthulhian themes and reverse lucidity.

When they aren't that (and sometimes when they are), they feel just as real as life fairly often, which has me feeling a bit troubled about my connection to reality sometimes. Sometimes I find myself stuck debriefing myself to transition back into reality after a particularly vivid dream. Some outright reinvent memories into ones of a different person's life, have creatures that can syphon memories, or is an elseworld outcome of if I'd done one thing far enough back in my life differently.

If I were dumb enough to fall prey to magical thinking, I'd assume that they were not mere dreams.

Forgive me my digressions, but it's a strange synchronicity that I encounter this thread after having a conversation with someone on the very subject.

I cannot entirely characterize my dreams into a general sense.  They vary a lot in theme, mood, lucidity, etc.  However, what I usually find fascinating either in the dream or after having come out of it, is its strange sense of autonomy.  With enough lucidity I experiment with sensory impressions, visual detail, sound, taste, etc., to sort of "test the simulation's fidelity."  It always feels absolutely real WHILE in the dream, but when leaving the dream it's "realness" slips away from previous confidence in it.  But not always.

It puzzles me that, if this is fantasy of some sort imagined from one's own mind, how is it that it doesn't always suffer from some morbid sort of familiarity?  Sometimes there is that sensation.  It's sort of a "knowing" that things would happen, as though aware of the narrative that's on-going, as though having a third-person perspective while still experiencing it in a first-person method.  I mean, one can kinda do that with physics in the waking world.  There are really no surprises to be had, once you can begin reading ahead in the story.

Even when this feeling of familiarity isn't as potent or noticeable, none of it really bears significance apart from any other mundane experience.  Everything just "happens" and so what?  However, the times where genuine surprise occurs or encountering some sort of autonomous event can be really weird, especially in reflecting later on the dream in the waking world.  Are there parts of the mind simply preventing their presence from being in one's active awareness?  Like many of the brain's automatic functions?  It can be vastly deep, rich, and almost have a life of its own, as though it really was a place somewhere that you travel to in your mind.  So, either the mind is vastly more deep than we even credit ourselves, or there is some unconscious pool of mindspace or dimension that one's consciousness slips into.  I'm much more willing to believe the former rather than the latter, but who knows?

It can feel weird sometimes finding yourself a stranger to your own mind.

it's not dead it's never dead i have to clear my mind