I'm a night owl, but I never have nightmares. I sometimes have dreams that bother me the next day, but never nightmares. I Used to have them as a kid, but I think that was caused by my step mother.

The ones where I have to go back to high school or a job I was fired from just make me think in the dream "wtf am I doing here? I'm done with this place!"

I'm also a avid gamer and have had the dreams where I knew it was a dream, and was like "Cool! Time to fly!"

Mom turned and looked directly at me. I sat up straight and was
intensely awake because I knew it was real and not just a dream. She was actually there. I wish I could describe it better.

but in the last several decades there has been a consensus forming on how to understand them. Freud had a few things right and a lot of things wrong. Jung was a little more profound but his concepts only fit a portion of dreams.

When you get into individual dreams and try to understand where the images and characters came from, they are very idiosyncratic and often come from very recent events. While they often turn out to have a clear meaning, it usually doesn't come about by applying an external theory.

They're making a lot of progress on the biological angle, but like any other complex, emotional process, dreams are not likely to be reduced to a biological phenomenon. They're probably closer to literature or art.

in a while.

I am a night-owl...big time. I don't have nightmares often, but I do have them and they are usually quite violent. The worse ones are the ones where I wake up from one, into another, into another, into another. I have created "tells" to look for which let me know if I am still dreaming, and then work to wake myself (lucid dreaming). I am not an avid gamer, hell, not really a gamer, but I am quite good at lucid dreaming. I also don't always dream in English, either. I have had dreams with subtitles, in foreign languages, in sign language (and the dream had no sound, which freaked me out), and dreams with soundtracks.

And people insist I'm "weird" for it.

You know how the most common nightmare seems to be "perpetual falling"? Mine's like that... except I'm going up. Forever. Totally normal (so to speak) dream, then suddenly I'm airborne, flying over the landscape, and in total terror. Which is trally strange because in reality, I love flying. It seems for most people dreams about flying are exhilarating or liberating (which is why my nightmare makes me "weird&quot . I have that kind of dream too, though, only it's running. My feet are on the ground and the landscape is zooming past me, I'm leaping obstacles...

Still, I'll take perpetual floating nightmares over the fucking H.R. Giger / Hieronymus Bosch post-apocalyptic nightmares that led me to spend my teen years preventing deep sleep...

kind of like that movie Flying Dragon- Sleeping Tiger (or something like that - weird movie weird name) where they do martial arts in the treetops. I find them very invigorating and positive. The only problem is that they are so real, sometimes in waking moments I feel that I ought to be able to do that.

I when I was in h.s. I used to dream that I had forgotten where my locker was and I never had the right books - well, maybe that was not a dream. In college I use to dream that I suddenly realized that I hadn't been to class in like a month and I couldn't find it. That was very real and very disturbing. I sometimes have dreams like that still. I guess it is about loss of control. I prefer the flying dreams in which I am in control.

and many of the dreams I remember are really weird to say the least. Has a dream about sex his morning too before I woke. I won't go into that one. lol

...involve pretty mundane, everyday life kinds of things. I remember very few of the crazy dreams.