I have aphantasia so don’t really have full fledged scenic dreams with a narrative like some people have.

It’s more like I see my daughter crawling and falling into the plug socket so I need to go in after her, and then I’m suddenly in a field full of wasps.

I don’t ‘see’ much, it’s more like flashes of images and emotions; and I’ll often open my eyes and talk or shout but still be asleep mentally.

It’s fun until someone cuts your arm with a sword during medieval battle, you wake up but you can’t move and can’t feel your arm so you lay on the battlefield for a while.

If you want to have lucid dreams, set an alarm clock to two hours before you have to wake up and another one to when you have to wake up.

With this two-hour interval you should wake up right in the middle of the dream.

Once that works out, keep telling yourself that the next thing you’ll experience will be a dream when you fall asleep after the first alarm.

With a bit of practice you should be able to get to lucid dreams.

For what it’s like to dream: Imagine being in a simulation, and whenever you look somewhere or you think of something, your brain autofills whatever you focus on.

Say you are on a beach. So you think “How did I get here?” and while doing so, your brain generates a memory of you driving there with other people in the car.

“But who are these people?” And the brain fills in your wife and your son. “I didn’t know I had a wife and a son.” And the brain fills in memories of your first date, the wedding and the birth of your son. And so on.

For me, the biggest tell that I am in a dream is that electronics UIs don’t work. My brain isn’t fast enough to simulate e.g. a working smartphone interface. They are always screwed up and non-functional.

Is like a movie that is injected into your brain, but randomly generated by AI (aka: it make zero sense and random as fuck).

Then just as things get interesting, someone wake you up and flash the Men In Black memory eraser thing and you’re like: “What the fuck was that? I think I had a dream, but I forgor”

Somewhat weird and cringe but entertaining. I usually keep my phone next to bed, if I have some dream I’d like to remember I turn on audio recording and speak whatever comes to mind. Hopefully I get to remember that in the future.

You dream every night, everyone does. You just don’t remember the dreams on waking.

IDK about windows to the subconscious but if I have an interesting or recurring dream, sometimes I try to interpret it, and have gotten some things out of doing that.

Maybe there is some gadget that can detect when you are dreaming. You wouldn’t want to have it wake you automatically on a regular basis (disrupting sleep isn’t always avoidable, but it isn’t good). But you could try it once or twice and see if you remember the dream then.

Dreaming is also called REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, because people’s eyeballs jerk around during that sleep phase. Usually the jerking is pretty random. Once during a sleep study, a guy’s REM suddenly changed to very rhythmic, repeated side to side movements. That was weird enough that the researcher woke him and asked him what he had been dreaming about. The answer: playing ping pong. The eye movements had tracked the ball going back and forth.

Very often I’ll have a repeat dream, or a dream about a previous dream. Then I lose track of which was the original dream

I used to dream better when I was younger and even took control of a few them. Now I’m pretty much like you, it’s rare if I even remember one.

A couple were probably windows to my subconscious like the nightmares that involved me waking up sure that nukes were about to strike or the ones about tornadoes attacking me.

Just last night I had a dream where I was fighting a Russian invasion from my childhood home. Ran out of ammo for my assault rifle and ran to my old room to get the machine gun. Somehow got stuck talking about it with other people and never got back to shooting the invaders. Just weird shit like that.

Check out the Twin Peaks series. For me that’s the closest I’ve ever seen on screen

I have incredibly wild and vivid dreams, a handful of times a year.

My most recent one is one that has repeated a handful of times. I am in Portland for some reason and there is a restaurant with a large gravel lot.

I park and I walk up to the restaurant to order a hot dog and Colin Melloy from the Decemberists shows up. His hair is about shoulder length, he’s wearing cut off blue jean shorts and a plaid shirt. And he puts on an open air concert out in the gravel lot for free for everyone who just happens to be stopping by this particular hot dog stand.

He played songs from the Crane Wife album, which was pretty cool.

I’ve had other dreams where I’ve led choirs of priests and nuns on a musical rampage throughout New York City, singing a song I’ve never heard before and have not heard since as like this massive musical number.

I’ve had dreams where I Fight evil villains on spaceships with laser swords only to find out that the villain was my cousin.

I’ve had dreams where it’s the 80s and I am a white guy that wears white suits and sunglasses and I’m rich and I drive a red sports car that’s a convertible and I have a lot of money and that dream. I told myself, oh yeah, I’ve got to make that big purchase in the morning. I better put $50,000 under my bed so it’ll be there when I wake up. And then I woke up in the real world and immediately looked under my bed to realize that it was a dream and I’ve never been more upset to wake up in my life.

I’ve had dreams where I’m in a dark room being assaulted by demons, being told all the horrible things that there are about me, and I’m trapped to a chair, and like I’m praying to get out of this situation, and the demon laughs at me, and he flicks his finger, and while I’m stuck to the chair, it lifts up onto one leg and starts spinning around and around faster and faster and faster, trying to get my hands to unclass from prayer as the demon laughs in the darkness.

And I’ve had a recurring dream throughout most of my life, well two recurring dreams throughout most of my life, one of which is where I’m standing in an infinitely large black room on a small little pedestal, and there is a glowing, blue, thin strand of string that serves as a tightrope between here and the end of infinity, and i become aware that I am supposed to walk this tightrope.

Somewhere out beyond the darkness are a tribunal of judges who are watching me and watching my performance, as I take one step onto the string, and then I take the second step, and I realize I have to balance, and I immediately fall, and as I’m falling and I’m plummeting through infinite darkness, I hit the ground, and in real life I wake up, and my entire body convulses and bounces on the bed.

The other one that I have is there is a town, and the town has rolling green fields and sunflowers and wooden fences and white houses and paved roads intersecting through it that wind back and forth and I am driving in an old beat up blue Ford truck with the wooden slats on the truck bed. And, as I drive through the town people stop and wave at me and I wave at them because I am making a delivery and they know me and I know them and I get to drive back and forth in this beautiful, serene, peaceful, perfect town full of happiness.

I don’t dream much either, according to sleep studies. Do you have a sleep disorder and/or smoke weed?

There are many kinds of dreams, each with a different sensation.

• There’s vivid nightmares which leave you in a state of panic, often unable to go back to sleep due to a hyper focus on every little sound and touch.
• There’s action dreams which give you an adrenaline rush and a state of random anger.
• There’s emotional dreams which leave you as an empty shell, crying or full of longing for something out of reach.
• There’s horny dreams which leave a puddle in your bed.
• And there’s also happy dreams which fill you up with joy and leave you refreshed and full of love for life.

Of course there’s also the forgotten dreams which can be anything, but don’t really matter to you because you can’t remember having them. But they often leave behind the feeling you’re supposed to be doing something, which can drive you crazy during the day.

It’s like getting absorbed into a memory, but the memory gets all jumbled and weird (but you don’t notice).

I had a dream not too long ago (week maybe) where I didn’t dream about an event or a past, but I dreamt about a project I was working on and I invented something for myself that I can actually build right now if I wanted, but it is meant for me a decade or two in the future.

I’m a wood carver and I’m currently carving a gift for my brother in law. The dream was me fixing a lot of the things I had issue with in the project, and a future idea about my parents that I’ll be writing down and brainstorming until the times comes that I’ll probably want to build it.