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.

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

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

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

For those who don’t dream much, I’m curious of your surrounding sleep habits and how much you’ve looked into changing your habits. This could be a big indicator you’re not getting into REM sleep, which is not good.

Do any of you drink alcohol, take other prescribed substances (or not prescribed)?

Have you tried eating foods rich in magnesium or taking magnesium supplements?

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.

To answer out of order, I don’t analyze them. I don’t think there’s really any reason to.
Sometimes it can be a window to the subconscious, but it’s mostly just random things.

It’s really hard to answer what it’s like. I dream very frequently and quite often vividly. What it’s like varies so much night by night. Lately, for maybe the past three weeks, I’ve been having one nightmare after the next after the next. For me, I tend to enjoy the scarier dreams that deal with “monster movie” plots. Zombies, clowns, ghosts, etc. Those are fun for me because they’re not real irl, so it’s easier to enjoy.

The problem I’m having right now is that these nightmares are too real and too targeted. “Nobody likes you” or bleeding out or being alone or getting cancer. Just all the horrible things my brain can do to make me wake up miserable, I guess.

When I’m stressed, I have a set of reoccurring themes that makes it easier to identify as a stress dream and therefore not be as effected by the events or emotions in the dream. Themes are: tsunamis, bears, brakes failing, or physical abuse.

One of the greatest problems I have after dreaming so vividly my whole life, is that I’m terrified that my brain will flip a switch when certain situations arise. For example, I’ve often dreamed about drowning. As in I’m in a pool or lake or ocean and for some reason am unable to get air. So I start panicking and doing anything I can. As I finally can’t take it anymore, I gasp for the air that isn’t there and… Huh. I can breathe water? It takes a bit, but inevitably the dream says look at you, you’ve always been able to breathe water, you just never tried.. So when it comes to the real world, I’m terrified that if there’s a situation where I need to hold my breath for a while underwater, my brain is going to just lean into the many lessons learned and tell me to just breathe and it’ll be fine, because I’ve always been able to breathe water, duh.

So. None of that probably answers your question. But it’s such an esoteric and personal and varied thing from person to person. Or from week to week within a single person.

If you do want to dream more, try to keep a little notebook on your nightstand and when you wake up with these dreams you rarely have, write them down. It clues your brain in to start remembering them more and then you will start to truly dream.

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I used to have vivid awesome dreams when I was a kid and some scary ones as well, as an adult I am in the same boat as OP, handful of dreams a year that I even register and I forget almost everything once I wake up. And the worst part is most of my dreams seem related to my daily worries, like even in my dreams I can’t escape my anxiety. I remember an amazing dream I had as a kid where I could fly, it felt so real, it was like entering into a futuristic simulation.

I have a personal hypothesis, born out of studies I read a long time ago and haven’t kept up with nor really bothered to research more (so take it with a grain of salt), that dreams are two things happening at once:

•Your brain organizing your memories of everything that happened that day, including every thought you had even if it doesn’t have a physical event attached to it.

•Your imagination adding as much of a cohesive story as it can to those often times unrelated memories.

I always picture it like still images that change rapidly one after the other, sort of like flipbooks, and then your “conscious” mind trying to keep up with it, finding no logic, and creating a storyline instead.

I’ve found myself lucid dreaming before, and despite being in control and knowing it’s a dream, I’m still asleep, so I end up making dumb choices or playing along with my dream.

The dreams I remember tend to be strangest/goofiest ones or the ones that had some emotional impact on me. However, when I analyze them while awake, I realize that there was a lot of extra “content” that I didn’t add or doesn’t fit into the dream. Like how somehow the place and the people I’m with change every “scene”.

Sometimes I wake up with a phrase resonating inside my head, with that feeling you get in your mouth when tou want to say something. And since I’m bilingual, I’ve had dreams with both languages happening at once. Hell, I’ve even had dreams where I’m speaking Japanese “fluently” (i.e. it feels fluent in the dream but I know it must be gibberish, since I don’t speak the language).

Sometimes they help me face subconscious anxieties, sometimes they give me solutions to problems I’m having IRL, but more often than not, it’s like I’m watching the randomest movie ever. And I do think they’re a “window or the subconscious” but not in the sense I think you’re asking. Since they’re memories and imagination, it is your subconscious that is choosing to focus on specific aspects or the storyline you create. So, analyzing them can help to see what’s going inside that blob of fat we call brain.

Tl;dr: they feel like when you’re fantasizing/daydreaming but a lot less cohesive, and can be helpful every now and then.

I don’t know how dreams happen to people with aphantasia, and I know my explanation would be wildly different for them, but that’s how I see dreams.

Recently I’ve dreamt of having a lucid dream, so dream me thought he had control of the dream, but I don’t think I did. I remember trying to master flying, but it was difficult, and I was afraid of heights.

I’m similar to you, but probably not as bad. I don’t often remember my dreams, or I might wake up with a fragment of a memory in my head: “Oh no! I need to let someone know the cats are playing cards in the oven!” But any of the context is lost. Also, if I don’t immediately focus on that fragment and try to remember more about it, it will disappear from my mind completely.

Sometimes, I’ll get a big chunk of the story, or multiple fragments that I can chain together to figure out the overall plot of the dream, but that’s only a few times a year, if that.

I wish I remembered more of them more frequently. I find them very entertaining.

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.