A while back, I watched a Korean drama called Twinkling Watermelon, which is about a high schooler who goes back in time and meets his dad when he was also in high school. After finishing it, I dreamed that I met my dad when he was around my age, but it turned into a sex dream. It wasn’t necessarily the most absurd, grotesque, or unhinged dream I’ve ever had, but it was definitely the wildest in my opinion because of the implications.
I used to take a weekly anti-malarial drug known for giving intense dreams on the first two nights after you’ve taken it. They would get WILD while feeling cinematic and super real. It was like going through a whole day of events. And someone always died. Always. Not sure if it still is, but it was listed as one of the known side effects of the drug. I think now it’s just “intense dreams.”
My most favorite one I’ve written about before online and so I’d be doxing myself to get into details about which cartoon characters were with me, but the short version is like a level from a video game where I defeated a mini-boss and got a lamp with 3 wishes, and used my wish to go on a trans-dimensional adventure to go kill the main boss. Patrick Swayze was killed.
A full African safari while driving around in an open-top blue Cadillac. Random person was killed, and it was abrupt - mid-conversation with a friend I turned to see someone get whacked in space between some trees off to my right. Then on with the show. Great day, great weather. Stopped for lunch at one point and everything, I had some grilled meats and an orange Fanta.
Worst one was running through the mall that I went to when I was a kid (my one and only “mall world dream”) and I was shopping like normal. Checking out stores, showing them to my spouse since some hadn’t changed since I was a kid. Very much a walk down memory lane dream. Then the ceiling tiles started falling, but not the panels - they were all the bottoms of stone columns smashing down. So it was like some Indiana Jones smashing ceiling thing. Ran from one of the mall to the other, eventually got cornered in a jewelry store where I got smashed and watched the column fall on my face like it was IRL. Woke up literally out of breath and covered in sweat.
Not the anti-malarial, but I had a friend give me some melatonin once to help sleep, and I didn’t realize at the time you took it right before you go to bed. So being an idiot, I took it right then and passed out on his couch for an hour or so. I played a whole game of hockey. I don’t play hockey, or even watch it, and it wasn’t on the TV. I think I was playing for the Pittsburgh Penguins and we were playing the Rangers. All 3 periods. I felt the ice below me, cool air on my face, the tension of the helmet fitting poorly on me. We won 3-2, but I really wasn’t keeping score. Stadium was empty, though, which seemed odd.
Ok, so that is wild.
I always wonder what would happen if someone like me with already intense dreams would take something like that. Cause people be dying in my dreams all the time. But I do really like the cinematic dreams though. Extra points if you fall to your death and you wake up just as you smack into your own mattress and have to question if it really was just all a dream…
I have taken melatonin before but I swear that and nyquil doesnt doesnt give me sleep but gives me a coma.
Well, it doesn’t work like that universally, so you might just end up not sleeping again for months. Happened to a biologist and a nurse I knew (years apart, it’s a rare side effect). It absolutely wrecked them both for about a year, though. I ended up with panic attacks after about 10 months, so I had to switch off of it. Other people had hallucinations, got paranoid, etc. Apparently 4 guys at Ft. Bragg were on it and got themselves spun up into thinking their wives were going to kill them that they killed them first. Rare but very bad side effects are possible.
It’s worth looking at foods that affect dreams and seeing if anything hits you in a fun way. Mugwort tea (mugwort, chamomile, lavender, hops) can do some stuff. And you might give lucid dreaming a try to see if you can get that going consistently. I’ve had 2 lucid dreams and they were tons of fun, but I can’t trigger it consistently.