Today’s Question for the Crowd: Your Most Boring Dream
Posted on September 29, 2013 Posted by John Scalzi 125 Comments
So, last night, I had a dream that I took my car to Discount Tire Centers store to get new tires, and when I were there, in the bland, tan waiting room, I was filling out forms and deciding which tires I wanted on my car. It was, in my remembrance of such things, the single most boring dream I have ever had, and I actually woke up vaguely annoyed that I had wasted a night of dreaming on tires.
Which brings me to today’s question for all y’all: What is the single most boring dream you have ever had? Is it as boring — or even more boring, if such a thing is possible — as a dream of filling out forms at Discount Tire Centers? Let me know. I would hate to think it’s just me having boring dreams. Let me know I am not alone.
Usually my dreams are all thrilling scifi and horror but last night, I had this horrifyingly mundane dream about being instructed to and actually doing research in order to write a paper about conservationists’ efforts to rehabilitate diseased trees in Nevada. No idea where that came from. I can’t even… I’ve never even been to Nevada.
How do you remember a boring dream? Those tend to fade very, very quickly…
Once I dreamed that I were a Siemens M65 mobile phone and I tried to get connection with a computer, but the cable didn’t work. This was during the time when I was working in a call center, doing customer service and support for Siemens mobile phones, among other things. So, it was a dream about stuff I worked with every day and I even went through the correct procedure of connecting a mobile phone to a computer, in my dream.
Sometimes I dream about commenting on facebook.
in risk of raising ire for offtopic, where did the next/previous article links go to ?
Michael Carmody:
They’re there; the links are white. I’ll fix.
I’m a newspaper editor and I frequently dream of doing paperwork at the office. I am the embodiment of Kellogg’s “when you start dreaming of work, it’s time for a vacation” … except I DO take them occasionally and it doesn’t stop. LOL …
“Groundhog Day” was a brilliant Science Fiction/Fantasy film, but vastly repeating dreams are extremely boring (unless someone out there has semi-infinite multiple wet dreams). Dreams in which yu realize that you are an an infinite loop, however, make a phase change from boring to nightmare.
I have a question. Do you really fill out forms in a tire shop? I think THAT is a nightmare.
I’m with Robin H – if they’re boring, I tend not to remember them. I don’t remember most of my dreams, and the ones I remember are either horrifying, wonderful…or turn into mind-movies, complete with my conscious mind trying to fill in backstory as I wake up!
This probably means most of my dreams are so boring I can’t remember them….
I quite often have dreams in which I’m at work.
But it’s never the fun parts of work. It couldn’t be watching the train wrecks that are protecting order hearings or crazy defendants.
No, my dreams are generally sitting at my desk, prepping the court files by writing the next day’s date and the courtroom number at the bottom of several dozen court registers.
And yes, I wake up annoyed too.
I think I have either very boring or very terrifying dreams, because I never remember any of them. Does anyone else out there simply NOT dream (or not recall dreaming after waking up)?
If it’s any consolation, you probably only wasted a few seconds or at worst minutes on this- dreams are generally not “real time”.
@Andy – I generally don’t recall my dreams, but I gather that everyone dreams; typically 2 or 3 episodes per night. I think you’re more likely to remember dreams if your waking interrupts the dream- if you complete the dream phase and return to dreamless sleep before you wake, it will fade so much faster.
I think many of the dreams I remember start out boring and veer into the disturbing.
I remember the ones that are disturbing.
Hope that answers your question.
I dreamt of putting toghether powerpoint slides for work last night. At some point during the dream my brain rebelled against the boredom and started to put in adorable animations of birds and rabbits.
Wish I could do that in actual presentations as well…
I occasionally dream of waking up and going through an entire uninteresting day, complete with droning teachers (when I was in high school) or paperwork and the most boring bits of whatever my current job is (now that I’m a “grown up”), before arriving at late afternoon or evening to wake and discover the whole day was a dream.
Come to think of it, those might belong in the nightmare category.
I rarely remember dreams, but the ones that crop up into my consciousness are almost never boring. Odd? Yes. Sometimes ominous even. Scary doesn’t figure as much any more though. For example, one dream I had a few years back (or maybe more) I was up in an attic. It was very dark (felt like night) and there was a single light source. Lots of boxes and other things cluttered the space. I saw something slither among the various accoutrement thingies. It felt ominous but not necessarily scary. Scary seems to be a consequence of ones reaction to ones dream. I stopped running sometime in my mid-twenties.
I woke up one night and thought, “Gee, I should really get up and write that dream down so I don’t forget it.” And then I went back to sleep and dreamed I was writing it down. And of course, when I really got up, I’d forgotten it.
Similar kind of dream, I was doing paperwork or something. It was actually so boring that it woke me up. I’ve also had a few dreams where I was at work, doing a normal day of work. Seriously pissed me off to spend the night working in my brain before I went to go actually work.
Many years ago I used to work in a pizza joint and I would have recurring dreams of just standing at my station making pizza after pizza. I remember waking up quite angry because not only was it incredibly boring but I felt like I worked all day and then turned around and worked in my sleep.
I know I’ve had dull dreams before but I can’t remember any anymore. Thankfully, I’m pretty sure i’ve never had a dream involving audited financial statements or Excel spreadsheets (my day job) because that would be horrifically traumatizing.
I’m with Andy@10:48, I rarely remember dreams or even that I have been dreaming. Last month I was a little freaked out because there were 4 mornings I recalled dreams, which was about as many times as the previous decade or more.
I can’t recall any particularly boring dreams of my own, but our middle daughter once dreamed she had a hole in her nightgown. That was the entirety of the dream: “Oh, a hole.”
While we’re talking dreams, though, I would like to apologize for relentlessly trespassing in your walled compound (you had less land, but a lot more house in Spanish Colonial) in a very lengthy dream this morning. You were nice enough about the first time, but despite knowing I shouldn’t I kept coming back. Not like me at all, and I don’t think I’ve ever dreamed about someone famous before. Anyway, I felt bad about it.
Last night I dreamed about being stuck at the airport. It was pretty boring.
John Cowan wrote [September 29, 2013 at 11:22 am]
“I woke up one night and thought, “Gee, I should really get up and write that dream down so I don’t forget it.” And then I went back to sleep and dreamed I was writing it down. And of course, when I really got up, I’d forgotten it.”
Since I’ve used email before there was an internet, I started over 30 years ago, in mid dream, thinking that I’d emailed myself something important from that dream. Then I wake up, and realize that the imaginary email may well have had interesting content, but could not penetrate the states-of-consciousness firewall.
I’ve had dreams where I’m just doing everyday stuff. Frankly the most annoying thing about them is waking up and realizing I was dreaming so now I have to do whatever all over again.
If I’m going to waste rem sleep doing laundry, the laundry should be done when I wake up.
I think I probably forget most of my seriously boring dreams, but I often have disturbing dreams about mundane activities. Dreams about doing calculus homework were a frequent occurrence in high school, and usually left me feeling stressed when I woke up. Similarly, I had a terrible dream in university in which I had to chase of my professors to hand in a paper on time, but I kept just missing him – I woke up (panting and out of breath) as I was dashing toward the bus stop and he was getting on the bus.
I’ve dreamed very vividly at least since I was four (50 now). I would just LOVE to have a boring dream…I really would.
I recently dreamt that I was formatting a spreadsheet…
Nearly every year, after a day of doing taxes, I dream that I recheck them and don’t find anything wrong.
The other night I dreamt about writing an essay for English class. It was in such excruciating detail that it took pretty much all night, and I could remember the actual wording for a while after I woke up. It might have been useful if I hadn’t been done will college for 15 years…
I spent what seemed all night looking for a place to pee. When I woke up, I didn’t even have to go.
When I first started working as a librarian, I would dream at least once a week in great detail that I was cataloging books.
The other night I dreamt I was really tired and then fell asleep in my sleep.
My dreams are 99% utterly mundane and boring. Most recently, I think I dreamed that I went grocery shopping and bought a frozen chicken. This week, I emptied my entire freezer looking for that chicken. Now, I think I just dreamed it. When you can’t tell your dreams from (albeit trivial) reality, I’m not sure what happens next. And when it comes to actual work conversations, saying “huh, maybe I just dreamed that we discussed that” doesn’t cut it either.
I’m a librarian too but I also used to be an Illustrator so my most boring yet frustrating dreams involve looking for books or finding these wonderful books on Art on my library ‘s shelves and getting very excited about looking through them, only to wake up and realize the books don’t exist.
And yes, even at the ripe age of 40 plus, I still have dreams about High school tests that I didn’t study for or never even took the class for.
I have had many dreams that end up with me riding mass transit. Sometimes a train, sometimes a bus, sometimes a airport people-mover.
The frustrating thing is that these often start out really interesting, like the one where I was stranded in a North Korean tourist trap, or the one where my dad gave me a jet pack he’d ordered off of QVC.
I dreamed of doing calculus homework. I had a page of integrals to work out, which I did. In the dream, it took about 40 minutes.
I tend not to remember dreams, aside from a few truly psychedelic ones over the course of my life. And yet I do remember the part where I frequently wake up going “why am I dreaming about doing work? And if I have to dream about work, can’t it at least be something helpful, like figuring out how to word the tricky part of the rule, not the endless-signature-gathering and making tiny meaningless changes part of my job?”
Most boring nightmare ever… Dreaming you worked all night on your graduate term paper only to wake up and find out it was a dream and you still have nothing more accomplished on the paper despite being absolutely exhausted from dreaming you worked on it all night….
I’m also one of those people who rarely remembers dreams…unless they contain famous people generally, and those are few and far between…
Sometimes I dream that I’m lying in bed trying to sleep in. Just lying there. And then I wake up and realize I was actually asleep.
About 21 years ago I was laying down for a nap with my baby sister (I was about 17 at the time) on my mother’s bed in the middle of a summer’s day. I looked around the room, and out of the window and looked at the beautiful blue sky and the large tree located directly outside. I looked back down at my sister and went to sleep. When I woke up, I looked back out the window, only to realize that the window AC unit that was in that window completely blocked out any view of the outside. So, yeah, I realized then that I had actually dreamt all of that before. That was freaky, but also rather boring.
When I was in college, I’d had one of those marathon 42-hours-awake-at-a-time-because-I-was-bad-at-time-management-and-also-kind-of-an-idiot kind of sessions, which ended with me in class, listening to the lecture, trying desperately to stay awake.
I was informed later that I had slept through the class, and that the professor even told the students around me: “Poor guy. Let him sleep.”
So I dreamed that I was in class, trying desperately not to fall asleep. While I was in class, asleep. In fact, though, this amused me.
I started having dreams like that when I was in my thirties or early forties. I considered it the onset of middle age. They aren’t really that much more boring than the ones about showing up for an exam you haven’t studied for with the wrong amount of clothes on.
Cheer up, when you get older and start taking pills for arthritis, you’ll get vivid, colorful, scary dreams again.
I used to wash dishes in my sleep when was working as a dishwasher. I would wake up sitting upright in bed with my hands moving. Last night I dreamed that I had to review a movie version of Much Ado About Nothing starring Ashton Kutcher. The horror…
My most boring dream – and I’ve had it a few times – is of organizing my Tupperware. That’s it. No rhyme or reason to it. Just organizing Tupperware.
The worst of the boring dreams have always been dreaming about being at work, and not just working, but there’s NOTHING TO DO. It’s always a bunch of inane tasks that are simply busywork. Lately, the boring dreams have been very housewifely, since I’m not currently working, so an endless grocery trip seems to be a favorite of my subconscious, as is endlessly mopping floors. Not only am I bored, I’m a drudge. Fantastic.
I’ve had my fair share of dreams in which I got up and got ready to go to work (or school) only to wake up and find I was still in bed. There was one dream relevant to this topic, however, that’s stuck with me over the years. The dream wasn’t boring in itself but contained the theme of the universe’s tendency toward mundanity (or ordinariness, or boringness if you will). (The natural law governing this tendency is probably related to the one governing entropy.)
I have to mention that I had this dream early in 1996, not long after Bill Watterson retired his “Calvin and Hobbes” comic strip and a little more than a year after Gary Larson stopped drawing “The Far Side”. My job at the time required me to be there at 6 in the morning, and I therefore had to set an alarm clock for what was for me an agonizingly early hour.
Anyway, I dreamed I was reading the Sunday morning comics page and found that two MORE favorite strips had gone the way of the recently departed ones mentioned above. “Will you look at this!” I exclaimed in disgust, to no one in particular. “First ‘The Far Side’ and ‘Calvin and Hobbes’ are gone, and now ‘Doonesbury’ and ‘Zippy the Pinhead’!” I then took a deep breath and proclaimed, “It’s just hardly worth getting up in the morning any more!”
Of course it was at that point that my alarm clock went off.
[Deleted because, come on, Scorpius. This I know you love thumping on Obama, but this was a stretch. Stay on topic, please. — JS]
That was a warning from God, John. You should buy tires at Les Schwab.
My most boring dreams are of being asleep in bed. End paragraph.
I have a recurring dream where I am sent back to high school and must make it to classes. Almost all of the dream is just going through one specific stairwell. Over and over. Sometimes my brain decides to spice it up and adds in a sign that tells everyone in the dream to walk on one side of the stair case if they’re going up and the other if they’re going down.
I recently had a dream in which I was vaguely annoyed to discover that I was out of tea. That morning I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the PG tips box was full.
Would this have been worse if you’d been at Canadian Tire?
Question–Scalzi, you’ve mentioned in the past that you’re a lucid dreamer. Do you have also have very good dream recall as well? Because most of my dreams that aren’t nightmares fade within the first 15 minutes of waking up.
I often dream that I’m riding a train or driving a car, and then I sort of forget that I’m riding or driving but am instead running. Usually I then go do something more interesting, but sometimes I just keep going and going and going.
I dreamed last night that my older brother & I were at a baseball game. Just sitting there silently munching on hot dogs.
I once dreamt I ran out of deodorant.
Periodically I have what I think of as “the chili dream.” It’s a very boring dream in which I am making chili and stirring it and stirring it and…. you get the idea. Sometimes I am even aware that I’m dreaming the chili dream then I am annoyed and bored and unable to wake up while stirring, stirring. I used to think there must be some deep meaning because it is a frequent dream but now I think that some dreams are just boring and stupid.
I’d wish you interesting dreams but that sounds too much like a Chinese curse.
Once I dreamed that I was NOT out of toilet paper. Morning was a bit of a disappointment.
I, uh, actually find buying tires really exciting. It’s the single most effective way to make the car faster. Of course, I have the odd hobby of driving around cones in a parking lot: http://www.scca.com/solo/
I used to dream about taking calls at work. Like I’d have whole dreams that were just answering the phone and taking run-of-the-mill messages. I’d wake up angry that my brain had decided to put me through hours of work I wasn’t getting paid for.
I’m not a consistent lucid dreamer, but I’ve been pretty successful at establishing a ‘no dreaming about work’ rule. When I realize I’m dreaming about work, I will, in-dream, go “Nope, I’m not working in my sleep!” And then start wandering around Babylon 5 until another dream comes along.
(Yes, Babylon 5. Don’t judge me. I still miss Crusade like it’s Firefly. Every time I see Daniel Dae Kim or Gary Cole in something else, I get sad all over again).
In college, I would wake up from the most god-awful boring dreams of doing math problems. Yes, the were so boring, mundane, and repetitive I WOKE UP. I would fall asleep, and wake up again, because of the same dream. Insomnia due to boring dreams. I don’t really remember any of my dreams anymore.
I can’t remember ever having any boring dreams. I usually wake up from a dream and think “Really, brain? REALLY?!” Because most of my dreams make Dali’s work look ordinary and boring.
The few that haven’t been completely bizarre have been interesting. I used to have a recurring dream that I could float like a balloon. Not flying, just touching the ground lightly every few yards. After a while, in the dream I’d start telling myself “See, I really can do it, it’s not a dream!” Then I’d wake up. The last time I had that dream, the location was on the moon and I got very excited because I knew that the floating on earth was a dream but living on the moon was reality.
I think I’d rather have interesting but disappointing dreams rather than boring ones, but not being able to float like that still makes me sad.
Last night I dreamed about preparing for the Government shutdown that’s almost certainly coming on Tuesday. I was composing the “out-of-office” messages for my phone and e-mail. It was simultaneously extremely boring and extremely annoying.
Customs. Hours and hours of waiting at customs. I’m dreaming about being bored waiting and waiting and waiting.
Philip Gray {to me on Facebook, after I linked to Mr. Scalzi’s page here}
I haven’t remembered any dreams since childhood.
3 hours ago · Like
Jonathan Vos Post .
Philip Gray: the (to me) horrible thing about that is that it is within the normal range for our society. If you stop adults on the street and ask: “What did you dream last night?” the two most frequent answers are:
(1) “I don’t remember”;
(2) “I don’t dream.”
The second is neurophysiologically impossible. The second might make you wonder: “What is my unconscious trying to tell me, which I ruthlessly suppress from waking consciousness?”
.
Whoops, correcting the typo, so as to make sense:
Philip Gray {to me on Facebook, after I linked to Mr. Scalzi’s page here}
I haven’t remembered any dreams since childhood.
3 hours ago · Like
To which I replied:
the (to me) horrible thing about that is that it is within the normal range for our society. If you stop adults on the street and ask: “What did you dream last night? the two most frequent answers are:
(1) “I don’t remember”;
(2) “I don’t dream.”
The second is neurophysiologically impossible.
The first might make you wonder: “What is my unconscious trying to tell me, which I ruthlessly suppress from waking consciousness?”
Ok, at the risk of being slightly off topic I have to post this here. I’ve been meaning to email you with it anyway and when I saw this topic come up I realized it was karma telling me to get it done.
Last week I had a dream that I was reading the Sunday paper comics. One of the comics in the paper was Dennis the Menace. I don’t think that DtM is actually still in the papers anymore but in my dream it was.
The basic plot of the comic was that Dennis’ mother got a new computer and started a blog. The punch line of the comic was Dennis saying “Wow Mom, you’re going to be just like John Scalzi.”
My first thought in the dream was “I have to email Scalzi and tell him about this. I can’t wait to see what he has to say about it on his blog.” Then my second thought was “Does anyone old enough to still be reading Dennis the Menace know who John Scalzi even is?”
I dream about grading papers and writing lesson plans. That’s boring enough in real life, let alone a dream.
Last night I dreamed that I sold a guy a tie. Then the store manager got mad because I didn’t work there. Not AS boring as your dream, but still, oddly bland.
Mostly, when I think I’m going to have a boring dream, I wind up naked. That didn’t happen this time.
My most boring dream was, in some sense, a nightmare, involving being trapped in some kind of drop-ceilinged corridor maze and feeling a sense of being compelled to reach some point in it, only to be sent back to the beginning and having to do the exact thing again. It ended when I literally thought “this is boring” and woke myself up.
Like others, I tend to remember only the more startling (and hence, non-boring) dreams, while the tamer dreams go unnoticed by by conscious self. Occasionally, I’ll have some otherwise boring dreams, but in which my Mom and/or Dad will anachronistically appear (they passed away in the mid-1990s).
My most boring dream was dreaming that I was at work, which at the time was at a candle factory, trimming the wicks on jar candles on a conveyor belt.
I have a lot of dreams of working on my dissertation. It is disappointing to wake up and realize I have to continue to work on it.
Several commenters say they’ve dreamt about taking a test they haven’t studied for or otherwise being unprepared for class. I have those occasionally, but when I wake up I think, “It was a dream! I graduated and I NEVER have to go to school ever again!!!” Then I feel like a million bucks.
As for my boring dreams, I’m a programmer and occasionally write code in my sleep. It rarely compiles.
I suspect that I don’t usually remember the boring ones. But one time, I dreamed that I got up and started making breakfast. I mainly remember it because when I actually woke up, I was so surprised that I hadn’t already got up and started making breakfast that it stuck with me.
Washing dishes. Which really sucks when you wake up and they’re not clean.
Last night I dreamed I was at Manderly again… uh I’ll dream about movies or television programs, some times I give them better endings, and sometimes they are scene after scene of boring.
I don’t remember any dream that was boring while I was having it, but of course most dreams are boring to tell of…or rather to hear someone else tell of.
The autumnal color scheme makes me long for winter. But perhaps I’ll get used to it.
I guess the most boring dream is a work-related dream. I worked in restaurants for years, but never had the standard in-the-weeds-forever waitron dream.
But I did have a work-related dream when I was working in the inside-sales call center for a certain cable company that will remain unnamed. Don’t remember much.
But when I worked there, I also had a dream that I got shot dead in a ditch by some guy I was betrothed to. I was bringing my friends to our house, and “my feller” flipped out and started shooting.
It was so elaborate and vivid (It was late fall, and I could smell the slightly rotten leaves) I was kinda freaked out for a coupla days.
I once dreamt I had insomnia. I wish I was making that up. It’d actually be funny.
I had an iffy day at work, and then I had a dream that replayed the day, except that for some reason all my pens turned into frogs when I picked them up. If that was an insight about the day, I’m not sure what my subconscious was trying to say.
@ Pamela D: My math dreams always made me feel like that. Also, in my math dreams, I was much more successful at solving problems than I ever was when actually doing my math homework.
I frequently end up dreaming about being at work, usually doing something tedious like stamping or covering books.
One that I had was riding a Greyhound Bus somewhere. I don’t no where I was going exactly. I was just riding this bus for hours and hours across Nebraska and Wyoming. Which is boring if you’re doing it in real life actually. (I was born and raised in Nebraska so I know how it gets). Mile after mile of cornfields or short grass prairie.
When I woke up, I had never been so glad as to be in Seattle on a dreary Monday morning.
My immediate reaction to the question (other than “I don’t usually remember the boring ones, just the non-boring ones”), was to be strongly reminded of that Laurie Anderson song (rendered relatively correctly here.)
and she goes on to talk about having that dream again, about taking a test in a Dairy Queen on another planet, and the there’s this woman who;s making it all up and she’s writing it all down.
“Oh no! Another Laurie Anderson clone!”
I’m a veteran, and my deployment to Iraq was form after form requisitioning parts… I dreamed about forms for weeks…
Once I dreamt that I was washing dishes, and then I started with the Tupperware. and suddenly I said to myself: “Wait, this must be a dream because I washed all tupperware two days ago and I haven’t used them since then”. So I awoke.
This very night I dreamt that I had to travel by bus; I had bought the ticket *years* ago, but suddenly, with only a few days left before the voyage, I discovered that the ticket’s date was wrong, so I spent what seemed like hours trying to get the travel agency to acknowledge that it wasn’t my fault and that I needed a new ticket. Boy, was that boring.
I had a dream the other night that shouldn’t have been boring, but was.
I was C3PO, and I was in a giant aquarium holding a katana and facing a barracuda. Before anything happened, someone opened a hatch in the side of the tank and the barracuda went inside. It left behind an egg sac, and I slashed the egg sac with my katana, and barracuda eggs went everywhere. Then I woke up.
My kitchen got infested with some tiny bugs that I think hatched out of some dried beans, so I spent an entire day cleaning the kitchen, cleaning out the cupboards, and thoroughly bleaching the walls and every other surface. I staggered off to bed and dreamed of bleaching, bleaching, bleaching, bleaching the kitchen.
Once, while I was working as a cashier in a supermarket, I dreamed that I was standing at my register filling out my tax paperwork and some other paperwork for the store. That was the whole dream – standing at the register filling out paperwork. Oh, and at one point my supervisor came and gave me another form to fill out. And once I lost my pen for a minute but then I found it again. Why my brain thought I needed to do this I have no idea.
It’s been nearly five years since I had a car in San Francisco and I still occasionally dream about having to move my car for the street cleaning. It was really annoying to dream about it, wake up, and then realise you still had to move the car. It’s not only boring, it’s a special type of early morning despair.
Tetris. I dreamed of endlessly falling blocks. Oddly enough this came after an extended stint of playing Tetris.
I once dreamed, in real time, my commute from Van Wert, Ohio to Ft. Wayne, IN.
When I was in high school, I used to have recurring dreams of getting up and going to school (and then I woke up, and had to do it all again). It was a little interesting, though, because there was always one (always different) thing changed from reality–an extra orange in the fruit bowl, the amount of milk left lowered, my homework done…
Yeah, I’ve had the Tetris dream. And it was long after I’d decided I needed to NOT have Tetris on my PC.
Just last night, I dreamed I was spring cleaning my office at work. It had grown from a cubicle to a full office, and had a lot more books and software than usual, but basically I was going through a desk, drawers, shelves, and sorting out stuff into “Keep”, “Store” and “Toss” piles.
It was oddly satisfying.
I never remember my boring dreams, so I am blaming this thread for this one. I dreamed that I was organizing office supplies into one of those desktop organizers. Every time I got it the way I liked it,I got moved to a new desk with a new pile of stuff to put away.
I’ve had that dream where you’re naked at work. I guess that’s boring in the sense that everyone supposedly has that one.
Mostly though, my dreams are highly surreal. For instance, there was the one where you had to pay for bus fare with pizzas and I got arrested because my pizzas weren’t thick enough, or the one where my neighbours summoned alien flatworms from another dimension with calculus rituals and they started taking over everyone’s brains.
In the ‘most people would find them boring but not me’ category I once dreamed a whole new way of doing Laplace Transforms, but promptly forgot how it worked when I woke up. I really wish I could remember that one.
You have inspired me to have the most boring dream: standing in line at a fast-food place with a woefully understaffed grill area, and the customers keep piling up.
Insurance paperwork. Trying to get reimbursed for the ambulance ride my dad took from hospital to hospice. Was doing the same thing awake as asleep. Boring and nightmarish, awake and asleep.
I used to dream regularly about me reading the newspaper.
I was hanging out with Eli and Peyton Manning. They left me to babysit their annoying kids because they had to go play football.
most of my dreams are sequences in one of three or four (or five or six. who am i kidding) life-long (so far anyway) recurring dreams. but occasionally i also have super-mundane dreams, to the point that i have a few memories that are probably actually dreams. . .
my most favourite mundane dream so far is one in which i wake up, have a shower, get dressed, have breakfast, and then actually wake up to realize that that all was a dream.
I recently dreamt about our garbage and recycling schedule. It was a large calendar on the front door.
I had my most boring dream sometime in my mid 20s when I dreamed I was in High School waiting for the teacher to arrive so we could take an exam. The whole dream was just a handful of us waiting and waiting… Oddly enough there was no test panic because I knew that the panic didn’t happen until after the teacher arrived. Since the teacher never did, the dream was boring and not nightmarish.
I recently had a dream where I was filling out a bunch of forms and each one got slightly more complicated and annoying until I hit one that wanted me to solve a bunch of integrals. I remember thinking “Oh HELL NO am I doing calculus. This dream sucks!” and I woke myself up.
The worst for me was dreaming my alarm went off, I did my morning ritual, went to work…
…and then my alarm went off for real and I had to go do all the stuff I HAD JUST DONE. Grrrrr.
But that’s more terrible than boring. I was more than just annoyed with that damn dream.
As a teenager with a fever of 103, I dreamed that I had to climb rocks. Just a steady, endless progression of clambering over one big (my size, so five feet and some) round rock, sliding down the other side, and climbing the next one, precisely the same.
And as an adult, working in a bookstore, after a week of working in the same department (and having to listen to the same CD on in-store play over and OVER, do you know how many times one 42-minute CD can repeat over the course of an 8-hour workday?), I would dream about going back into that department, with that same CD playing, and reshelving all the things. Then I would wake up in my blessedly silent house and thank every deity under the sun for days off.
My most boring dream was one where I played a full game of euchre with friends. (Second most boring: I had a coffee just before I went to bed and all I did in my dream was jog.)
A few weeks ago I had a dream that, upon awakening, I thought of as being boring. Now I’ve forgotten what it was about, and I’m not sorry.
Clearly, from your original post (and many of the comments) it is possible for a dream to be both vivid and boring.
I occasionally have a vivid dream where I am seeing, hearing, smelling and otherwise experiencing a completely ordinary sequence of events. The most recent one involved walking down a rainy sidewalk alone, going into a diner, ordering pie and coffee, pretending to read my newspaper while actually eavesdropping on a party in the next booth, etc.
One thing makes this dream immediately distinguishable from waking life: I don’t recognize any of the names, people or places in the dream. It’s as if I’m experiencing someone else’s life.
Then I realize that there are actually *two* consciousnesses present: one is walking around, eating the pie, etc.; the other is experiencing the entire sensorium, but is an observer without agency.
The second “me”, the “me” that is dreaming/observing, cannot turn “my” head to look out the window, or take a sip of the coffee. I have to wait for the other “me” to do it.
Then the dream just ends, as randomly as it started.
I hate having the dream where you wake up and go about your morning routine (I’ve gone 3 rounds of this) and then of course you actually wake up and have to drag yourself out of bed. And you’re already tired from getting up 3 times.
I know those feels, Annalee. Not as bad as you, but I knows ’em.
When my first baby was old enough to eat people food I started having nutrition dreams. Carbohydrates, protein, vegetables, no drama, no dialogue, So Boring. It was fueled by my first-time-parent terror of ‘doing it wrong’ and feeding my child nothing but cheeseburgers by accident. tires vs. calories… it’s a tough call
I used to work in visual effects. I lived in Los Angeles for almost fifteen years. The vfx business, though, has been going from bad to terrible to catastrophic for more than ten years now. A few years ago I threw my hands in the air and gave up. Jumped on a plane and left. I didn’t want to leave, but my options ran out. Now, I often have dreams in which I’m in Los Angeles. Nothing ever happens. But I’m there. Sometimes I’m in my car on the 405. Sometimes I’m standing on the sidewalk, or I’m walking along, maybe from my car to a restaurant. Sometimes I’m on the grass, both hands on the concrete fence, looking down over the PCH at Santa Monica Pier. The beach. The Pacific Ocean. Nothing happens, but the dreams are vivid. I see, hear, smell. Feel. Blue sky. The warmth of the Sun. But nothing ever happens.
Over 30 years ago I was working as a lead operator on a mainframe at a major marketing board. I dreamt about working an entire evening shift (including cleaning the tape drives) and decollating a box of five copy printer paper. Everything ran smoothly without incident. Then I woke up and had to go to work. Nothing went right. It was the shift from hell.
I seldom remember my dreams, thank god. The ones I do remember are usually Tarantino level violent.
I want to change my answer. I thought writing lesson plans and grading papers was a boring dream subject, until last night when I had a dream about shaving my legs.
I guess this topic inspired the dream.
My most boring dreams always start with someone saying to me “I had the weirdest dream last night, let me tell you about it.”, oh wait, that happens when I’m awake…
I’ve had dreams where I’ll start out driving some kind of enormous vehicle packed with stuff and/or passengers, then as the dream goes on, the vehicle gets smaller and smaller, and the stuff disappears, and then I’m on a bike, and then the bike disappears too and I’m walking.
Conversely, I want to know what my cat dreams. She’ll have the paws twitching, eyes rolling, whiskers waving dream, then wake up, look straight at me and do a series of enthusiastic conversational meows. I’m sure she’s saying “I just had the weirdest dream…” and I wish I knew what that was.
Orange juice in a glass pitcher on a butcher-block countertop, near a shaft of sunlight.
Yep, that’s it. No plot, no activity. That sucker was recurrent, too. As recurring dreams go, though, I guess I can’t really complain. It’s a heck of a lot better than those times when I tried to take a nap at work and dreamed about proofreading a book, and woke up in a panic because I didn’t remember what came next.
I’ve dreamed about playing solitaire. I think that’s weird.
Literally had a dream just last night that I was going from store to store looking for a copy of the Guardian. Yes, the newspaper.
I once had a job that involved staffing a desk at a very quiet time. We were not allowed to read or do anything but it there.
I had several dreams about just sitting and waiting. Nothing happened. I didn’t think about anything. When I woke, I could not tell how long the dream had lasted because nothing happened.