Can You Remember Your Earliest Dreams?

[OldTimeRadio]

Here are the ones I remember:

Age Four. Dreamed that my Mother and I walked down to the dentist's office in my hometown. Every person we encounted was a STICK PERSON. But my mother recognized them all and greeted them by name. My dentist and his nurse were also stick people. This was a fairly pleasant dream.

Age Five. The first nightmare I can recall. I'd been given a little red rocking chair and I loved to sit in it and rock. But one day the arms of the chair turned into hairy human arms. The left arm held me tightly in place while the other hand held a giant hypodermic needle and tried to jab me with it. I broke free and ran into the living room. Several family members sat talking, including my parents and my Dad's brother Bob. I related what had happened and asked what it meant. "Somebody's trying to kill you, I guess," said Uncle Bob. "I'm just glad it's you and not me." Then everybody went back to talking, ignoring me. (THAT was the nightmare part.)

Age Six. My parents and Uncle Bob and I rode a sort of indoor roller coaster inside a downtown Cincinnati department store. The coaster was a very gentle ride and everything went fine until the very end of the dream when the coaster mechanism went crazy and started throwing people out of the cars and smashing them against walls, ceilings and floors.

 

[emmbob]

I used to have a cabin bed and all my bears and toys would be in the bed with me. When I was about five, I dreamt that one of the bears (a pink, fluffy thing I'd been given for my third birthday) came to life and was crawling towards me. It had large claws and frightened me so I threw it over the side of my bed to the floor. I then looked over the side and saw it crawling towards the ladder. I woke up as it got the first rung, and looked, fearfully, over the edge of the bed again. I had indeed thrown the bear out but it wasn't moving... anymore :shock:

I also saw a very large black figure standing in the centre of my room once (I was about six), and had to use the magical protection of my duvet (remember, monsters can't get at you if you are under a duvet - fact). I'm still not sure if I dreamt or imagined or saw that for real, though it may have been something to do with my mum's habit of looking over the top of the bed at me when I was waking up and frightening the crap out of me.

Oh, and the blob shaped things in Stop it and Tidy up (was it 'the big, bad I SAID NO!' ?) used to chase me through nightmares; to me they were just these large malevolent ... things, just out of sight behind me. They made that kind of vacuum noise - you know when your ears are about to pop?

I may have been a bit older when these things happened but I'm rubbish at remembering ages.

 

[MrRING]

I remember:

A dream where me & my brothers were driving around in dragracing cars with pointy ends and we were deflating other cars like balloons.

A dream where a plug of tar in the ground at my aunt's house opened into the Lone Ranger's secret headquarters.

A dream where monsters from the Peter Cushing film Island of Terror were coming to suck my bones dry.

Many dreams of being chased by Godzilla down highways or at my school.

 

[Pietro_Mercurios]

Pre School:

There was the wolf under the bed, although it might have been an alsatian, just as I was falling asleep. Hated having my hands outside the blankets because of that.

There was the going a long a long tunnel and getting caught in a sort of spider's web. Very claustrophobic and panicky scary that one. A birth memory, if ever there was one.

Then there was the one about the room of the white space, knowing others there in some sort of way. Looking back, that always seems to me to be a dream of a memory of before being born.

 

[Bannik]

All of these took place between the ages of 3 and 6:

*Our apartment was on fire and my family and I were outside with the rest of the neighborhood watching. At some point, what looked like fireworks were exploding out of the windows and my mother said something to the effect of "it looks so beautiful." I thought to myself, "What is she nuts? That’s our house that’s burning down!.” It was quite pretty, though, I have to admit.

*I’m in some pre-historic realm and I stumble upon a triceratops that’s being devoured by a T. Rex. The triceratops notices my sadness and disgust and gives me a look that says “it will all be alright in the end.”

*My mother gets zapped by a laser beam and all that’s left is some of her hair.

*The man from Sesame Street (I forget his name) is walking down Sesame St., steps into a puddle of an acid-like substance and disintegrates.

*Many dreams in which ET is after me or lurking in the background.

*I'm in some dark room and I’m being operated on by tall, slender glowing white beings. I wake up feeling this dream was a memory of something that happened to me before I existed and that the beings were creating me.

There were other dreams as well, including two in which someone I know is walking around without a head because that’s the new fad.

 

[Spookdaddy]

I had this dream when I was six years old and it’s stuck with me ever since at least partly because it really doesn’t feel like it belongs to a six year old boy - even at the time it felt like someone else’s dream had found its way into my head. Looking back on it now it has a kind of Angela Carter nightmare/fairytale feel to it or maybe it could have been a piece of feminist agit-prop theatre but, as I’m sure you can appreciate, at six years old I wasn’t particularly familiar with modern fiction or feminist theory.

The dream starts with me looking down on a large square room - a pristine kitchen with pale tiles and white walls. There is a window in the centre of each wall but the room doesn’t have a doorway and I am looking down from above the height of where the ceiling should logically be - as if the room is open topped. Along one wall is a worktop with a sink placed centrally in front of the window. There is a woman washing pots in the sink and placing them on the draining board. She is attractive and blonde and is wearing jeans and a white jumper.

At some point I stop being the detached observer and become the woman washing pots. I can now see the view from the window which consists of beautiful, rolling, downland scenery with the odd clump of trees, sunshine and a blue sky. Although I don’t look out of the other windows I know the view is exactly the same from each one.

For what seems a long time nothing happens - I just wash pots. However, very gradually, I become aware of the sound of breathing, quiet to start with but getting louder and more laboured, coming from outside the room. The sound follows a regular pattern - heavy breathing for a few seconds and then a pause and a scrabbling noise then more heavy breathing then more scrabbling and so on. At some point I realise that the noise I’m hearing is the sound made by someone running continuously around the outside of the room and stopping only in order to crawl under each window so that they cannot be seen.

And that’s it. Boring really I know and although there was a very definite growing sense of threat it never turned into a nightmare because I’ve always had the ability to force my way out of a dream if I don’t think I’m going to like what happens next. However for some reason it has stuck in my head without fading for well over three decades. As I said originally it just seems bizarre that I had this dream at all.

Another strange thing about the dream is that it was and still is so vivid that I can work backwards and forwards from the actual dream and remember in frighteningly clear, almost photographic, detail the day or so immediately before the dream and the same period afterwards. It’s as if the dream acts as a mnemonic anchor for a forty-eight hour period of my childhood.

 

[Timble2]

I was just over two years old. We were on holiday staying in a boarding house.

I dreamt that walked up some stairs and turned came to an open door. It lead into a bedroom. A boy and a girl sitting on the floor wearing long white night-gowns. There was a window through which I could see one single, bright star. The boy pointed at the star and said 'That's the one.' to the girl.

I woke up with my Dad looking down at me, I'd been shouting in my sleep.

About four years old.

I walk into a jail cell, there is a huge tiger in the cell, it growls at me.

The first dream is one of my first memories, like spookdaddy, it feels like it came from somewhere else

 

[agentbuffy]

I had not thought about this in literally years, but I remember when I was at primary school (probably about 7 or 8 yo) I used to have a recurring dream in which there was a woman locked in quite a small cage - she couldn't stand up in it - either in the car park or outside the gates of my school. That's pretty much all I remember, but I know there was something a bit odd about the woman, although I can't put my finger on it.

 

[glamour_dust]

One of my earliest was of a hooded shadowy being standing at the foot of my bed watching me. In the dream I stared at him for a while, knowing that he was odd and scary looking but not feeling particularly afraid. He then extended a hooded arm and held out my orange teacup that I had tea in every morning. I rose up in bed, stretched out my arm to take it and then really woke up. Turns out my dad was passing by the foot of my bed and was quite startled by me suddenly rising up like that. I've always found it a little funny actually.

 

[GNC]

I had a dream where I was eating my pillow and when I woke up my giant marshmallow had disappeared.

Ah, no, not really, but my earliest dream had me lost in a department store and being horrified to see that whenever anyone went onto the displays of clothes dummies they would freeze, begin to shudder and then gradually become dried up and yellow. The dream would end with me being taken back home by the staff, but as I knew it was a dream I was protesting loudly that none of it was real. Eventually I'd wake up.

 

[staticgirl]

I think I was 4 or under:

Basically a feeling of being in a huge tunnel. The walls are spongey like mushrooms. The tunnel gets smaller and smaller and I start suffocating.

What could it have been a memory of?

I still get the dream occasionally, nowadays the floor is black and white chequered squares and the walls are red. I suspect it's from Twin Peaks.

I've always been a bit claustrophobic..

 

[PeniG]

These dreams are all "Alaska," i.e. prior to turning six (which I did the summer we left Alaska).

I enter a tunnel in the front yard of our military duplex, become trapped between two stalactites, kick, scream, and pound my fists. No one comes to rescue me and I bitterly regret trying to play Winnie the Pooh.

I have no recollection of the rest of the dream, but I was attempting to escape something and running through blackness when I suddenly encounter, looming over me, my sister's baby doll - one of those rag dolls with a plastic face, eyes closed in eternal sleep. It was approximately as tall as a house, and the worst thing about it was that it was still asleep.

I'm sure I've told this one before - it's my defining nightmare - but here it is again.

My little sister and I are running away from the Frankenstein Monster. I have hold of my sister's hand and am running along so fast she flies out behind me like a rag doll, feet not touching the ground. I am running down a hill in a suburban neighborhood in the evening, screaming for help at the top of my lungs. As we pass each house, the curtains are closed and the lights go out, the people inside deliberately pretending not to be home so they won't have to come to our aid.

 

[fluffle9]

Aged about 4 - I'm in the shopping precinct in my home town. My skin turns to glass and I can't move. A man starts smashing me with a hammer. I'm hollow.

Around the same time - Vague memories of a dream about monsters. Not a scary dream, more like the Muppets.

Aged about 5 - Trying to climb over a bridge/ladder structure over the railway near my house, followed by my mother. We are trying to lift a pushchair containing my infant brother with us. We seem to be running away from something.

Aged about 7 - Throwing my brother (aged about 3) down the stairs. His arm comes off. One of my parents just pops it back in the socket like part of a Barbie or something.

I used to have sort of reccurring dreams about Eyeore from Winnie the Pooh. I would dream that he was my pet but I was having to give him to London Zoo for some reason. It sounds funny but the sense of loss in these dreams was overwhelming.

 

[tattooted]

I posted these dreams on another thread, asking if anyone else had experienced anything similar. They are actually more like hypnogogic visions rather than dreams--I used to get them every night when I was falling asleep. Strangely, these are the only dreams I can remember having before the age of 12 or so, but I can vividly remember many of my dreams from the age of 12 onward.

One vision is of a world of bleach white sand, with bright blue skies. This isn't a beach, or even a desert, but an entire world. Although there is absolutely no other living thing besides myself in this world, I know that there is some intelligence here. Its like whatever life is here has surrendered itself to become a part of the white sand or the blue sky. I'm a pollution to this place just by being apart and alive.

I can't see a sun, but the glare from the sand and the brightness of the blue sky make my eyes ache. The only sound is the sound of a wind blowing across the sands. The world is beatiful in a stark, classical way, but it is also sterile and lifeless. The only movement is shifting of the sand.

The second vision is of a burning junkyard world. The colors here are black and red--black trash, black smoke, red fire, although this red is tinged with black, corrupted, polluted. I can hear the fire crackling and flaring, and the air smells like burning rubber. There is a strange sort of life in the junkyard world--in the stuff being burned, and in whatever is doing the burning. But the life here is chaotic and ugly. The only action happening in this scene is fire burning the trash.

These visions would appear to me in a strobelight fashion--white world, black world, over and over as I was getting to sleep. They weren't dreams, but they appeared in my head like dreams. I remember having them before I had words to describe them, before I knew what a desert or a junkyard were. More than anything else, they seem like really vivid memories, but from what I have no idea.

They only come to me when my mind is completely empty, so I hardly ever have them at sleep time anymore, because my mind is just too full of crap. I can't make myself have these visions, but they will sometimes appear without warning during periods of mindlessness--i.e. when meditating, or during sex. The visions have never varied in all the time I have been having them.

 

[OldTimeRadio]

"I had this dream when I was six years old and...it really doesn’t feel like it belongs to a six year old boy - even at the time it felt like someone else’s dream had found its way into my head."

That's a fascinating concept in itself.

Sort of makes me wonder what your Mom might have been dreaming that same night, or possibly another older female in the house or even in a neighborin house.

P. S. Let me point out also that ceilingless rooms are the way some motion picture sets are constructed.

 

[OldTimeRadio]

A little later, aroumd seven or eight, I had a whole series of dreams in which I became weightless and started "falling" up into the sky. I'd be desperately attempting to hold on to things - trees, fences, window sills, radio and TV antennas, chimneys, even roofing shingles - to keep from drifting entirely away. In one dream I dug my fingers claw-like into clumps of crabgrass until I eventually awoke.

I found these dreams exceptionally scary and remember more than once being awakened by my parents because I was screaming in my sleep.

 

[Iris]

OldTime Radio I used to have the opposite type of dream when I was small. I would be trying to avoid the earth opening up but I never could and would end up in another place. I would walk around and then the same thing would happen again. Finally the last time I would be swallowed by a great fish. Initially very afraid, once inside I felt calm and protected and soon after woke up. I had the same dream many times.

 

[GreenJeanz1]

I had this as a recurring dream for a few years, starting around when I was 3 or so;

I only remember part of it..I was standing amongst white clouds and fog, in a kind of overlook with two very tall seeming adults. Suddenly, from the clouds and fog and blue sky in front of me, a city(Not a modern one but one done all in white with towers and fantasy looking things) unfolded like the opening of a book. The man to my left said something cryptic that I can't remember the exact phrasing of. It was something to the jist of;
"This is the city where your parents rule."
I remember feeling terrified at that point, not of the people next to me or the city in front of me but just because it was so weird. That's all I remember of that dream and I sometimes wonder if this was a pre-birth memory, as other people have wondered about their weird dreams.

Another reoccuring one from around the same time involved two bits I remember;
Flying through a rainbow in some kind of spaceship(I imagine the millenium falcon from star wars now when I picture this but I don't think I had seen Star Wars yet then so this is some kind of attribute I made up now) and dying from it.
Another section I remember involves me walking on a cobblestone sidewalk, when suddenly a creepy, sort of homeless-looking man jumps up and points at something on the corner and asks "Is this yours?!" in the most deranged tone possible.

I also had a goofy nightmare where a pair of barbie boots were walking up the side of the record shelf on their own(like where you put barbie shoes or other doll shoes on your fingertips and walk them around). It's really funny now but the dream scared the crap out of me at the time.

 

[zizzerzazzer]

I had a nightmare when I was probably ... 4 or so. About a witch that came and put a curse my favorite gingerbread man plush toy. She flew out a window and the gingerbread man dissentigrated into a billion tiny squares all of the same size which slowly dispersed into the room (which was in a house which I'd never seen in my life, with a large picture window). It was incredibly disturbing.

I had reoccuring dreams about poking people's skin with straws or other objects and wherever I would poke them an eyeball would grow. As if everyone had thousands of secret eyeballs under their skin.

When I was 8 I had this nightmare almost every night for a year or more about being in this huge gothic building, a mansion or church of some kind, I would be with my friends exploring, we would be upstairs in the attic and crawling in a crawlspace and suddenly they would dissapear and I would be alone. I would then crawl out of the crawlspace and found myself somehow in the 'dungeon' which was filled with rotting corpses, and of which there was no escape.

Then this one that may have been based on a movie - I remember being a young boy or seeing a young boy walking up and down stair cases. Around and around, up and down. The house was old and dark and decrepit, and there was a yellowish tint to everything. On the basement staircase there were fishing bouys hung up all along the celing and the sides, which were very dense and I had to push through them. Everytime I would walk down into the basement I would see a bathtub in varying stages of decay. It would be empty, then full of water, then full of rust. Then I would see another young boy, or maybe myself, drowned in the bathtub. I seem to remember this bathtub scene as a memory of a movie, but I can't remember which parts were dream and which parts were real. And I can't figure out why on earth I would have been watching a movie like that.

I did have fun ones too like the ones where if I run around the outside of my house exactly a certain number of times I would transport to another dimension or time.

I had lots of E.T. nightmares too, though

 

[mossy_sloth]

I used to be afraid of the sound of my heartbeat as I went to sleep. It terrified me because I didn't know what it was. But then, I must have been about four, I dreamed that this big black metal grate with a face came up to me and said not to worry, the sound was only him snoring. And it never scared me again.

 

[placeholder]

more dreams

i remember dreaming that female identical twins were impersonating my parents by wearing masks of their faces, the hallowe'en masks you had when you were a kid with the elastic string to hold them on. they were very obviously fake to me but i would play along looking for an opportunity to get away. i wasn't afraid of them as such, i just have always hated playing along with people, even as a very small child. they also used to do goofy dance routines that were a bit like "hokey cokey". i hated the hokey cokey and dancing in general. everything about the dreams was just so cringey and ambarassing! i dreamt them quite a bit and in a lot of variations.

the other dream i used to have all the time from about age 4 to nearly my teens went like this. my dad would park on a sloping street which was quite near my house and leave me in the car for a bit while he called to someone's house (my younger sister and one of my younger brothers were always with me in the car. my youngest brother was born when i was five and i think that's why he has never appeared in these dreams). now my dad never left us in the car unattended and for the very good reason that i would probably do what i did in the dream - play with the handbrake. so i let off the handbrake and the car rolls forward a little. Dad will definitely notice i moved the car, i think to myself, and since i don't know how to reverse the car the only thing i can do is drive around the town and then come back down the hill and park it in the exact same spot. Of course how logical! so that's exactly what i do, sometimes i drove into the river accidentally (i was afraid of that happening anyway) sometimes i didn't and had a great time driving around at about 10 miles an hour. never did seem to get back to park the car.

 

[silvercoin]

I remember my first dreams very well. (When I was less than 3) I dreamed that before I was born, I was brought to Earth via a sort of space ship. Sterile looking and white with a green tinge and full of people of all ages with some shelves with raisins on! I also dreamed that I was brought to my new house by angels, after I was born. I could see them and hear them. They were flying up and down the stairs. But then one of then threw some keys at me, and I became deaf to them and stopped seeing them. Before my first day at school, I dreamed about what it would be like. It was a big red and gold empty room. (As I had no idea what 2 expect!)