This is stuff about what my dreams tend to be like, and things that I experience and don't experience in dreams.
I've remembered some of my dreams as long as I can remember. I started keeping a dream journal in 2008 on the computer, and I think the frequency of dreams I remembered increased not that long after that. Before I started my dream journal, I would occasionally write down dreams or tell my mom about them, and my dream journal also includes all the earlier dreams I could find (the earliest one I have there is from when I was 7, though I only have ones I wrote on the computer, not ones I wrote on paper). The past few years I've had more than 300 dreams per year (though I often wake up during the night, and some of that is from times when I've woken up multiple times with dreams).
I don't think my dreams have meaning. I definitely don't believe that dreams are prophetic, but also I don't think they're likely to have insights into my subconscious. (My dreams do sometimes incorporate things I've been thinking or worrying about recently, but as far as I can tell, they're always things I was already aware of, and are pretty literal.)
For me, dreams usually involve being at a place and things happening (like a story, though it usually makes less sense than a typical story), and typically involve both people and things. I seem to remember at some point seeing people talk about dreams and using things like "being by a waterfall" or "falling" as examples of dreams, and those sorts of things wouldn't be typical for me as the whole dream, since there would usually be more than that (and way more details). (Sometimes I only remember that much, but in those cases I usually feel like there's more that I don't remember.)
Most of my dreams involve weird, non-mundane situations that are different from what I normally encounter in real life.
Some of my dreams have multiple different parts (as if scenes in a movie). Depending on the dream, these may form a semi-coherent story, or may be completely unrelated, or there may be some of both. When dreams involve going between rooms or buildings or whatever, it's fairly common for the dream to skip from one place to after I've arrived at the other (at least from what I can remember; it's also possible I just tend not to remember the part where I go from one place to another). There have been cases where I was told in the dream about something I didn't experience, but remember it after waking up as if I experienced it directly in the dream (as if my dreams can have flashbacks and such).
As far as I know, my dreams always have something visual, and I've also had dreams where I've heard stuff. I think other senses are less common but still can occur. I don't dream in black-and-white (aside from very rarely when my dream was imitating the style of something else, like a movie), and I have remembered things being specific colors.
I also sometimes remember thinking things, and I frequently have some sort of knowledge of what's going on or what's happened previously that I don't remember learning about experiencing (e.g., in the tooth spy dream I posted, I don't remember a part where I was told that I had those things in my teeth or that I was supposed to go to the black van, I just knew those things). Sometimes a person, place, thing will appear in a dream, and I know that it has the same name and connection to me as a person or place in real life (or in fiction outside the dream), but is otherwise somewhat or completely different (though it usually just seems normal in the dream); the terminology I typically use for this in my dream journal is "was supposed to be" (e.g., "I was in what was supposed to be my room, but instead of my regular bed there were two smaller beds, and…"; "I was in a story, which was in the dream supposed to be one of the Borrowers books (even though there were no borrowers in the dream, and there was nothing in the dream similar to the actual books[…])").
Places
Usually I can remember details about where the dream takes place, and those details tend to be fairly prominent in my memory of the dream. If I'm outside (or I can see outside), I can usually remember if there are trees or buildings around; if it's inside, I can usually remember the color of the walls and roughly how big the room is and whether there are any windows. I'll also generally remember the amount and type of light and sometimes the white balance (incandescent lights look yellow).
I can often remember the layout enough to draw a rough map, and there's often enough consistency and I have enough of a sense of where I am that I can mark where I am at various parts of the dream on the map. In some cases I can do this even when I don't actually remember walking between places, seeing one place from another, etc. I sometimes feel like I have a sense of which way the map of my dream should be oriented (but I don't usually remember compass directions).
Most of my dreams involve places that are specific to the dream, or places that are supposed to be places from real life but are significantly different, though sometimes my dreams take place in specific places that I know from real life that don't seem to be changed much (usually my bedroom in that case). The places tend to be fairly-plausible instances of normal types of places (like, a house or a school that feels like a normal house or school but not any specific one I've been to), though I think there's more variance than in real life. I'm not aware of any cases of places being reused/consistent between different dreams, aside from dreams that involve unmodified real places.
I think walls completely covered with windows and rooms with no windows at all are both more common than real life, and sometimes (but not always, and I don't think even usually) buildings are way bigger than they would normally be. Rain seems uncommon in my dreams, and sun more common than real life. Complete darkness is rare (not sure if it's happened), but dim lighting and nights with things lit up aren't that uncommon.
Electronics, computers, and video games
Things related to video games are a common theme in my dreams. This can involve me playing video games, watching let's plays, or being inside video games, and sometimes there's ambiguity or inconsistency about which of these is going on. Sometimes things that are supposed to be in the video game just look like real life but there's some sort of video-gamey level/world structure or something, or maybe I just know that I'm in a video game; other times the thing that I remember seeing is something like a 2D platformer.
I sometimes use computers or electronic devices. They sometimes work, or at least kind of work; me interacting with a computer normally isn't a reliable sign that I'm not dreaming. However, computers and electronics are likely to behave weirdly in dreams, in the sense of having weird bugs or error messages. Sometimes they work fine but I can't find an option I'm looking for; sometimes they seem to work but they won't turn off; sometimes they run weird operating systems, or old operating systems that I haven't used in a long time (e.g. Macintosh System 7 has appeared in my dreams multiple times).
Dreams about dreaming and sleeping
There have been times when I've realized I was in a dream. It's not frequent, and I don't think it counts as a proper lucid dream, since I don't usually have control (though there may have been a couple exceptions in my life). I haven't made any attempts to lucid dream. I think this is more common close to waking up, and sometimes I try to wake up (which might work, or might cause a dream-inside-a-dream). Other times, I try to make sure that I can remember what's happening (and there have been times when I thought there was a way to take pictures/something I wrote/etc. out of the dream). If the question of whether I'm in a dream occurs to me in a dream, I'll usually realize that I'm in a dream; that is, most often I'm not thinking about whether I'm in a dream, but actively believing that I'm not in a dream when I actually am would be unusual for me.
Dreams within dreams are common for me. The most common form is that in the last scene, I wake up from the previous dream, and generally try to write down my dream. When I was younger, I tended to tell my mom about my dreams, and during that time period there was at least one dream (probably more, it was probably common) that involved telling my mom my dream; now that I have a dream journal on my computer, I generally dream about typing it in that, or I attempt to type it and the computer misbehaves. When this happens, the dream I remember in the dream is usually an earlier part of the actual dream, though sometimes the details are wrong. There have also been a few dreams in my life where I kept waking up over and over again.
I've had occasional dreams where I couldn't open my eyes, even though I tried.
Other things
I've occasionally had "moon dreams"; these aren't very common but they stand out. These are dreams where I notice something odd about the moon, e.g., there will be multiple moons, the moon will be moving at a speed where I can see it moving, or the earth will be in the sky instead of the moon. This tends to seem unusual in the dream (as opposed to most other unusual things, which seem normal until I wake up), and causes a panicky feeling that something's wrong.
There have been a few dreams where it seemed like a part of the dream repeated during the same dream, and the second time I knew what I expected to happen (though it wasn't always the same the second time).
Things I haven't experienced much or at all
I don't usually get nightmares, though there are exceptions.
As far as I know, I've never had a dreams or part of a dream that repeated exactly from an earlier dream. There have been times when certain types of things happened in multiple dreams, but the contexts and details were different each time. (I'm not sure whether "recurring dream" is defined to require exact repetition, or if exact repetition is even typical for recurring dreams, so I'm not sure whether I experience them.)
I also don't remember ever experiencing sleep paralysis while awake, or experiencing anything at all like sleep paralysis demons. There have very occasionally been weird issues when waking up but I think that's usually just limbs being asleep.
Hypnagogia
I've sometimes experienced weird thoughts when going to sleep or waking up. Usually for me these don't involve hallucinations, but instead involve weird beliefs and such. There are three main types of these I've experienced:
When I'm falling asleep, at least sometimes, my brain goes to a mode where it's no longer consciously aware of its surroundings, and it's thinking about things that make less sense (like dreams, only it doesn't seem like they're real). This seems to require my eyes to be closed. In at least some cases, if I think about my surroundings or senses, I'll wake up; I may also sometimes wake up spontaneously. Waking up from this state consists of me thinking more normally and noticing my surroundings (including the sound of the fan if it's on). When this happens I immediately forget what I was thinking about, though if I follow the train of thought from earlier I can remember (or at least that used to happen?). (Something similar sometimes happens if I get really tired, e.g. if I'm staying awake super late for some reason.)
Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and do things like using the bathroom or getting water. Sometimes when this happens (but not always), there's a partially-awake state where I can do those things and remember what I did later, but have odd beliefs about what it is I'm doing and why; for instance, I sometimes think that going to the bathroom is a form of communication. Somehow, as far as I can tell, this doesn't interfere with my ability to do these things correctly or cause me to do things I ordinarily wouldn't. (This has happened more at some times in my life than others.)
There's an unpleasant type of thought that occasionally happens when I wake up during the night, which tends to happen when I'm sick or particularly uncomfortable. Generally when this happens, at some point I'll notice that this is happening, and won't remember it starting; rather, I notice that this has been happening for a while, and don't know how long or whether I've actually gotten any sleep. I tend to toss and turn and be uncomfortable and find it hard to get back to sleep, and I have even stronger incorrect beliefs; often I believe that I some sort of need, though I can't fulfill that need and generally the need doesn't actually make sense once I wake up. Whatever I'm thinking about will seem more unpleasant than it ought to be. My usual solution is to try to wake up fully and focus on something else.
I don't usually get these thoughts when I wake up for the day, but I have sometimes, especially in middle school (which started way too early in the morning). I've had partly-asleep thoughts about having more of certain body parts than I actually do, which I think were this type.
