When did it start?

Hello Amberfields.
Thank you for the welcome.

It broadens out a lot from the early start: how material crept into dreams in cohesive chunks (scenes; people; situations) that could not have been rehashed life experiences including reading or watching TV. It made me ask how our imaginations worked as if in parallel to wakefulness when it could occur either as a deliberate creative act or simply daydreaming.

People might class it as random cerebral activity but its coherence suggested it far more constructed than random especially when deliberately focused. I wondered if it involved receiving some kind of material from the netherworlds, as I still regard ‘inspiration’ as a flow from the interior/astral realms.

It developed beyond just these musings though. Like, how one could go to bed with some material problem on one’s mind, to do with constructional projects or something administrative, and dream up the solution? Then the attempts at lucid dreaming which might mean anything from meeting someone and swapping gifts (for something I needed) to crossing into different ‘universes’ for exploration.

I haven’t made dreaming a particular interest except those early days taught me to keep a dream diary at my bedside. It’s difficult to write in the moments after waking up, especially if lying on one’s writing hand but if it is something that seems interesting it’s too risky to leave until fully awake because of tendency to rationalise into a story.

I've learned that dreams don't necessarily signal aspects of one's life and its problems but can also represent aspirations or produce solutions to wakeful problems - almost as if one visits the astral to solve a problem in the mundane world!