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Long post time!
I once was on a medication that worked rather well for what I needed but unfortunately gave me unusual vivid dreams every night. For your amusement (and because this vent is long-awaited), I am compiling a list of the types of dreams I had and their ratings!:
Dreams where I drive: 4/10. Not the usual car crash dreams, which tbh are about a 6/10 because they're kind of terror-inducing in a rollercoaster way. These driving dreams, however, are normal driving stints, which means I often forget in my waking hours which memory of parking the car was the actual place I parked my car and which ones were dreams. >:(
Dreams with my significant other: 6.5/10. Easy to tell they're not real, yet still enjoyable, and usually involving other people s/o hasn't interacted with, so I get to see some new character interactions.
Dreams that are wholly focused on dream!me trying and failing to fall asleep: 2.5/10. Those suck. It kind of just makes my waking hours of falling asleep even worse, and leaves me pretty frustrated the next day.
Dreams where I am inexplicably in random, mundane places: 3.5/10. The problem with these is that they're fairly unsettling, and they stay with me a while, leading to some weird deja vu of "I've been here" when it was in fact a very clear dream I had weeks ago.
Dreams that splice in weird bits of trauma: 1/10. Shut up. This literally isn't relevant anymore and you have no reason to be bringing this up and dragging other innocent parties (random people in my dreams) into this.
Dreams that take a week or longer in a single night: 5/10. You get trapped in there and watch days pass, but usually if I'm having one of those dreams the location ain't bad. Brain has to sustain something for a week, after all. It very often gets overwhelming toward the end of the week, which might push it to a lower rating, but the locations generally being optimistic push it up a rating, so it balances out. The curse here is that I remember a week that never happened.
Dreams that are educational: 5.5/10. Pretty random, but not usually haunting, so that's a bonus. I could probably write an encyclopedia of absolute gibberish from the things I've learned from my dreams. They make sense, in a weird way, but some of the diagrams feel AI-generated? Even though it's in my head? And some of the concepts, too. Legit I have read textbook chapters in my head of knowledge that either I didn't know or isn't real, or both. (Usually the latter.)
Dreams that just tell me stuff that happened recently in real life: 4/10. There's almost always a negative tint and it's like, bro, why are you telling me this, I was there, I lived it this afternoon. And then my concept of what actually happened is messed up the following days, weeks, whatever.
I might come back to this and update it if I remember more types of dreams I've had. Or if I look in my notes app tbh. But anyway, having vivid dreams every night that haunt your waking life are not normal, so if you were wondering about yourself, you might want to check on that with a medical person, especially if it's impacting your memory or how rested you are each day. I had a long time being hesitant/resistant to call them "nightmares," because most of the time it wasn't scary monster or hopeless scenarios where I end up dying or worse, but the definition of nightmares isn't as rigid and black-and-white as we thought as kids. Bad dreams? Unsettling dreams? Dreams that bother you at all? Those are nightmares. It's not childish, and it is not something you need to live with.