Wow this is so interesting. Always first person for me - maybe there were other times otherwise but I don’t remember. Wow I never imagined people would dream otherwise.
I shocked me when I read somewhere else that a lot of people don’t dream in color. What the hey?
Yeah this is blowing my brain! Literally 100% of my dreams are first person. I don't even understand how you can dream in 3rd person. Like, you're seeing yourself from a distance? But like, then there are two of you - the one you're looking at, and also the floating you that's doing the looking.
Yup. I practically never dream in first person perspective and that’s about it. Think of it like watching a tv show or a movie and accepting uncritically that the character on the screen is you.
Funnily enough I have another weird aspect of dreaming that I have discovered is very common amongst other trans people. My dream self used to roughly 95% of the time used to be represented physically as my internalized gender…or sometimes would just be rendered as a featureless void capable of interacting with the world and recognized internally as me I suppose is the best way to explain it. Probably sounds a bit Magnus Archives. However post social transition the ratio has changed the opposite direction and now I am represented in dreams by my real world like appearance about 60% of the time… Which I am not the biggest fan of to be honest but my waking world comfort levels have increased so it’s not the worst.
First person, and an interesting note. I was experimenting with lucid dreaming for awhile, with some very minor success. One thing that ALWAYS woke me up though, was doing something I had never done in real life. I was unable to breathe underwater. The mere attempt would wake me.
Then I got scuba certified in real life, and like magic, I was suddenly able to breathe underwater in my dreams.
It makes me wonder how you think about yourself in real life.
Mostly, but not always first person. But I’m not always the same person - my age and sex isn’t at all consistent in my dreams. I’ve been an old woman or a baby boy, and pretty much everything across those spectrums. In my dreams it’s completely unremarkable.
Most, if not all, of my experienced dreams so far, have been in 1st person, as if I'm the one living through whatever realism-fantasy-scifi shenanigans I'm in; thing is, most of the time, they're almost exclusively set within my home province, including the central capital city, highways and all.
Consuming and creating various creative media also has its own part in aligning perspectives in those dreams, as well as how the supposed "plot"/"storyline" plays out in its entirety.
A mixture of both 1st and 3rd person when my mind decides to fashion me a body. When my mind forgets to give me a body and I’m just an orb, it’s always 1st person.
Most of the time 1st person, sometimes 3rd person like a TV or drone camera showing me with the scenery around, like I’m watching a movie. Very rarely is it following behind my head like in a 3D video game.
I dream mostly in 3rd and often my physical self is not in it.
For example I just dreamed about a being a worker in a warehouse. I never seen that dude before in my life but “camera” and I controlled him so that was me.
Both. My vivid dreams tend to be in first person (one way to recognize the vividness) while a lot of my just weird ass dreams are in 3rd person.
The time I woke myself up by talking in my sleep, it was in first person and I walked down the street to a friend’s house and when his mom answered the door I spoke in my sleep “can Shane play?” And my own voice woke me up.
But the dream I once had of riding a T-Rex through a McDonald’s warehouse was in 3rd person.
A little of both. I remember sometimes being surprised while dreaming because it’s suddenly shifted to 3rd person. Usually when that happens I’m no longer physically present in the dream, just watching it like a movie.
Funny you ask. Most of the time I dream in the first person but I recently had one where it was in the third person. It was strange - almost felt like watching a movie. I tried to analyze or read more deeply into the dream to think if I could connect myself to it but nope. Just a random mind-movie.
I get these often and I wouldn’t define them as third person but more “non-person”. To me first person dreams are where I’m watching it through my eyes and Thurs person would be watching myself as I do things (like third person video games). Not even being in the dream, just a mind movie as you called it, seems like another level removed.
I wonder how much the amount of movies and video games around these days has changed this - whether dreams in the past would have only been first person because that’s the only thing people had experienced.
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