How do you dream?

Though i did wake up a couple of weeks ago in a cold sweat thinking I could no longer prove Pythagoras's Theorem. Couldn't get back to sleep til I did it from first principles.

I remember my dreams about half the time when I wake up.

Wasn't there a case where a man apparently dreamt about strangling a Japanese solider to death, and when he woke up he found that he'd actually strangled his wife who was sleeping next to him?

Also, does anyone have dreams that frequently shift from first person to third person? I mean: you're walking along some imaginary street, and then all of a sudden you "lose" your body and turn into a kind of floating soul camera, whizzing in and out between people and places, cutting wildly between various shots, and then suddenly your body materilises back and you start talking to the people you were spying on.

Since then, my dreams have calmed down considerably. I don't even remember most of them.

Anyway I had another ILE dream last night - this is getting ridiculous. OK it was tangentially related to ILE but still. I also remembered Ethan's bride in the previous dream as being Mel.

Does anyone else double dream?

By double dream, I mean where you have a dream that at some point "ends" or "rewinds" and starts again, sometimes with slight variation from the first and sometimes with a feeling of deja vu or realization that you are dreaming.

I dream a lot and this happens to me quite often (at least 10% of the time). The first time I remember it happening was in my late teens or early twenties and it seems to happen more as I've gotten older.

My theory is that dreams are just your mind taking short-term memories out and storing them in long-term memory. Since our memory works by building connections to other existing memories, the dream is our mind* making these associations in broad categories (i.e. the names on the filing cabinets or folders, like "work", "father", "vacation", "home"). This is why so often a dream mixes places/people like when you dream about your adult house but it looks just like the house you grew up in: your mind is associating your current "house/home" memories with much older "house/home" memories and has to activate them to make that connection. Similarly I find people are transposed in dreams, such as where a co-worker appears but your sleeping mind "knows" within the dream-logic that the person is someone else.

I wonder if the double dream is the final part of the associative process where your sleeping mind, having made the initial connection between memories in the first dream, re-reruns the dream to ensure the connection or tighten the bond between the memories.

*Whether this process is done by your sleeping mind as part of the dream, or your waking mind instantly upon waking and trying to recall the dream, is probably a discussion for another time/thread. I tend to go with the view that dreams are mostly non-narrative (which is why they are so weird) and it is only your waking mind, attempting to make sense of the dream, that adds the narrative after the fact.