Back in the bad old days of insomnia, I had both the kind where you can't fall asleep (minimum one hour to go to sleep, often very much longer) and the kind where you wake at 2 or 3 am and think dark thoughts for hours before falling asleep again. I know that I was much more likely to remember the dreams from, let's say, between 4 am and waking. But I never had a lucid dream in all those years.

This morning actually is a good example of that. I woke at 6 and I had the sensation that I had had quite a few dreams, but try as I might I couldn't remember any of them. Finally I turned my thoughts elsewhere, and one tiny incident from one dream bobbed up into consciousness. Then I decided to sleep some more. I woke again as 8 and got up to the go to the kitchen to start my coffee. As I passed my laptop, I reached over to turn it on. My laptop was in the dreams I had in that last sleep segment, and several segments of the dream came back to me in detail. I should write them down actually. To me dreams are like morning fog. They burn off fairly quickly. I can sit and think about the dream and even try to commit it to memory as soon as I wake up, but if I don't write it down, I'll usually have forgotten it by the end of the day. Weird, uh?

It was in the wikipedia article I think that I read a hypothesis about some part of the brain - the laterodorsal prefrontal cortex? - that's implicated in LD. It should be switched off while dreaming. If it's not, you can become aware you're dreaming. See, I have lots of really weird things happen in dreams, and none of it ever cues me to the fact that I'm dreaming. Not ever. I just go with it. Whatever the brain part is, it must be firmly shut off in me.

I'll look into it.

I don't think I've ever had a vivid dream either.

I agree there's meaning in dreams sometimes. Most of my dreams, though, seem to be random crap from my day thrown up in some odd combination.

I did have a series of dreams, not recurring but all with a theme. The first was when I was 15. The last I would guess was 10 or 12 years ago. There were probably a dozen or so during those years. It always involved a house or occasionally some other kind of building. Usually I owned it; sometimes I was just visiting. Sometimes I'd owned it for many years, sometimes I'd just bought it. But I would realize in the dream there was a section of the house I'd never known was there before. Sometimes it was an attic or a section hidden behind a wall. Once the building was a duplex, and I'd never realized it before. It was always full of interesting stuff the previous owners had left. It's almost always really exciting, because I now have all this stuff I can rummage through. Sometimes it was like a time capsule, because the stuff had been stored there untouched since the 1950's or whatever. (I'm actually smiling as I type this.) Once the dream was one of those nightmares you wake up from with your heart pounding. I'd just bought a house from the estate of an old woman who had died there. I was looking the house over, and I decided to check out the attic. I could feel evil eminating from there and I knew it was the previous owner's spirit. I refused to let her scare me, and I started climbing. When I got to the attic, I realized there was another attic above it. I kept climbing and kept finding more attics and each time the evil got more intense. (That was a common theme in these dreams - a series of progressively smaller rooms which become more intense as you go.) Finally I got to one set of stairs where the evil flowing down them was so powerful, I couldn't face it. I turned and ran, and that's when I woke up.

That series of dreams probably had a meaning and I must have "got" it because the dreams stopped. But I have no conscious knowledge of the meaning.

I agree there's a connection. And I think there's meaning in the psychosis. With my son it seems like his dream world bleeds into his real world. There's such a dream quality to much of his delusions. He had a notebook, for example, that he kept on top of the refrigerator. He told me that he believed it was a website. He'd given several of his friends "permission" to edit the site. And he believed that what he'd written there was available on the Internet. Very dream-like.

When he was psychotic, I took him to church with me several times. One day the priest told me that my son had followed a teenaged girl into the restroom and knocked on the door to the stall. Apparently he said something odd to her, but he won't tell me what. Anyway he's now very embarrassed about this incident. Last night he told me that several months after this happened, he decided that rearranging the rocks at the end of my driveway would somehow make it better. He can't remember why he thought that would help, but apparently he went out and moved some rocks around. Again, very dream-like, IMO.