Dreams

[Farm Boy]

I think this could be fun, and mostly I'm just curious...  How do you dream?  Are you usually your birth gender, or the gender you identify with?  Do you notice gender at all?  Any other specifics about how you dream?  Black and white, or color?  Can you tell when you're dreaming?

I'll start:

When I dream, I only have a body about 50% of the time.  Out of those times, I'm usually either my birth gender or am unaware of gender.  It's also common for me to be in a stranger's body (of unidentified gender), watching myself in my dreams.  Only a small amount of the time do I dream I'm in my identified gender's body, although the frequency of this has increased over time.

The other 50% of the time I have no body.  I'm simply seeing myself do whatever it is I'm dreaming about, like I'm watching myself on TV.  Sometimes I'm not even in my dreams, and I just see things happen, either with no people or with people that I don't know and who aren't me. 

I dream in color, things are usually impossible to focus on and are unrealistic, and I very rarely know when I'm dreaming.  This pretty much only happens in nightmares, and then I wake myself up because I'm unable to control the dream.

Your turn!

[Doveglion]

I rarely see myself in my dreams, but when I do I'm generally a boy. Even when I don't see myself everyone in my dreams refers to me as male. It's not usually that I was just born in the right body in my dream world, but it seems more that I've been transitioning for a while in them and am finally just living as a guy without all the mess of people thinking I'm a girl. The only time I've been referred to as female in any of my dreams was a couple nights ago because I was dreaming I'd met my ex's girlfriend and she got really angry at my ex because she was told I was female and kept trying to tell me I had to be a girl. To which I just calmly replied. "Hi I'm Sid. Sorry if you're confused, but I've never really been a girl."

It's kind of weird because I didn't always dream that way. When I was a kid and didn't know about transition I just dreamt I had been born in the right body, but ever since starting to transition all I ever dream about is being post-op. I didn't even realize I was post op in them until in one of them I was shaving without a top on and there were no moobs there. but there were slight scars. Before that I just thought I had continued dreaming I was in the right body all along.

I like it though. I wake up motivated everyday to keep working towards being like myself in my dreams and knowing even though it is a dream it's very much possible.

I also dream in color and I can read in my dreams too which is weird because people always say that most folks can't. o.o I never know I'm dreaming until I wake up even if it's a nightmare which sort of sucks. When I was younger it was really easy to wake myself up, but now it's near impossible.

[LordKAT]

There is a thread called what gender are you in your dreams.  You may find what you wish there.

I have nightmares. None any child should ever gain.

[Anima]

I hardly dream at all, but the dreams I can remember the last half year or something has been stuff like me as happy woman, me giving birth, me having sex with males (even if I really, really am hetero). And I had a nightmare where I had endless amounts of mascara on and I was crying and I couldn't stop and there were people there mocking me.

[Angel On Acid]

I'd love to be a girl in every dream I have, but it's rarely the case. When it does happen it's really nice though

[Crow]

My dreams vary a lot. Sometimes they're real, sometimes cartoons. Sometimes color, others greyscale. Sometimes I'm myself, other times I'm someone else (like playing a character in a video game), and yet other times I'm simply an uninvolved observer (like watching a movie). It's kind of a grab-bag.

As for gender in dreams, I rarely notice gender in dreams unless the dream is specifically gender-themed. It's not so much that I don't have a gender, just that it doesn't matter enough for the dream to take it into account. I mean, if I take on the identity of a character or something in a dream, my brain sometimes takes into account the gender of the character I am in the dream... but I'm fairly certain me being male in a dream doesn't say much if I'm also an 8-year-old anthropomorphic cartoon MOLE. XD (Actually, though, in character type dreams, I usually take the form of a male animal character. But that's just as a general rule of thumb.)

When I'm myself in dream, I really never notice my gender unless it's a major part of the plot. For example, here's a rather entertaining dream I had recently (copy-pasted from a different site, because it seems silly to retype the whole description):

So, for some inconceivable reason, I was placed in an elementary school to go to their class for transgender kids. I was still this age, mind you, but the elementary school was the only school around with a class for transgender kids, so that's where I went. Said class was taught by my favorite teacher... from high school?! And it was kind of like a special ed class, where there are students of all ages, so it was like... kindergarten through 5th grade, and me. So we had activity time, and I kept trying (to no avail) to find an activity that wasn't about 12 years below my skill level, and was getting fed up when the teacher announced that it was bathroom and lunch time. She then reminded a couple of little girls (who were MtF, of course) that they should be in the girls bathroom, not the boy's bathroom, and I asked which bathroom I should be in. Apparently there... wasn't a bathroom forme, so I just held it.

So then we went to lunch, and apparently all the transgender kids sit at one table (recipie for bullying, anyone?). So I sat down at the table, and lo and behold, I spot a little boy (about second grade) who I recognize from a previous dream-- about teaching! And yes, dream-me remembers him quite clearly from my teaching field experience, because apparently my dream-memories overlap. Aaaawwkwwwaaaard-- my student has become my classmate. I'm very excited to see him, so for some reason I pick him up to say hi, and for some reason the whole lunch room starts picking on him because they think he's a raccoon. WHY? I don't know. He wasn't a raccoon in the previous dream, nor was he (or did he resemble) a raccoon when I spotted him in this dream, but when I picked him up, lo and behold, there was an anthro raccoon in my arms. But I knew the kid, so I kept denying he was a raccoon.

Needless to say, THAT dream I kind of had to have a gender for or the dream wouldn't have made sense. XD

There's only one other dream/nightmare I can specifically recall being myself (not a character) in and having a gender (or at least... a physical sex) for, and my body was female in that. *shrugs*

[Farm Boy]

Oops, I wasn't notified of these posts...

Thanks KAT, I didn't know there was already a dream thread.

That's a very interesting dream, Crow!  Glad to hear I'm not the only one who has ridiculously nonsensical dreams, although I must say I've never had anyone turn into a raccoon.

[Nat]

I dream vividly and in colour.  Most of the time i feel like me, i have been a few different 'gender's'  in dreams. I generally know which i am based upon the responses i get from other figments in the dream.

There was a long period of my childhood where in my dreams, nightmares, or even daydreams, i was male. But i knew nothing of gender identity or anything to do with trans* anything. All i knew where that some people where gay, but didn't fully understand.. I think i preferred to think of people as people, and didn't like the gender binary others seemed to use for many different rules.

But i learnt a lot when i hit puberty... That was an interesting stage, and i think i began to have more nightmares around then, in which i didn't really bother to know if i was any gender/sex within the context, although i noticed a lot of the time things wouldn't always fit right if you tried to think about it.

-Nat