music, books, love and kindness

I was trying to find the right search words to see if other people experience their dreams the way I do and discovered this thread on Reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Dreams/comments/13x1duc/do_your_dreams_take_place_in_a_consistent/

And Google's AI Overview brought up this, though I would not use the word "recurring" so much for my dreams:

Recurring Themes:

People often experience recurring dreams with consistent elements, which could be interpreted as a link to a specific parallel reality where certain situations repeatedly play out.

I do have the kind of recurring dreams that are considered textbook (i.e. haven't gone to class all semester, teeth fall out), but I also have dreams that pick up from the previous night's or contain the same places. 

For instance, there is a thriving mall that is often in my dreams and I saw it so vividly the first time that I mapped it out the next morning and saved it so I could compare it to the dreams that followed over the next days and weeks.

My dream life is often far more vivid and exciting than my waking, real life, but it is so extreme and so vibrant that it scares me more than anything else.

Even the bookstore and record store I frequent in my dreams scare me (the mall looks like it could be from the 1980s, but it looks nothing like the mall near me that I have been going to for more than 40 years).

In the bookstore I am often handed (aggressively, I might add) scores of romance novels (often Harlequins) when I am not asking for them and in the record store I am often finding "new" Carpenters albums, which might sound neat on paper, but is exhausting and sad.

My family history is often even more distorted from my real family history, but is chronological from dream to dream. My coworkers appear a lot as well.

Someone I terribly wronged (good intentions or not) decades ago shows up, too, but unlike with what happened in real life, she always seems glad to see me and we are friends. Those are some of my best dreams, but are somehow worse than my most frightening ones, because those good dreams are so far from the truth it's heartbreaking.