This is trivial and probably very niche.
I have always had lots of very vivid dreams, which often infuse the following day with some kind of mood. This is something I like about my brain — even my nightmares please me on some level (once I’ve woken up from them!) because they’re rich and peculiar.
I’ve gone through phases of keeping a dream journal but they never last long, because I remember so much that it takes way too much time out of my life to write everything down! I do keep a more general diary anyway, so if I have a dream that seems especially important / strange I write about it there.
When I dream about people, it’s often fairly easy to work out what was going on, what it was about on a deeper level. Those dreams can alert me to feelings I was unaware of or connections or analogies between different people and experiences. Sometimes dreams about people feel intense / important, but not always.
But I also have lots of dreams that are primarily or entirely about landscapes, which are invariably intense and engaging — they feel completely absorbing whenever I remember them. Occasionally the landscape will be somewhere I know (not usually how it is in real life, but in the dream I know it’s the house I grew up in, a specific country I’ve visited, a city I used to live in etc). Often it’s nowhere I know at all. The dreams are often long journeys through the landscape, without any notable events except reaching the next part of the landscape, though sometimes there's a storyline.
Whenever I remember a landscape dream, I feel a strong urge to revisit it mentally in as much detail as I can — to write down / remember in minute, comprehensive detail everything I can about what was there, as a way of reliving it. It feels compulsive, like an obsessive crush or something. (I don't normally have time to actually do it.)
I assume, from the way I feel about them, that they’re symbolic landscapes, meaningful to me in some way, even the ones I don’t know where they are, and that there might be ways I could reflect on them that would be insightful or help me process emotions etc. But I have no idea where to start.
YABU - no, I don’t have dreams like this
YANBU - I have dreams like this and recognise the feelings!
Any tips on how to turn them into sources of insight rather than distracting daydreams very welcome!