I've had a number of bizarre dreams over the years, but of course they typically don't seem strange while dreaming, it's only in the waking state that they seem strange.
One odd dream was with my root teacher, who's a master of dream yoga and sleep. We were on retreat and I had brought a rare rasayana for him as a gift. The night after I gave it to him, he appears in a lucid dream in which we are in a particular situation where I'm standing directly next to his teaching throne and he tilts it to show me the opened jar and how he'd used a spoon to scoop out the rasayana in a certain pattern, so it's scraped out like a little bowl. The day after I gave it to him I was waiting to see him in line. As soon as the person in front of me walks away, he leans over picks up the jar, tilts the jar and holds the spoon just like in the dream. As I look inside it's exactly like the dream. The instant he sees my startle, he breaks out into a huge smile and a sense of unified spaciousness and warmth covers everything. The question I had, is gone. With nothing to say and everything I needed gained. I just smile, bow and walk away. He continues on as if nothing happened. One of the stranger series of dreams I've had surrounds UFO sitings I had with a group of family and friends when I was a young teenager. They developed over the course of my life. At the point they began to have stronger significance, I had dreams over several nights, each dream in sequence, picking up where the other one left off. The odd thing was, in recollecting them after the sequence had completed, I could ONLY remember them as one continuous whole, as if they had arisen out of something more unified, that had no break in continuity. Very strange. When I was first learning to do a form of nondual contemplation called "the shattering of tensions", I would often find myself in dreams where I was challenged to perform this style of practice in the dream. The dynamic was usually where some set of repeating karmic patterns presented themselves in the dream; this might mean being in a "room" where certain phenomenon would repeat to the point of being very annoying. I eventually learned that if I applied the technique at the precise moment the annoyance crescendoed, the dream elements would "freeze" in time and I could then transform the dream or allow the individual karmic constructs which made up the dream, dissolve back into the void, liberating the patterns that held them in place. That's one of the ways I was taught nondual contemplation. On waking I just immediately understood how to do the practice in waking state, a point that had alluded me before. In the dream state you're not a hampered by time, you can even play dreams in reverse or examine individual dream elements. Once one could shatter the constructs of the dreams, you could reduce it to a bare presence, even less than a 'witness', just a permeating clear presence. Those are some of the tamer examples. Some are simply too bizarre to share on a public list.
