My dreams tend to be more random than strange, so when I wake up I can usually remember only snippets and can’t link them into a story.
However, a particularly vivid dream I had maybe a year or so back prompted me to open a Word doc and record as much as I could remember. It concerned an ex-girlfriend and although I couldn’t remember dialogue (actually I never can) there was enough clear visual detail and ‘storyline’ to make it worth noting down. But even if I had quite vivid recollections when I woke up, by the time I’d finished typing it made up maybe a third of a page.
A couple of nights ago I had a series of really intricate, almost compelling dreams, although their subject matter had nothing to do with my real life in terms of places, events and people. What amazed me was that typing it up accounted for 2 full pages of A4 at 12pt text. It was just a staggering amount of detail that I could remember even though – because it seemed a bit superfluous – I left out quite a bit of ‘scenery’ detail.