My father and I are both golfers, and he tells me that he frequently has golfing dreams, but that they invariably revolve around his **not **being able to play golf: the clubhouse has lost his reservation, he can’t find the 1st tee, he forgot to bring golf balls, etc. So, he spends the entire dream trying to play golf but being frustrated at every opportunity.
I get to play in my golf dreams, but my *poker *dreams follow the above pattern exactly. For instance, I get to the casino but there’s a long waiting list, so I go to the bar to wait but then I miss when they call my name and I get bumped to the back of the line so I go to a different casino but their poker room is closed for renovation so I go back to the first place where they have a seat for me but now I’ve lost my wallet, and so on ad infinitum. I dream about poker frequently, but I’ve never gotten to actually play a hand in my sleep.
I can only assume that this type of dream is fairly common. What I want to know is this: what are the kinds of activities that other people have these dreams about? What’s your relation to the dream-subject: is it purely a leisure activity? Do you feel anxious or apprehensive about it in any way? Is it something that’s been going notably well, or poorly? Is it something that you do collaboratively, such that you’re failing to perform might upset or inconvenience others, or is it basically a solo affair (like golf or poker)?
My favorite hobby is shapenote singing (a community singing tradition with early-American roots), and I often have dreams of singings that are about to start but, for some reason or another, never do.
To answer your questions, I don’t have any anxieties about the singing itself, which I love, but I do sometimes have anxiety about a singing as a social event, especially if I’ve been involved in the planning. This is probably a source of the dream-theme.
Frustration dreams are pretty common for me, but I don’t recall them being about any particular theme. I’ve had work-based, home-based, driving-somewhere-based, sex-based.
I have the abject poop dream: I must go, but the bathrooms are always nonexistent, malfunctioning, or my entire 10th grade PE class is milling about watching. I also have the conference paper/important classroom presentation goes pearshaped dream (I absolutely depend on projectors working, so it’s usually technodrama, or I’ve forgotten my notes/text) and the job-interview gone awry dream. Oh, and the “forgot to drop calculus and tomorrow’s the final” one, in which the textbook I would use to learn a damn thing by morning is in the locker to which I’ve forgotten the combo months ago.
My dreams are sometimes frustration dreams, sometimes not, but they always have two main aspects: (1) they’re incredibly vivid visuals, and (2) they flip back and forth between me experiencing them as the participant; then removed as the observer (often when things get scary I remove to observer status).
I like the second aspect best, because its only an experience avialable in dreams, not IRL or in books or movies.
(Fully acknwleding that ther’s nothing more boring than somebody elses’ dream):
Last night I dreamt I was a German teenager in the early 1960’s who’d gotten into trouble with the law, but was sent to Hawaii to serve my sentence. There were some icky scenes when I was the only white kid in the cell, and had to take the bunk next to the toilet.
But in Hawaiian jail, they let you out during the day to surf (at least in ones dreams), so there were some spectacular visuals during that sequence.
Later back at the jail, I was informed via grainy B&W teleconference with Conrad Adenauer that the German authorities wanted the new generation of juvenile delinquents to be “cool,” not suceptible to right-wing indoctrination, so we were shipped to surf city. To assist us, German technology was provided by means of a bulky metal box that was strapped to my wrist which affected my inner ear so I could stay on my board.
For me these kinds of dreams are almost always about my being back in college and having to take an important test, but not being able to find the room and running all over campus and ultimately missing the test. Another version is that I teach in a college (which I really do IRL) and can’t find my classroom and run all over campus looking for it; same thing, with a twist.
I also have the bathroom dreams–I have to go but can’t find one, or I find a toilet but it’s out in the open on the sidewalk of a busy street or something. Then I wake myself up and realize that, in fact, I really do have to go.
99.99% of the time when I have dreams like this; it’s because I need to pee really badly.
The recurring theme I have is that I’m walking through a doorway and the door will shut behind me. Only except I haven’t quite made it over the threshold yet so the door winds up pushing me through. Instinctively, I’ll try to push the door back. This usually turn into a game of [del]tug[/del] push of war. When I look to see who the hell is trying to push the door in on me; nobody is there, it’s an unseen force. A ghost! I tells ya’! :eek:
Sex. Come to think of it, it’s been a while since I’ve had these, but they are fairly common throughout my postpubescent life: I’m at a party or somesuch, and I manage to meet a pretty girl who’s really into me (and at this point it should be obvious that it’s a dream, but I never seem to realize that). We go off in search of a place to be alone (aka, she wants to do it) but we never manage to find anywhere. We go place after place, never being able to find a proper place to do it. It’s quite frustrating. Then I wake up and realize that, oh yeah, nobody wants to do it with me anyway. So now I’m even more frustrated. This is yet another reason why I love smoking pot - it keeps me from dreaming.
Flying. I know I can fly in my dream (like Storm from Xmen or something) but for some reason the best I can do is to hover unsteadily a few feet above the ground. It’s REALLY annoying.
I also have a lot of dreams where I can’t stay awake. It’s weird, but I’ll be walking along in my dream and then I fall over from drowsiness. And then I can’t fully wake up. It’s like the feelng when you’re sitting in class or in a meeting right after lunch and you can’t keep your eyes open no matter how hard you try.
My problem always is that it’s my turn to tee off, yet I can’t find a suitable spot to place my ball. I’ll put it down, and then realize my back swing is hindered, so I’ll move my ball, and then realize something’s blocking my view of the hole. This continues, and continues, and continues, and the other people in my group are growing increasingly impatient with me, and I’m getting more and more frustrated, and embarrassed that I can’t seem to be able to play my ball.
Usually I end up settling for a shitty 1/2 back swing and a crappy 50 yard drive. And then it starts all over again!
My version of a frustration dream is being unable to find my way home. I would be lost in a vaguely familiar place, wandering about to another vaguely familiar place, but just unable to find my way home. Till I woke up, that is.
I’ve read a theory that the “can’t find a bathroom” dreams are pretty much what you describe - your body needs to go, but you aren’t supposed to go in the bed, so that kind of a dream is produced.
Most of my frustration dreams are what you describe - problems with college, maybe not quite as clear-cut as “can’t find the test room” but pretty close to it. Either I’m back there or I had to go back for more schooling for some unknown reason, and there are classes that I’ve never gone to or forgot I had, etc.
I am a big fan of The Who – last night I had a dream about their upcoming Super Bowl performance. The entire stadium was in a frenzy, everyone standing and cheering. Pete’s power chords were deafening, Roger’s voice was in full roar, and they were playing the most amazing version of "Start Me Up" I have ever heard.
I think I’ve had other kinds of frustration dreams, too, but I’m blanking on the content. The sensation of, “Oh I’m about to do this, but–oops!” sounds VERY familiar.
Apart from my golf one above, I also have a recurring frustrating dream where I’m trying to dial a phone number, but keep hitting a wrong number. I just can’t seem to dial all the digits without making a mistake at some random point and then having to start all over again, and ALWAYS with other people watching me and wondering what the hell is wrong with me - just as in my golf dream!
I sometimes dream that i am being cheered by a vast crowd; they want me to sit in on drums with a big name group. I finally allow myself to be talked into playing but when I sit down at huge drum set, I realize that I can’t play drums. Huge embarrassment.
In real life, I couldn’t play drums if I had ten years to learn.
I have frustration dreams pretty often, actually… the subject matter changes depending on what’s going on in my life and what’s might be important enough to frustrate me at that given time.
The most recent one involved a debate with a coworker who refused to understand why we’d need to encrypt a customer’s preference for spicy foods to protect their privacy, even though in my dream I was very passionate about the fact that this was critically important (my most recent project revolved around user permissions, hence the subject matter). I woke up feeling very very annoyed, even though I knew perfectly well it was silly.
One of my favourite version of the frustration dream is one The Boy had right around his bar mitzvah - in his dream, he was standing in a McDonald’s feeling ravenously hungry, but couldn’t order a thing because the entire menu was written in Hebrew.
