I have been having the exact same chasing dream my whole life w/only minor variations at the end. I haven’t had my chasing dream in several years, but when I have it, it is always this:
I am running down a dirt/gravel road away from something (I have never figured out what or whom). I am running toward a large, white, two-story farm house with a porch. This is not a house I can remember ever seeing in real life. As I get closer, I veer off the road and head directly toward the house, across the very large yard. As I run under a tree, something catches my hair. This is where the dream varies. Sometimes it’s just the tree branch. Sometimes I run though a cobweb. Sometimes it’s a snake in the tree that gets in my hair. Then I wake up. I never get caught and I never make it to the house. I never manage to avoid the tree or whatever is in it.
I’m a 48 year old female and I’ve had these dreams since I was a child. They varied–at first it was out of control cars coming after me. When I got a little older it was serial killers and then nazis. I often had the “molasses effect” during the dreams.
They stopped being so frequent when I was in my 30’s but I did have an unusual one where the bad guys from The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover chased me into a corner and a group of terrorists burst from the wall in a “Hey Koolaid” manner and stopped them. I think I might have had my meds readjusted after that.
I had them frequently when I was younger, but rarely nowadays. One of the most terrifying chase dreams I ever had was being chased around our yard by a gigantic turtle that wanted to eat me. A turtle! I would run to the back door, find it locked, and pound frantically for my brothers to open up. They would come to the door and look out the window, but they couldn’t see me, and wouldn’t open the door. By then, the turtle was getting close, and I had to light out, slogging through the molasses around the house to the front door, where I would pound on the door and ring the doorbell. My brothers would look out the window and remark that they couldn’t see anyone, then they would leave, and the turtle would crawl around the corner of the house and fix me with its beady, hungry, reptilian eye, and I would take off for the back door. It was an exhausting dream.
Straight male. I used to have them more frequently when I was younger. The molasses feeling was the trigger to let me know that I was actually dreaming. That’s when I started to explore the lucid dream ideas and try to steer my dreams to places where I thought I wanted them to go. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it worked better than I wanted. Not limited to chasing, but any manner of running toward or away from something.
Nowadays, they don’t come as often. And more usually I get stuck in the molasses and can’t realize the dream enough to wake up. I guess that means my brain is getting old as well. Oh, and the slo-mo thing happens when I dream I’m fighting as well, or trying to use my hands with any degree of dexterity.
Oh, and when it’s not people, it’s never robots for me. It’s usually a big dinosaur type godzilla thing. I guess I’m just old school.
Never anyone chasing me that I recall, but I do often have dreams where I’m running and in a hurry. I just don’t have too many nightmares. If anything, I’m more angry at the fact that I have to run or befuddled because I can’t figure out how to get where I need to go (as I can never backtrack. What’s behind me is always different that it was when I passed through it.)
When you do finally see that house, you’re in for a surprise.
I’ve definitely had the chasing dream where I can’t seem to get my legs to work. Less and less as I get older. Just last night I had a frustration dream where I was trying to do something simple and it didn’t work. Oh yeah, I was trying to shoot the bad guys, who had stolen our camping gear and had rounded up the rest of the party at gunpoint … hmm, not my usual type of dream.
