# Dreams involving extended disinterest or lack of patience **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [January 1, 2014, 12:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dreams-involving-extended-disinterest-or-lack-of-patience/677630 "2014-01-01T12:50:02Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 19\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![JohnClay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/c37758/32.png) [@JohnClay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JohnClay)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2014, 12:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dreams-involving-extended-disinterest-or-lack-of-patience/677630/1 "2014-01-01T12:50:02Z")
I’m not very knowledgeable about dreams but I’m under the impression that they involve compelling situations. Is it possible to dream you have a boring job to do which takes hours? And can they involve an extended lack of patience? I consider this to be a factual question - either the answers would be “I’m not sure” or “Yes they can exist, I know of an example”. ---
**Author:** ![HoneyBadgerDC](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/honeybadgerdc/32/1033_2.png) [@HoneyBadgerDC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HoneyBadgerDC)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2014, 1:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dreams-involving-extended-disinterest-or-lack-of-patience/677630/2 "2014-01-01T13:23:50Z")
Not sure if it is the same thing John but I would often have work dreams where my opinions were ignored no matter how serious a situation was getting. I would wake up extremely frustrated and angry. I felt like the guy who screamed the sky is falling. ---
**Author:** ![JohnClay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/c37758/32.png) [@JohnClay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JohnClay)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2014, 1:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dreams-involving-extended-disinterest-or-lack-of-patience/677630/3 "2014-01-01T13:27:55Z")
BTW by a lack of patience I mean restless boredom. i.e. the situation isn’t serious. ---
**Author:** ![JohnClay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/c37758/32.png) [@JohnClay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JohnClay)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2014, 1:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dreams-involving-extended-disinterest-or-lack-of-patience/677630/4 "2014-01-01T13:43:56Z")
I’m rewatching Inception… > **[Inception](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inception)** > > Inception is a 2010 science fiction action heist film written and directed by Christopher Nolan, who also produced it with Emma Thomas, his wife. The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a professional thief who steals information by infiltrating the subconscious of his targets. He is offered a chance to have his criminal history erased as payment for the implantation of another person's idea into a target's subconscious. The ensemble cast includes Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Co... > [@](#): > > …in Limbo, the deepest level of all, the planned ten hours of outer-world time would be experienced as almost two centuries… That could involve the boredom that I’m talking about… I wonder if that idea was based on any real experiences. ---
**Author:** ![SerafinaPekala](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecae2f/32.png) [@SerafinaPekala](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SerafinaPekala)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2014, 2:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dreams-involving-extended-disinterest-or-lack-of-patience/677630/5 "2014-01-01T14:09:07Z")
Sure, I have some pretty mundane and boring dreams. Too mundane to even recall the subject. I only remember that I have to purposely wake myself up from them because they are so deathly boring! ---
**Author:** ![JohnClay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/c37758/32.png) [@JohnClay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JohnClay)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2014, 2:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dreams-involving-extended-disinterest-or-lack-of-patience/677630/6 "2014-01-01T14:13:20Z")
> [@SerafinaPekala](#): > > …I only remember that I have to purposely wake myself up from them because they are so deathly boring! So they’re part of a lucid dream (where you know you’re dreaming)? What about non-lucid dreams… ---
**Author:** ![buddha\_david](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/ee7513/32.png) [@buddha\_david](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/buddha_david)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2014, 2:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dreams-involving-extended-disinterest-or-lack-of-patience/677630/7 "2014-01-01T14:17:12Z")
I’ve had dreams about frustration, or getting bogged down in excessive details, or the tedium of micro-managerial work, or the restless anxiety of “Waiting for Godot”, and so on and so forth – but I can’t recall ever having a dream that was genuinely _boring._ My mind tends to wander in real life whenever I’m bored, and so it is in dreams – whenever a dream starts to get dull, the storyline gets shaken up by a sudden tsunami or an invasion by the Judean People’s Front Crack Suicide Squad or something like that. ---
**Author:** ![JohnClay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/c37758/32.png) [@JohnClay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JohnClay)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2014, 2:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dreams-involving-extended-disinterest-or-lack-of-patience/677630/8 "2014-01-01T14:20:36Z")
> [@buddha\_david](#): > > …My mind tends to wander in real life whenever I’m bored, and so it is in dreams – whenever a dream starts to get dull, the storyline gets shaken up by a sudden tsunami… In dreams does your mind just wander without the storyline becoming action-packed? ---
**Author:** ![buddha\_david](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/ee7513/32.png) [@buddha\_david](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/buddha_david)\ **Post date:** [January 2, 2014, 2:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dreams-involving-extended-disinterest-or-lack-of-patience/677630/9 "2014-01-02T02:30:16Z")
> [@JohnClay](#): > > In dreams does your mind just wander without the storyline becoming action-packed? I don’t think I’ve ever been aware of my own thought process within a dream. All I can remember in any dream I’ve had is myself acting, reacting, observing & speaking. There’s always a lot of action (the “sudden tsunami” dream is a major recurring theme) and it’s like when the plot starts to get dull, the dream itself changes into something more interesting. And that’s all assuming that I’m aware of my own presence in the dream at all, or that I haven’t assumed an entirely new persona (such as a secret agent or a rock star) which is actually very common in my dreams. It may be true that my boring dreams are the ones I don’t remember, which is extremely common for anyone who dreams. ---
**Author:** ![LibrarySpy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/f9ae1b/32.png) [@LibrarySpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LibrarySpy)\ **Post date:** [January 2, 2014, 2:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dreams-involving-extended-disinterest-or-lack-of-patience/677630/10 "2014-01-02T02:43:35Z")
However boring the task at hand in my dream is, I’m stressed out to the max. Usually I’m being pursued though. ---
**Author:** ![lost4life](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/c4cdca/32.png) [@lost4life](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lost4life)\ **Post date:** [January 3, 2014, 1:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dreams-involving-extended-disinterest-or-lack-of-patience/677630/11 "2014-01-03T13:53:07Z")
I’ve had some pretty mundane dreams, to the point where I wake up and think “what was the point of that!” Oh, I was naked of course 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![dracoi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/90db22/32.png) [@dracoi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dracoi)\ **Post date:** [January 3, 2014, 6:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dreams-involving-extended-disinterest-or-lack-of-patience/677630/12 "2014-01-03T18:30:49Z")
I have literally dreamed my way through a day of work, only to wake up to the alarm clock and realize that I now have “another” day of work ahead of me. The dream felt long, tedious and exhausting. I woke up at 8 am feeling exactly the same kind of tiredness I would feel coming home at 6 pm. I used to have similar dreams about school. One dream, I got stuck mentally replaying the same level of a video game over and over and over until it was a relief to wake up. And I’ve also had dreams that were a lot like those period pieces in which the extent of the drama is whether salmon can be served with an alternate sauce because the kitchen girl is in love with someone above her class and forgot to get all the right ingredients from the shop. ---
**Author:** ![misling](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/3ab097/32.png) [@misling](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/misling)\ **Post date:** [January 3, 2014, 6:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dreams-involving-extended-disinterest-or-lack-of-patience/677630/13 "2014-01-03T18:49:54Z")
I’ve had dreams that were tedious. But the reason I remember them is, the sense of tedium ‘woke’ me to lucidity, and I realized I was bored with the dream and changed it to something else. I’m assuming if they had stayed tedious and I hadn’t switched to lucid dreaming, I’d have just forgotten them. ---
**Author:** ![Washoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/ecae2f/32.png) [@Washoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Washoe)\ **Post date:** [January 4, 2014, 5:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dreams-involving-extended-disinterest-or-lack-of-patience/677630/14 "2014-01-04T05:32:38Z")
> [@dracoi](#): > > I have literally dreamed my way through a day of work, only to wake up to the alarm clock and realize that I now have “another” day of work ahead of me. The dream felt long, tedious and exhausting. I woke up at 8 am feeling exactly the same kind of tiredness I would feel coming home at 6 pm. I can’t begin to imagine the horror. :eek: Sounds like a good plot for a sitcom, though. But damn—that must _really_ suck. ---
**Author:** ![elfkin477](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/a9a28c/32.png) [@elfkin477](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elfkin477)\ **Post date:** [January 4, 2014, 7:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dreams-involving-extended-disinterest-or-lack-of-patience/677630/15 "2014-01-04T07:02:27Z")
You started two threads about this? ---
**Author:** ![Wakinyan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wakinyan/32/352_2.png) [@Wakinyan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wakinyan)\ **Post date:** [January 4, 2014, 9:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dreams-involving-extended-disinterest-or-lack-of-patience/677630/16 "2014-01-04T09:17:04Z")
It’s not uncommon that people who are depressed have dreams where they are depressed; things are grey, nothing happens, it is just like real life. ---
**Author:** ![JohnClay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/c37758/32.png) [@JohnClay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JohnClay)\ **Post date:** [January 4, 2014, 9:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dreams-involving-extended-disinterest-or-lack-of-patience/677630/17 "2014-01-04T09:38:46Z")
Actually when I was depressed I had really good dreams. BTW apparently depressed people dream up to 3 times more. > **[How depression works - the cycle of depression](https://www.clinical-depression.co.uk/cycle-of-depression-diagram/)** > > Take the fear out of depression by understanding how depression works, and how you can start fighting back today. (BTW their depression program has a no questions asked money back guarantee which I took advantage of since I’m quite stingy) ---
**Author:** ![MaltLiquor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/858c86/32.png) [@MaltLiquor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MaltLiquor)\ **Post date:** [January 4, 2014, 11:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dreams-involving-extended-disinterest-or-lack-of-patience/677630/18 "2014-01-04T11:04:21Z")
I went through this. I love nightmares, really crazy violent ones but they are fantasy enough that when I wake up it was obviously a dream, yet realistic enough that I keep on dreaming. I usually wake up when I figure out it is a dream, gore and creatures and people getting killed is fine, shortly after I get slow motion run, can’t move, or I do something just stupid I wake up. Anyway as a person that so far has had 3 of the most amazing wonderful moments in his life happen in a dream I feel for you. You will get passed it for a few from my experience but it goes back to no dreams or work dreams. I will swear up and down I have never been depressed but I probably have been and maybe I am now. Depression is there for a reason, it makes you question a lot of things. I usually think myself out of depression and then pass out as it is morning of the next day. Your dreams are the product of day in day out hell in a job that is there. You may be doing it just because you have to to do what you think you want…the job that you would like, the job that is not a job. you just have the doldrums and it is coming out in dreams. I found getting another person into my life usually helped. It was another player a dream can be made off of, people from work were there also but as that was basically my life I had very little else to play off of besides books. ---
**Author:** ![Wakinyan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wakinyan/32/352_2.png) [@Wakinyan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wakinyan)\ **Post date:** [January 4, 2014, 12:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dreams-involving-extended-disinterest-or-lack-of-patience/677630/19 "2014-01-04T12:48:04Z")
> [@JohnClay](#): > > Actually when I was depressed I had really good dreams. That is actually “expected” and follows classical (psychological) views on how dreams work, but it is not uncommon to dream that you are depressed when you are depressed which really doesn’t fit different psychoanalytical theories (in lack of better words). But of course, if you are depressed for say a couple of years, with a normal dream frequency (as in dreams one remember), it would be surprising not to have all kinds of dreams. – But in any case, the answer to the OP is “yes”.