I haven’t had the “missing the final exam” dream for ages, but instead I recently had the “unprepared for the FIRST day of class”. I’m a college instructor, and I dreamt that I didn’t have a textbook or syllabus prepared, and the classroom was full of bright and eager students. Scary!
Likewise. Either I can’t find one, or it’s out of order, or missing, or disgusting, or the door won’t shut, or just as I’m about to go I realise it’s not a toilet, but a chair, and I’m in a room full of people or on the front porch in front of God and everybody…
Interesting, I thought I was the only one to have these dreams. One time, the restroom was a giant locker room and all of the toilets were in a circle in the center facing outwards… no doors, no partitions, only inches of separation, and everyone sat on the benches watching… other people were using the toilets but I just couldn’t bring myself to. I considered using the showers instead, but they were being monitored.
Sometimes the restroom is a loooong hallway, and every time I open a stall to go it, it is completely disgusting, so I move on the to the next, all the way down the hall.
Sometimes the restroom is a labyrinth, you need to walk through stalls to get to other stalls, and sometimes the toilets are separated and sometimes not, and I wander the maze looking for a private toilet that is also not disgusting and has toilet paper, often having to turn around when I find an already occupied toilet.
Seriously, I have these dreams a lot. Probably my most common reoccurring dream.
I have them pretty much every time I have to pee while I’m asleep. I need to train myself to just wake up.
When this happens to me, and I actually do find somewhere to pee in my dream, I invariably feel unsatisfied when I’m done peeing, so I’m plainly not peeing myself in real life. 
On a par with not being able to find a place to pee is not being able to find a place to make out with the cute girl who is seriously up for it. Often even as I start looking I become aware that I’m dreaming and I just know I’m going to wake up before the fun starts. Bah. :mad:
I’ve never had the teeth crumbling dream.
I have frequently dreamed that I have a bunch of rooms in my house that I never knew were there - this is always a good dream and I enjoy looking at the stuff that was left behind, or plan what I will buy to put into those rooms.
But I have dreamed that there’s a whole room full of lab rats that I forgot to feed and water (usually at the lab, but once I dreamed that this room was in my house!) - this was during the time that this was my actual job (lab animal tech). I continued to have this dream occasionally for some years after I no longer held the job. I also have had dreams about being a waitress, long after I quit my waitress job. In one of those dreams I got so many customers all at once that I could not handle it, and I threw down a tray full of beers and walked out, saying “I quit!”
My flying dreams: I am never flying high, more like gliding along without touching the ground.
I haven’t been in college for years, but still dream about totally forgetting that I had even signed up for some of my classes to the point that I look on my registration form and see 2 or three classes that I never attended and realize it’s too late now to withdraw without penalty and that I will have to take a failing grade in all of them because I will be unable to catch up by reading or trying to take any tests in those classes. Usually these are classes like accounting and business stuff (some of which I did take in college and found to be extremely dull).
One dream that I think nobody’s mentioned yet: I have dreamed that I am having sex with somebody I know in real life, but who is totally unappealing to me sexually, but in the dream he/she somehow is appealing enough. But when I wake up, the person is once again unappealing, but I feel soiled somehow by the vivid memories of the dream where I was enjoying getting it on with him or her.
I also dream that I am looking all over a parking garage trying to find my car. Or that I am walking in a familiar neighborhood but the streets are all different than I remember and I am totally lost. In both these types of dreams, I never do find my car or my way.
I don’t remember ever dreaming that I am in a car that’s out of control. I have had the needing to pee dream and finding only crummy toilets that nobody would want to use.
I have a somewhat similar dream about houseplants - I have to water them all, and they’re all over the house in weird places, and I’ve forgotten to water them and they’re dying, etc. It’s a very frustrating dream for some reason.
I was supposed to water a friend’s plants for a month when she was out of town. I faithfully did my watering, but when she came back, there was one plant in some out of the way place in the apartment that I had never watered and it had died. This was long before I had the lab rat job. I wonder if that’s why I was dreaming about forgetting all about something that I was supposed to do?
Another dream/nightmare that I had for awhile was that spiders were crawling on my face or in my bed. This dream was very realistic because it was always the same bed that I sleep in, and the dreams happened while I was asleep, so that the only difference between reality and dream was the existence of the crawling spiders. Once I was screaming so much that my husband woke up and I insisted he help me find the spiders and kill them before I could go back to sleep. We looked all over the bedroom - no spiders to be found.
Once I dreamt it was the first day of school…and I spent half an hour in class before I realized I was no longer in grade school…so I high-tailed it to High School, then again to College, etc.
Crumbling teeth?
That is happening to me FOR REAL RIGHT NOW!
My lower right molar chipped off a quarter of the crown (still intact pulp).
Required dentist to drill deep and install screws into the dentin as anchors for the artificial tooth material.
Sleep Tight.
In my most terrifying version of the teeth dream, it seemed so real, so…REAL! I was praying that I would wake up as I had in the past and find that it was all just a dream. And in fact that is what happened. Relief was short-lived however, because upon awaking I found that my teeth were in fact crumbling, and all the dream-induced fear that had seemed so frightening in the past had finally come true. But then, I awoke from that dream, the dream within a dream, and literally screamed aloud as I realized I was okay.
My dreams of this nature involve going to the first day of class all prepared with my syllabus and finding that it’s actually the final exam, and I haven’t met with the class all semester.
I always like my Secret Maze dreams. I will be in a large and elaborate dream building, and progressively discover hidden entrances into quite confined spaces that serve as crawlways to other areas in the building where I discover another set of hidden entrances and so on.
The narrative of the dream requires me to use these connected hidden pathways repeatedly to navigate my way around the building, notwithstanding that there are obviously conventional ways of getting about. Sometimes the crawlway will open up to reveal whole hidden apartments, beautifully maintained and decorated, whose existence I note as potentially useful but which I seldom seem to exploit.
The atmosphere of the dreams is quite fun. I am not hiding from anyone; rather the sense is one of amused and curious exploration. For some reason, there always seems to be an obligation to retrace the same secret route many times, as if to get it “right”.
In a completely different class of dreams, a weird thing that sometimes happens is that I will dream about a place that exists in real life and with which I am thoroughly familiar (the house of a friend or relative, etc) yet the version in the dream is utterly unlike the real version, and, in-dream, I am totally unaware that my real grandmother’s house (for example) was nothing like this. Why does my brain create the narrative necessity for a place to be my grandmother’s house, yet instead of easily plugging in memories of the real thing, go to all the trouble of creating a completely different building/neighbourhood altogether? Bewildering, but fun.
Oh, and tick to the flying dream (most excellently happy dream there is) and to the naked-and-unprepared dream. I suspect that the reason no-one else in the latter dream seems to notice the nakedness is that the emotional tone of the dream is anxiety, and if someone in the dream actually noticed the nekkid, the anxiety would crystallise in a sense into something else, like embarrassment, that would resolve the anxiety.
Yes to both of those. And I don’t even own a car anymore.
The bathroom dream I have a lot. It tends to involve several public bathrooms, with toilets either occupied, not working, or the door is missing. Sometimes when I finally decide that I can handle peeing in front of women, it turns out that the bathroom is unisex and men start wandering around. The worst one that I had recently, I had gotten down to business in an area that was sort of open, but no one was there when I sat down; when I was ready to finish, a guy had come in and was waiting on me. No way I was going to wipe & pull up my pants in front of him.
Teeth crumbling I have occasionally, but it’s part of a different pattern of dream. In this dream, I have something grainy in my mouth - maybe crumbling teeth, maybe some extra dry food, or who knows, but I can’t get it out of my mouth. I spend this entire dream trying to rinse my mouth out - get a mouthful of water, swish, spit, and there’s still just as much … whatever … as before. :shudder: I usually wake up to find I’ve been sleeping with my mouth open.
When I was a kid, there was one house I visited in my dreams several times. Somehow these dreams stopped when I was older. I miss that house.
I attended a therapy seminar several years ago, and one of the assignments was to imagine a house. This house was meant to represent our inner self, and the leader had us visualize different rooms to represent different parts of our life. All I remember is that the kitchen represented friendship, because I “saw” a lot of kitchen tools that I didn’t know how to use, even though I knew what they were.
I also have the naked in public dreams, but I’m always very practical in them - Ok, I’m naked, so what else is new.
Question for the people have naked dreams, do you sleep in the nude?
I don’t have the “unprepared for a test” dreams. I have dreams about not going in to work, and realizing about halfway through the day that I didn’t tell anyone that I wasn’t coming in.
My recurring dream is what I call a wandering dream.
Type one I’m just wandering around seeing things. No rhyme or reason, just walk this way and I see a dog, walk that way and there’s something else interesting. Sort of like the expanded house dreams, but outside. Occasionally, this will involve driving a car - when a car is involved, I will usually hit one section that I can’t cross with the car, so I get out and walk on foot. But when I get past that section, my subconcious realizes that it left the car back there, and I go back to the point where I left the car - this part loops until I wake up. :smack:
Type two I’m trying to get home from somewhere. It almost always involves starting at a real place in my hometown, trying to get to the house I lived in in HS, and a distance that I might not be able to finish walking before it gets dark.
No. I’ve tried it, and I can’t do it. I have to have at least a tank top and boxers on or I keep waking up, startled by my own nakedness.
My subconscious is confused about my coming year as a student teacher - it had me going back to school as a pupil last night (there was a technicality… while I have a maths degree, I am too old to have sat the high school GCSE so I obviously had to go back and get one :smack: 
:dubious: ).
Later, not really in the same dream, I was explaining something mathematical and I started writing down the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4… except that every time, although I was saying the numbers out loud while writing them, I could not write them in the same order I was speaking. :smack:
I don’t get naked or school dreams any longer, I get the teeth one, and when I need to wake up and pee I get the unsuitable bathroom dream [no privacy, toilet clogged and full to the brim, no available stalls or just plain no bathroom available in the location]
On the other hand, I absolutely love flying dreams, I am a ‘swimmer’ type flyer. Probably why I love scuba diving so much
About that flying dream, which I get every once in a while: I don’t take off running and leap forward with arms extended, like Superman, but instead, while walking normally I simply will myself up into the air. Before I do so, I always take great pleasure in knowing that those around me are going to be amazed at my unique ability, but no one ever seems to notice.
Reading the later posts reminded me of other dreams I share:
Out of control elevator-The strange thing is the elevator is not always DROPPING out of control. Sometimes it is RISING out of control. In one dream it shot out the top of the building and landed in a deep hole in the ground. I never get hurt in these dreams.
Flying-I don’t take off in a leap, Superman style. I just slowly start to float upwards. It’s so gradual that I don’t notice until I’m about at treetop level. Then I panic, because I realize that I don’t know how to do this.
Can’t stop the vehicle-Mine is always something large, like a bus or truck. And I can stop it, but it takes an extraordinary amount of effort, like putting my entire body weight on the pedal.
I also have a recurring stolen car dream. It’s not any particular car I’ve owned. It spans several of them. In real life I have never had an obsession with having my car stolen. I just pay my insurance and forget about it.