I keep having a dream about walking up these perfectly shaped concrete blocks on some structure on another planet, I look up when I get to the top and see two moons, one with some giant oil derrick thing on it and then I feel a really intense creeped out feeling and wake up. The atmosphere of the dream is gloomy, like the lighting during an eclipse and overcast skies, it feels like I am on an alien world or something, but its empty. I’ve had this many times over the years and always thought a movie or video game influenced it, but its not like any of them. Had it again recently. No big life changes or anything.
What are your strange recurring dreams?
[Moderating]
Dreaming isn’t really an art form, so this would work better in our IMHO forum. Moved.
I find myself living in a HUGE house living with a bunch of spoiled college aged children that I absolutely hate.
And the guy that owns the house is a rich old man that couldn’t care less about his spoiled rotten children.
I’ve had some recurring dreams that others have also had, such as taking a college course and not having studied enough or attended enough lectures for the final exam. But a recurring dream that’s probably specific to me is where I’m at a campfire and I’ve forgotten to bring the marshmallows.
If I have to go the bathroom IRL while sleeping, I dream about urinating in inappropriate places because I can’t find an appropriate place. I even go into bathrooms and there are no toilets. Then I wake up and go to the bathroom.
I have a dream about enrolling in a college course and forgetting to go to class all semester and then realize I have to take a final (pleased to meet you EmilyG). I went to college 38 years ago and still have this dream. (However, I did once miss a final exam and failed the class as a result. I missed that the prof had changed the schedule for his class’s final from the published finals schedule.)
I also have a recurring dream that I am in my house, except this is a dream-only house that I have never been in IRL. But I see the same house in multiple dreams.
I often dream of being lost in
a shopping mall
a large office complex
a school campus
I walk around and around and recognize the different places I see but can’t quite work out the correct turn / staircase / door to use.
I also have anxiety dreams about driving on the freeway. IRL I drive one every day and it doesn’t faze me in the least but in my dream I can see it in the distance and I’m filled with dread.
I’ve had a regularly recurring theme of a dream of moving back to San Francisco pretty much ever since I moved back east from there. Several times a year I’ll have a dream that I’m either about to move back to San Francisco or I’ve already moved back … or sometimes both in the really epic dreams.
I don’t remember my dreams very vividly anymore, except for these ones.
They’re so hard to explain though. It’s been over fifteen years since I lived there and the memory bank is a little withered, so even though I’m in San Francisco, it’s always some strange compressed version of the city, like a video game set in San Francisco or something, hardly ever an exact duplicate except for specific places, things and times. The dream almost always features me moving into a new apartment on a long street on the top of a hill. It’s pretty much an amalgam of every apartment I’ve ever lived in. And I always end up taking a walk down the hill to a big open market area and then I usually end up getting lost on the subway. But I’ve been on many adventures in dreamland San Fran.
These dreams always seem to last hours and span weeks if not months of time so I’m not really sure I manage to pretzel my brain around it, but I love them. I look forward to the dream; I’m always in a good mood when I wake from it.
I dream about rivers and streams and overflowing fountains.
• The “school” dream so often reported by others, but with this variation: it’s not that I forgot to go to class all semester, it’s that I started blowing off one course (still showing up for it but not having done my reading and research) then started blowing off another and soon am not in reaching distance of a passing grade in any of them, and have the frustrating realization that I’m not gonna make it in academia (yet again… as if I’ve tried and retried to scrape through and get my degree or something)
• the “naked” dream also so often reported but with this variation: that I’ve set off go to somewhere (across campus or to the post office or whatever) and realize “Aww gee, I shoulda put on clothes” but decide to act nonchalant and brazen it out; but folks’ reactions get more and more intense and hostile and it starts to look like a spectacularly bad situation.
• the “can’t run” dream once again apparently widely shared: my feet are slipping and I’m making no progress; in desperation I kneel and begin trying to haul myself forward gripping the ground and yanking myself forward but it’s horribly slow going and there’s some imperative reason I need to get somewhere before something bad happens or something bad catches me from behind (isn’t it always like that?) and this isn’t adequate at all.
• the not-quite-Superman dream: nope, can’t fly, but I can sort of…swim through the air. With a fair amount of thrashing and kicking I am up in the air and clasp a tree limb 40 feet up. This is fun! I also do it indoors quite a bit, ascending or descending flights of stairs without touching down except once every 20 steps or so, or going over balcony railings and sailing out over the next level quite a ways before gently touching down.
• the gravity-inverty dream: I’m walking on the ceiling, and have to step around lighting fixtures (especially those damn chandeliers) and haul myself over those divider-thingies between rooms that come to knee level when you’re walking on ceilings. Again, quite fun to be up here.
In my dreams when I have to pee, I am always away from home in an unfamiliar place, looking for a bathroom. There will be a lot of false turns, but if I do finally find a bathroom it will be out of order or something. This goes on, with the need getting more and more urgent, until I wake up and go.
I used to think that if I actually peed in the dream, then I would also pee in real life while asleep and wet the bed. This turned out not to be true.
One of mine is poking around my house for some reason, and discovering a giant attic space, or basement room we didn’t know about. In some cases I’ll discover whole musty floors of the house that have been closed off for who knows how long.
Yes, and yes. I used to have the “go into a communal bathroom with a bazillion stalls and there’s something wrong with each one” but now it’s more wandering through a house and seeing things that should be toilets but don’t end up being, and peeing in them anyway.
Less frequently than soon after she died, I have dreams that I’m not sure if my mom is still alive or not. I think it’s my mind not being able to accept that she’s really dead.
I don’t have a single recurring dream, but I do have a recurring theme. I call them “place” dreams. They can border on nightmare.
In my dream, I’m somewhere, usually a domicile/dwelling, but occasionally outside, on a road, or trail in the woods.
In any case, where/whatever my dreamscape geographical loci, it’s someplace that’s composed of familiar elements of places I’ve been before, but is still new/strange to me. I get this growing sense of unease as I feel I should know this place, or where I am at, and in my dream I move around/wander looking for things I should see/recognize, but I can’t find it/them.
Just last night, I had another one of my “escape from a concentration camp” dreams. 
I have similar, but usually the facilities are grotesquely filthy, like Renton’s hallucination from Trainspotting. Ugh.
Then there are the orgy dreams. Those are considerably more fun. 
The oddest, though is that I’ve had a long series of dreams that are unrelated except that a white tour bus shows up in them; sometimes I’m riding in it, sometimes it’s just there in the background. A white tour bus. Haven’t a bleedin’ clue what that might be about.
It’s a couple of months into the semester. I realize I haven’t attended a single lecture for one of the courses I signed up for, and haven’t turned in any assignments. It’s too late to drop out. It’s much too late to catch up.
I still have variations of this dream, even though I graduated 20 years ago. (It’s only been 13 years since grad school, but the dream feels more like undergrad than grad school.)
I used to have those dreams too, it gave me a feeling of the night before christmas, the giddy anxiety, then completely filled with fear.
I still have those but my brain has compensated by adding a part where I remember I already graduated and I’m OK. The relief is amazing.
In the past when I have fallen asleep with the radio on, I have dreamed I am trying to turn off the music but it won’t stop (because I am hearing the real music seeping through). I rip the plugs out of the wall but it just won’t stop!
Well, I had a variant of that this morning. I had the A/C on and in the dream I kept trying to turn it off and it just wouldn’t!!
That still often happens to me.
This Top Secret clip is worth sharing again.