Share your (totally mundane?) recurring nightmares

Just at a very basic level;

Vehicles out of control; Vehicles are a symbol for control in our lives. If you’re not the driver, then you don’t see yourself as being in control. If there is no driver, then you may be surrendering your control of your life, however unconsciously. If someone else is driving, you may see them* as controlling your life.

When the vehicle is out of control, you are afraid of things that are happening in your life that you have no control of, that you cannot prevent or change.

  • The people in our dreams do not necessarily represent the actual people. More commonly they are parts of ourselves symbolically represented by what those people mean to us or aspects of their persons that we find reflected in ourselves.

For example, if Uncle Bob is driving the car, then you might want to look at what Uncle Bob represents to you, the parts of yourself that you find common with him or how you feel about him that may be reflected in some part of yourself.
Nudity; This is a very basic, very common fear of being exposed. Of having your inner self, your ideas and secrets, exposed to the world.
straykat23’s dream of walking endlessly and not making it home is about feeling like you have a very long way to go in order to get somewhere in your life. Impatience with how long it’s taking you to accomplish something and the accompanying feeling that you’re not settled (not ‘home’) until it’s done.
Running From Danger; Whether it be monsters or storms or whatever. It’s about feeling overwhelmed by danger, by possible problems in your life and trying to get away from such things. Seems very “duh!” when explained, but sometimes we don’t make the simple connections between what we’re dreaming and the things going on in our lives.
Haven’t Prepared; Whether in class or at the job. You’re there and you don’t know the materials, you don’t know the work. This is a fear of not being prepared, of being overwhelmed by what you are expected to know, or perhaps more simply, feeling insecure about your class or your job. You don’t know if you really know the stuff you’re supposed to know, you’re afraid that you’ll be “found out” and lose your position. This is a common fear that can affect even the most competent and prepared people.

At a very deep level, you feel like there is something very large and very obvious, right before your eyes, but you just can’t get a grasp on it. It’s overwhelming. It affects your very sense of self, causing the fear and confusion, because you are unable to see what it is.

Yeah, sounds obvious. But you should perhaps see a therapist who can help you work out what this issue is in your life that you are unable to get ahold of.

Because the unconscious mind, which quietly figures out most of the world without our direct supervision, is trying to deal with subconscious fears that we’ve created with our conscious mind.

In your case, I’d say that you are afraid of losing your connection with your fiance.

With the ‘ex-boss’ dream, as stated above, examine the aspects of that person as they relate to you. It may be a fear that those parts of yourself, whether work ethic or social skills or something, probably something that you do not like about yourself (because it’s represented by a person you hate) will or are causing problems between you and your fiance.
And on the flip side;

I got no fucking clue what dreams of teeth falling out really means. Never had that one, don’t quite grok it. I suppose I could get to the bottom of it with some time and discussion with someone who had those dreams.

So what does it mean when you don’t have dreams about nudity, but about something like not wearing shoes instead?

Fish in peril of some kind. Leaking aquarium, too many fish in a pond, more than one male betta in a tank and I have to find alternate containers before they fight to the death, etc. These dreams only happen when I’m stressed out.

Ooooh! I have a variant on the “teeth falling out” dream. It always starts as I feel a single loose tooth. I go to a grungy old fashioned type sink and pull it out with a gross cracky-sucky-pop. Shortly thereafter all of the rest fall out until my mouth is full of disgarded teeth. I continue to cough up teeth in quantities far greater then what would be in my mouth. At the same time, I seem to have regrown my own set and they are catching and grinding against the other teeth that I’m coughing up. I hate that dream. :mad:

Just means you’re a twisted shoe freak. :wink:

No…just kidding. Please be more specific. Do you mean that you’re just walking around with nothing else unusual except that you don’t have shoes on?

That happens to me all the time! (In my dream) I will be in a bathroom, and it’s a huge bathroom, with many stalls, but most of the stalls have really small doors which offer no privacy, or there are 2 or 3 toilets in a stall. The bathroom is always full of people and I can never find a clean toilet, there is always something disgusting on the floor and the seat, and I eventually find a semi-clean one, and sit on it, with everyone staring at me.

I have the school final exam/homework dream all the time too. Once I had a dream that a couple years after I graduated from school, they told me that I failed a class because I didn’t do all of the homework, so they had to take my degree away. After I woke up I was all upset, and it took a couple minutes to realize that it wasn’t really true.

Had a varient on this dream twice in the last few weeks (before that nothing similar)…

I have an ex GF who stalked me for yrs (relationship ended in mid eighties… she actually crashed my wedding to Mrs. FML in 1998). This is the real life part, not nightmare…

In the dream, She has moved in with wife and I. (In real life my wife detests her…) Her and wife are best buddies in dream, and I get nagging in stereo,

Nasty, bitter nagging. (Note: niether one are naggers)

It sounds like a bad sitcom…
sheesh…

FML

I used to stay in motel rooms alot during my trucking career. Some of them were pretty seedy.

The recurring nightmare I had involved me in the motel room late at night reading or watching TV when there is a knock on the door.

I open the door and outside is just darkness. But in the darkness is a shape that is even darker. I then realize with a sinking feeling that I have foolishly put myself in danger and I am completely defenseless. Then I wake up.

I had that nightmare a dozen times. The last time, I conjured up a shotgun and fired it into the darkeness.

Haven’t had it since, and it’s been years.

I have an extremely similar recurring nightmare relating to a horse I had as a teenager - I’ve forgotten that I still own him and I walk to the paddock in dread that I’m going to find him dead. On the occassions that I do find him, he’s in a terrible state - really thin and his hooves are completely overgrown.

I’m very jealous of those that have nice extra room dreams - my extra rooms are always haunted! :frowning:

I had a nightmare in lower school that I got stuck on the subway when coming home from school and rode back and forth all night before getting out the next morning and going back to school. This repeated several times over a half-year period.

The strangest thing about that dream, though, was that I wasn’t freaked out about being stuck in the subway. It was that when I got back to school, my teacher scolded me for not doing my HOMEwork at HOME.

My nightmares aren’t so much recurring as they are continuing. I’ve had several nights where the dream picks up from where it left off last night and then ends at another cliffhanger. It’s kind of nifty. It’s like a horror TV series in a way.

If you have insurance or can afford it, go for it. Just tell your primary care person that you want a sleep study. Here it falls under Pulmonary Medicine I believe.

Chimera, what about the “no usable toilet” dream?

I too have the “missed class” dreams. It’s always the same: it’s just past the middle of the semester, and all of a sudden I realize that I’m registered for some Spanish class and I haven’t been to it all year. I usually wake up and have to go through my schedule three or four times to convince me that it was a dream.

When I was a kid, I had a recurring nightmare that always freaked me out. It would start with my family and I leaving the mall having spent the day shopping. We’d get to the car, when for some reason I needed to go back in. When I turned around, the mall suddenly appeared much more ominous, with a high chain-link fence topped with barbed wire surrounding it. As soon as I got in the door, the whole thing changed to look like one of those old 2D scrolling video games. I would be wearing a red cape, standing inside something that was decidedly not a mall. It was a very dark green background (like the screen on an old old old Apple IIC or IIE) with grayish-white lines that popped out to serve as platforms. I would jump up on them, just like a 2D platformer, until I got to the middle of the “mall.” When I arrived there, I would be confronted by a single, black and white, disembodied eye that looked exactly like the giant painting on the side of David Copperfield’s trailer. I’d leap towards it, and then bam, I’d wake up. I hated that dream.

Something happening to my teeth (knocked out, falling out, rotting away).

I had another one this morning that combined some of the more frustrating recurring elements. It was some sort of Social Studies test being given by my high school French and Social Studies teacher Mrs. Dempsey. First the questions were written on the blackboard in illegible scrawls. The questions that I could read I knew I had no answer to. Then I looked again and the questions were erased and Mrs. Dempsey was thinking up others on the spot and writing them out. Of course I couldn’t find any paper or pens and even if I could I had no answers to the questions.

Then it became true that one of the answers involved online chat and the other students were clustered around the terminal so I couldn’t get any credit on that. It was like 11 PM and I still wasn’t clear what the questions were. At one point I had a flash of inspiration about writing one of the essays but by the time I found some scrap paper the question had changed. At one point I said “Well, I guess I’m going to fail” and in a way it felt good to say that out loud!

Mr. Neville might agree, just from the number of pairs of shoes I have…

Yes, that’s it. And it’s somehow totally unacceptable to not be wearing shoes, and I can’t tell anybody I don’t have my shoes and ask them to help me, because they’d just punish me for not wearing shoes.

I can only figure that this is one of those “Sometimes is cigar is just a cigar” dreams. Meaning that it is what it is; anxiety about being able to locate CLEAN toilets in public places.

While I don’t have the dreams, I certainly share the fear. I go out of my way to locate such places and then keep them locked into my radar. When I drove armored, I had a short list of places that were clean enough for me and would turn around and drive clear across my route to get to one of them if the need suddenly arose.

In my current job, there are only two restrooms I trust, both in out-of-the-way places in newer buildings.

I’m wondering if the clean toilet thing is gender-specific. 'Cause I (male) don’t even think of it in real waking hours, let alone in dreams. You gotta go, you gotta go.

There you go. Somewhere, somehow, you have issues with shoes. You feel that you need to have a lot of them because you have a fear of not having any, which would somehow be wrong.

This might seem out in left field, but perhaps you should consider working with or donating money to a charity that provides shoes to the impoverished, or special shoes to those with special needs.

That might have something to do with it. We males can urinate standing up, so the cleanliness of the toilet is only an aesthetic thing in those instances. But women have to sit down all of the time, which can lead to more anxiety about the cleanliness of public toilets.

I never thought about the gender aspect of the toilet dream. Any males have that dream? And is it just Americans?

gigi: Fortunately, I have very good insurance and plan on looking into the sleep study. I need to find out how much it will cost me with deductible plus any other portion I’ll have to pay, but it sounds like it might be worth it.