I get this dream every so often, maybe once or twice a month, always just before waking up. I’m in some form of academic setting, either an exam room, or a college hall in front of an exam room. I’m either in the middle of a written exam, or ushered into an oral interview. I suddenly realize that I have no idea what the test is about. I haven’t done the work, or the research, or read book one in the reading list. As I look around, I see everyone writing diligently, and I have absolutely no clue as to what to write myself (or what the hell the interviewer is talking about). Despair takes over.
But that’s not the annoying part.
The annoying part is I generally wake up at this point. And I look at the bedside clock, see it’s 9, or 10, or even 11 AM and the residual panic from the dream is still there. I race from the bed, convinced I’m late for the exam, get dressed in .05 seconds (without a shower, a breakfast or matching socks) and am barely out the door when I realize… I finished college years ago. I even celebrated the last exam of my existence. I work from home, without fixed hours. I chose to live and work that way specifically so there would be no “I’m late, I’m late !” stress in my life.
Dreams can go and hang themselves.
Do y’all have that kind of annoying, recurring dreams that have nothing to do with your current life ?
Now, this is where being a lucid dreamer is awesome. I used to have nightmares like this, now I think, “this is a dream, I can do whatever I want!” Usually I do something crazy, like shoot laser beams out of my eyes and fly into space. Sometimes I brainwash the professor so he gives me an A. Then when you wake up, and if you know you’re dreaming you always wake up soon, there is no panic.
I had my usual recurring nightmare last night. The settings and people change, but the premise is that I either have to run or hide because a man is looking for me and if he catches me he will kill me. I get the dream a lot when I’m under stress. One time I killed the man, and that was a really horrible feeling on waking, but I didn’t have the dream for a long time after that. The dream’s come back now though.
I had one where all my checks were bouncing. I woke up and sat there wondering how I was going to get more money to put into my account, then recalled that I had deposited $400 the other day and there was no way I’d written out that much in checks in two days time. So, yeah, dreams can go string themselves.
I used to have a dream where I was at the end of my last semester and then realized that I hadn’t taken class X all semester and wasn’t going to graduate. The part that amuses me is in the dream I’m so confident (arrogant?) of my abilities that I shrug it off and say “screw it, I’m so good I’ll get a job anyway.”
I sometimes have dreams where I’m performing in a play. Except, it belatedly occurs to me, I have no idea what my lines are, or what the play’s about. I go ahead and fake it.
I have two like this: One is that I’m in college and have signed up for a class but completely forgotten to go to class, do any of the readings, or turn in the assignments, and the final is coming up. In my dream I never actually make it to the final–I just get incredibly stressed out about the fact that I’ve completely forgotten about the class until it’s too late.
The second involves the gaming convention I used to go to every year. They have a big dealer’s room, and one of the things I enjoyed the most about the con was prowling around this room looking at all the stuff and buying things I want. In the dream, the convention is about to be over (last day, they’re starting to do teardown/cleanup) and I realize that I’ve forgotten to go to the dealer’s room–and now it’s too late. I don’t have this one much anymore since I don’t go to that con anymore.
This reminds me of the time before I was master of my dreams. I had this nightmare wherein it was discovered that I didn’t really graduate High School, because I never took a certain class! Then it’s time for that class’s final, and I didn’t even know what the class was!
But the worst nightmare I’ve ever had was… just feelings. A feeling of hopeless dread mixed with responsibility. I felt like I did something that doomed everyone, and there’s no way to fix it, we’re all going to die, and it’s my fault. I haven’t had that dream for many years, though.
I hate the ones where my teeth are shattering apart in my mouth. Ugh. Fortunately, those only show up a couple of times a year–the usual just involves people coming after me for various reasons.
… As far as I know, neither of those has anything to do with my life.
Mine is sort of like this, but even more rococo. Somehow, someone discovers that I never took American Government in high school (it’s always the same class). And since I didn’t finish my high school requirements, they’re going to take away my diploma, which means they’re going to take away my bachelors’ degree, which means they’re going to take away my Ph.D. (For some reason my JD - the only degree that Government might be sort of kind of relevant to - is never in danger.) But I can stop it all if I just take and pass Government this semester. But I’m about to fail it, because I can’t manage to get out of bed in the morning consistently to make it to an 8AM class.
I used to teach college classes, so I get the added benefit of sometimes being the unprepared student and sometimes being the unprepared teacher. Whee! Oh, and also the ones where I’m in a play and haven’t learned the part.
I hate the ones where I’m trying to get dressed and nothing in my closet is quite right.
I had a tooth-crumbling dream once. I went to spit out the bits and ended up with a handful of teeth, nuts, and washers. I looked at them and wondered what it might mean, because I knew I was dreaming. As I woke up, my dream self thought, “Oh. Right. The regular teeth have to come out before the fangs can grow in.”
Never did have a dream where I had fangs, though. At least not that I can remember. Pity.
My anxiety dreams are much different from all of yours. In mine, some stupid mundane action repeats over and over and over, like a door opening and closing or a person making a chess move and taking it back a thousand times. I get so frustrated that the repetitive motion wont stop that I sometimes wake myself up screaming in anger.
I sometimes have a dream where I’m back in high school, and I suddenly have no idea what my classes are or where they are. I want to get the schedule out of my locker, but I can’t remember where the locker is, or even where the office is to get help. This is pretty strange, because I graduated from high school over 30 years ago.
Most recently, I’ve been having a recurring one, every couple of weeks, where I’m out on the streets in some anonymous, bleak Paris suburb (although the setting is always more hilly than Paris really is) and I’m trying to go somewhere by train or Metro, only I can’t. Sometimes my ticket is no good, sometimes I make it to the platform but the train never shows, sometimes it’s too late at night and the station is closed, but I always seem to be in a location where the street is completely empty of people or traffic, and there are no bars or cafes open, so I end up just walking down an endless avenue lined with anonymous dark and shuttered buildings. I wake up filled with nameless dread every time I have it.
I’m pretty sure I know where this comes from: a confabulation of two incidents back in the mid-90’s, one where me and my sister had to walk from Nation to Denfert-Rochereau late one night because we’d gone the wrong direction on the last Metro and I had no money for a cab; and 2) a time I had to walk from the suburb of Le Blanc Mesnil all the way to the city due to a transit strike. Nothing particularly traumatic about either one, but for some reason or another they really got embedded in my subconscious.
That’s at least somewhat better than the other one I seem to have regularly, in which I’m desperately trying to pee in some horrible toilet, where everything is broken and there is piss and shit everywhere, kind of like the famous scene with Ewan MacGregor in Trainspotting.
I used to have one a while ago where everybody would get some strange virus from looking at a specific painting. So of course, I had about fifty copies of the painting around the house while I had to run upstairs for no apparent reason.
I once had a dream that I was made to pee while sitting on a stepping stool. I’ll regret posting this later, won’t I?
My main anxiety dreams, yes, seem to revolve around things from my past being true again. I’m back in high school, I still have to worry about seeing a certain person, etc.
EDIT: Oh! My brother once told me about a dream he had where the kitchen cabinet kept sloooowly opening, and every time this happened an eerie, deep noise resonated from the piano, and everything froze for a moment. That creeped me out, for sure.
