It’s control anxiety and it comes in different forms. For me, when I have concerns about career or achievement being out of control, it’s an out-of-control elevator (but interestingly, when it’s going well, it’s a rocketship). If it’s concern over life events in general then it’s a car and I can’t reach the controls because I’m in the back seat or otherwise oddly situated. If I feel like I’m on the brink of absolute failure (career, status, or just being alive), then it will be a crashing airliner.
So, control-related anxiety dreams. I’m sure they manifest differently for others depending on their own cultural symbols of control, but they tend to have the same general feel.
One time (while I actually was serving) a friend came into the wardroom and said “I just had the weirdest dream!”
Me: I know what your dream was about. Him: How can you know what it was about? I haven’t even told you what it was. Me: Doesn’t matter. I know what it was about. Him: OK, fine. What was it about? Me: It was about your deep-rooted feelings of sexual inadequacy. Him: Oh, very funny. Me: Fine, tell me the dream. Him: Well, I was Officer of the Deck up on the conning tower and the submarine was in a really narrow channel. I needed to dive, but I couldn’t make the boat dive and the channel kept getting narrower. Me: I was just messing with you, but that really was about your deep rooted feelings of sexual inadequacy!
I don’t think I’ve ever had any elevator dreams. But in reading the OP, to me it sounded like the elevators in Star Trek, on the USS Enterprise NCC-1701. I think they’re called turbo lifts or something like that.
I have had military dreams, like I am back in and it is during current times. But I haven’t served in 30 years. And it’s funny, but they come in waves — I’ll have those dreams on successive nights. Fortunately they are good dreams. Or at least they’re not nightmares.
I never have elevator or pee dreams. But I have dreams where I am in college and have to get to a building where my final is being given. I am totally unprepared and cannot find the building.
I get the one with a room full of toilets with no stall walls, or three foot high walls, despite never having seen one such in my life. (But I don’t wake up having to go.) Surprising it is so common. I assume people from countries with different toilet setups don’t have that one?
Funny, I was just posting in the pit about a recent pee dream! Here is the pertinent part:
Next, I had to go to the bathroom. I went into the restaurant’s bathroom, found a stall, used it…and when I looked up, realized the ceiling was open and a couple of young men on a balcony overhead were filming me. I mooned them and told them to enjoy whacking off about it later, but they thought it was all quite hilarious.
My mind has been quite creative in the past with dreaming different ways to keep me from peeing the bed…filthy toilets, no paper, no privacy, etc. But now it’s going to let me pee and shame me afterwards?! That’s just mean.
A good (?) thing is that my academic anxiety dreams are gradually being replaced by job trauma dreams.
My radio announcing/DJ shift is haunted by the fact that there is no decent music to play - instead, the files yield only how-to albums, historical narratives, Dinah Shore songs etc. Ghastly. On top of that, a newscast is coming up and the wire service teletype is churning out utter garbage - no news summaries or weather forecasts.
The alternative is pathology nightmares. I walk into the cutting area to see what specimens will yield the next day’s slides, and there are long long rows of complex anatomic specimens. Or there will be stacks of slide trays extending up towards the ceiling. Worse, a crucial portion of a specimen is missing.*
Never had an elevator dream.
*this one may stem from an actual incident during residency when I was dissecting a hysterectomy specimen, and a small ovary slipped from my gloved hand, bounced twice and did a perfect nothing-but-net dive down the sink drainage hole. We got it back, but the plumber probably was not enchanted with the job.
I “trained” myself so that when I have the pee dream, I’ll get out of bed and go to the bathroom. It’s annoying that once I sit on the actual toilet, I then have to “convince” myself that I’m REALLY on the toilet, and it’s okay to go!
The dream toilets are always without privacy, low doors or no doors, people milling around. Sometimes the toilets themselves are unbearably filthy. I’m sure that’s quite Freudian.
I get migraines. It took quite a span of time before I “trained” myself that if I had a dream headache, that meant I had a REAL headache, and I needed to get up and take something. Otherwise, I wake up with a KILLER migraine and end up destroying the day.
Mr VOW also gets migraines, and it took years before he learned that dream headaches meant the real thing, and he needed to get out of bed and take his medication. He was more creative than I am. He’d dream he was shot in the head, or he had a pile of bricks dropped on him.
When I’m anxious, sometimes I have the pool dream. A fantastic in-ground swimming pool is at the bottom of a hill. It’s lined in blue tile and lit from within, so it looks like the celestial bathtub in Princess and the Goblin. It is also surrounded by a luxurious patio…and a wrought-iron fence that I could not possibly climb over. And further surrounded by hillsides that are covered in plants like multi-floor roses, that would be difficult or impossible to walk through.
There is a path, or a set of steps, leading to it, but sometimes I can’t find them. Sometimes I do, but they trail off into the undergrowth. Sometimes I get all the way to the fence, then can’t find the gate. Or I do but it’s locked and I don’t have a key. And once I got inside, yay! But the pool was full of dead animals. One obstacle I don’t face is not having anything to wear. Either I’m already wearing a swimsuit (a much more glamorous one than any I own IRL), or I’m wearing something like shorts and a t-shirt that won’t be ruined if they get wet. Never have gotten immersed in water, in the dream, though.
I had a non-erotic naked dream once, when I was about twenty. But it wasn’t mortifying. I was strolling through the shopping district, downtown, as naked and as free as a bird. I waved off other people’s reactions, until an elderly woman tried to get me to put on a sweater. I fumbled with it, couldn’t get my arms in the sleeves, and handed it back, declaring I didn’t need it. Now, usually the naked-in-public dream means fear of being exposed. In this case, though, I think it was because I wanted to stop hiding and express myself freely. And as my 300-level psych professor told us, the details vary from person to person. Why the shopping district? Why an elderly woman? Dunno, but I do know that at 20, I was starting to be more sure of myself than I’d been conditioned to be.
Mine is when the elevator doesn’t stop at the top floor, and just keeps going up and up above the building. Then it starts swaying back and forth as it rises, and I feel that I have to keep my balance in order to keep it from toppling over.
I’ve also had dreams where I was at the top of a tree, swaying back and forth, high above the landscape. I imagine that that would be what a pre-elevator society would dream.
I’ve had pee dreams, where you can’t find anywhere to go, but that’s because you have to pee. What I find weird are the dreams where I’m tired, so very, very tired, but I can’t find a place to sleep.
I get the pee dream and yeah, it usually means I need to wake up and go pee.
I sometimes get the dream where I’ve gone to work (it used to be school) or some other public place where I am known, and suddenly realise I am naked from the waist down, and my shirt cannot be pulled down to cover myself.
I also get a weird sort of meta-dream where I dream that someone is telling me that something that happened in a previous dream is actually real and not a dream at all. In some cases, it is a dream I definitely did experience before (i.e. someone says “I know you thought that dream about being able to fly was just a dream but it was real! - you really can fly!”), and sometimes, the dream being referred to is not one that (when I wake up) I can recall actually dreaming before.
Edit: also I used to get a sort of half-waking dream whenever I was really sick where I would dream that I saw normal objects in the room, then suddenly it would seem as if they were massive, but very far away, so they just appeared to be the same size.
I get the pee dream. For some reason, it usually takes place in a gym or hospital. I go looking for the johns, and what at first appear to be toilets morph into washing machines or saunas just as I’m about to use them.
I get job anxiety dreams. I dream that I can’t remember how to do the document organizing or scanning and saving which comprises most of my job nowadays. This isn’t too far-fetched; I’m getting close to retirement and the avalanche of ever-more-complex assortments of documents and the technical skills needed to keep up on top of them is starting to overwhelm me.
I used to get something similar. Things would be very large, or very small, and for some reason this caused nausea. Usually the dream portended the onset of migraine.
Oh, and the work dreams. When I was cleaning houses, I had dreams about decluttering a house, and every time I thought I was in the home stretch, I’d discover another room (or two or more). And one specific dream: I had a client who sometimes asked me to help out with events at her house. I normally left after all guests had arrived and each had a drink and appetizers. In the dream, though, cars just kept rolling up and rolling up until there was a queue to get into the house, and the guests were asking for stuff like Tequila Mockingbird that I didn’t even know how to make. (A queue of people. Cars driving into the house would be another kind of dream!)
I have the pee dream before waking up and having to pee, but in mine the toilets aren’t in public view or anything like that, just dirty and gross and often oddly configured public restrooms. And usually in a large building where I have to walk quite a ways to get to it.
