My most common anxiety dream is trying to get ready for something and not being able to. For example, getting ready to go out and I can’t manage to get dressed because I keep putting clothes on but when I look down, they are off again, or I am packing and can’t find things, or things keep disappearing from my bags, or once, I was trying to take a shower in a really fancy high tech shower, I kept taking clothes off, but they kept appearing on my body.
I have died a few times in my dreams. Once in a tornado that picked up my car a few hundred feet, and once drowning. The drowning dream was very peaceful. I woke up feeling nice and calm.
I’ve had both of these dreams. I don’t understand the toilet dream at all but the gum dream is probably from a try mouth caused by breathing through it (cotton mouth).
I have 2 types of flying dreams. One is a dream where I can hold either a high tech wing “surf board” or use my arms to form a super efficient wing and surf the wind like a parasail. the other involves flying my own plane but I constantly have to take off and land on streets and fields with overhead wires everywhere. I have to get high enough to clear cars but stay under the wires until I have enough speed pull up over them.
I have everything on the OP’s list except driving dreams. My variant on the flying dream involves bouncing. I can jump higher and higher until I just stay up there.
I once had a dream that I was going to take a shower, and I was removing my clothes. When I woke up I had indeed taken off my pajama shorts.
I think another one of the ‘weird but common’ dreams is falling from a great height, or jumping off of something high up. My most common recurring dream as a child.
I’ve died in a couple of dreams. The afterlife was really bureaucratic.
I have also experienced the End of Time a couple of times. One time everyone was drawn to football stadia around the world, and above them each religion saw its own deity in the sky, coming to get them. Twenty years later I had a follow-up dream to this where the religious saw their own deity in the sky, then whatever deity it was decided to fuck with the atheists by a) rearranging all the stars, and b) turning gravity off for a couple of seconds. My cat went bobbing past me and I had to stop her from floating into the sky. I ended up saying “OK, so You can in fact change the law of physics - fair enough, I believe now, whoever You are.” Weirdest dream I ever had.
I’ve died at least twice in my dreams. Once was by drowning, after I had already realized that I was dreaming, so it wasn’t traumatic at all: It just changed the scene of the dream to the inside of a crypt, where I was playing chess against other dead folks (they were really lousy players). The other time, though, I thought it was real right up until the end, when an assassin stabbed me through the throat with a dagger, which woke me up abruptly (and unpleasantly).
As for naked dreams, has anyone ever had the opposite? I’ve had dreams where I was trying to undress, but kept on finding that under every pair of pants, I had another pair of pants, like Bartholomew Cubbins’ hats.
I got that one until I started teaching (college). Then I started having a dream where it’s the end of the semester and I realize there’s a class I forgot to teach all semester. Anyone else have that one?
Yeah. I keep thinking that some day a new Darwin will come along, figure out why, and we’ll all say: Now, why didn’t I think of that!? Seems like there are enough clues that it should be a solvable problem.
As a Professor, I get a variation on the missed class dream. I dream that my class is out of control (and I generally have excellent students), talking over me, arguing won’t sit down and I can’t do anything to get their attention. This usually happens the week before classes start!
I also have the teeth falling out one- I almost cried when I woke up and felt my teeth were still in my mouth.
one thing I notice in my backseat driving dreams is that I oftimes wind up outside the car, watching from the outside. I think it comes from watching TV.
I have that one once every few years. I did theatre in high school, so I don’t have any questions about where it came from.
Nope. I had a dream about being killed by a car bomb a few years ago and I’m fine. It was a surprisingly peaceful experience. I’ve never had a backseat driving, falling, or using the toilet in public dream either.
I think I’ve had the dreams listed in the OP multiple time, with exception of the toilet one (But even that, maybe once or twice?).
The naked/no pants one is pretty common, but it’s weird for me. Usually, I’m not at all embarrassed about being exposed like that in public, but shamed that I could be so stupid as to forget to put my pants on.
I also have this reoccurring dream where I’m underwater in a building that I know well (like the basement of my house, or my old office), I start to panic, because there’s no air, my lungs are aching, and I can’t help to take a breath. And that’s when the dream immediately becomes one not of terror but of elation and joy. I can BREATHE underwater! I also have a weightless sense of flying, but indoors and underwater. Some of my favorite dreams, those.
I have the regular flying dream too. It usually starts off by me just willing myself to levitate. Then from there, I discover I can just will myself to hover or cruise at altitude as if it were the most natural (but coolest) thing in the world.
I don’t think there’s “a” flying dream, but rather several different kinds. Speaking just for myself, I have at least four different types of flying dream:
1: I can make super-long jumps, like running down the sidewalk and only touching down every block or so. Basically, while I’m in the air, I can decide (within limits) when to come down.
2: I can walk horizontally on air, a feat which feels like it takes extreme balance. Occasionally I can walk up “steps” this way, but usually it’s just horizontal.
3: I can levitate off the ground, but have no means of horizontal propulsion. If I’m running when I start levitating, I’ll keep on moving, and I can push off of things, but I can’t just take off in some direction. Sometimes this is just a few feet off the ground, and sometimes it’s unlimited vertical distance.
4: I can do the whole Superman thing, with complete control. This is the rarest, and usually only occurs after I’ve done one of the other types and realize I’m dreaming, so I might as well go all the way with it.
I think that #1 comes from me riding my bike a lot, since riding a bike is a similar motion to running, but you cover more ground per leg movement, and can coast great distances without pedaling at all. Do the same thing but without the bike, and it’s a form of flight. I have no idea what the origin of the other three is. I’ve also heard from others about dreams of “swimming in air” flight, which I never have, presumably due to the fact that I don’t swim much in water in waking life.
After which I become a ghost and go around helping take down the bad guys, because they can’t kill me twice. Or end up in some weird, but cool, afterlife.
Why is it that when you’re running away, your legs don’t work, but you can painfully drag yourself along by your hands? I read somewhere that the leg thing is normal sleep paralysis, but why doesn’t it affect the arms?
It took me forever to learn to fly in my dreams. I can’t float- I have to be swooping up and down and around to sustain the lift.
My naked dreams are the complete opposite: I’m modest in waking life, but in my dreams being mostly naked is no big deal.
I’ve never had a driving from the backseat dream, and the one flying dream I had involved a hang-glider, but I’ve had every other dream in the OP.
I thought everyone had bathroom dreams when they needed to get up and pee. Everyone has the running & hiding from danger dream, though, right? I had that one again Friday night, and as is often the case, I didn’t even see the bad guys I was looking for a place to hide from. I could hear them in the school too though.
I didn’t start having walking/running dreams until I became a gimp. I am ambivalent how I feel about dreams where I can walk or run like normal.
When I have flying dreams, it is more like I am swimming in the air, but I adore swimming, so I can see why I percieve my flying dreams in that manner. I do not ever remember a naked dream however. I have had dreams where I am dressed wrongly for the function [showing up at a formal dinner in a swimsuit for example] so I am not certain how that works out interpretationwise…
Yes, when I’m awake I don’t even like to look at myself naked, but in my dreams being out au naturale is merely a bad faux pas. Sometimes the equivalent of showing up to a wedding in sweatpants, sometimes like showing in in your nightie, but usually not “OMIGOD I’M BARE NEKKED HERE!!!”
I didn’t realize until I started lurking here that other people had the “need to pee, but all the restrooms are too exposed and/or dirty” dream.
Buck Godot- that’s been my theory, too. Especialy when I’m dreaming that I’m in a play I actually did years ago, and of course I’ve forgotten most of the lines by now.
Interestingly, my “running away” dreams often feature concentration camps, or the Holocaust in general. I wonder, is it because I’m Jewish? Then again, it’s not like I know any survivors. My whole family is upteenth generation American, and both my grandfathers were American soldiers in WWII.
There was a period of years where I died in my dreams every night. Usually via tornado, but my brain eventually got pretty creative – being pushed by my mother out into traffic in a little red wagon, falling down an elevator shaft, being shot in the face…
In the dream, I would know that I was dying, and at the last second a feeling of complete and total acceptance came over me, and then blackness… And then I would realize I would still conscious, at which point I would wake up, and it would take me several moments to realize I wasn’t actually dead.
Eventually those nightmares stopped. I still get tornado dreams from time to time, but more often than not I survive. Sometimes I dream there are 10, 20 tornados after me, and yet I still survive.
The frequency of my nightmares over the long-term seems directly correlated to my mental health status over the long-term. I still dream about danger, but I usually overcome the danger or work it out in time. So there is really something about dreams. My brain must have figured out that I’m going to be okay.
I’ve had wacky, vivid dreams for as long as I can remember. Totally bizarre stuff like being chased by floating whales or diving into a vault of mashed potatoes. I’ve had lucid dreams, where I control everything happening, and I’ve had dreams where I’m so aware I’m dreaming that I interpret the dream as it’s happening… ‘‘Wow, look at all these basins overflowing with water… water is the subconscious right, and everything’s in black-and-white, wonder what that means?’’ In the black-and-white dream I remember one bright red teapot–the only object of color in the whole dream.