Yeah, I get that a lot. With the additional elements that I’m attending without actually paying and that if I went asking for my class schedule the Powers That Be would notice that oversight.
The common message I’m getting is that you feel unfulfilled with your life and, on a subconscious level at least, want change. You abort the trip to work, or you suddenly and drastically change the entire course of your life by doing something radically different.
A possibility that I’m worried about something? Well, come to think of it, I do sometimes worry about being stranded in my home town with no possibility of getting anywhere this city I commute to, as I have really built many bridges with various people and places within that city in more ways than would ever be possible in my home town and those bridges would eventually turn to dust if I was away from this city for long enough .
FWIW my take has been that dreams are what minds experience as the brain tries to make sense of activity that fires off based on information absorbed and emotional experiences of the day and finding connections to past memories and sensations. The result is to strengthen or prune various connections.
I don’t think that such is completely random, but neither does it necessarily have great symbolic meaning.
OTOH as conscious entities our post hoc interpretations are full of likely valid meaning! The imagery that comes up originates with stuff of our thoughts and past experiences/issues after all and that connects somehow to recent information and emotional states. The meaning we impose post hoc may not be the message the mind intended with the dream, but it still can be things of psychological significance that we impose that interpretation on that specific not arbitrary ink blot!
I have them, too. In mine, the restrooms are all in disrepair or really nasty or both. Sometimes there are also very strange people in them.
I’ve been retired for four years and I have some version of a work dream almost every night. If it involves an actual building I worked in, it’s usually the second to last place, I guess because I spent the longest time there (like one I had last night). But usually they just involve the people I knew over 23 years and take place in various dream locations. They do most often involve not being able to accomplish something.
A Thing I Learned when I was about 13:
If you dream that you really have to piss and you’ve finally found a bathroom – Don’t do it! Wake yourself up and get to an actual toilet!
Shortly before I left to go drive across the country, I had a very vivid dream. It consisted of one moment: I had been driving on a twisty mountain road. And, in the dream, I had just driven off the road, and off the edge of a cliff. The car was just starting to fall, and I was thinking “Ten seconds ago I could have slowed down. Now I’m going to die.”
I took the trip. I drove some of those roads. I drove them very carefully. I slowed down while there was still time to do so, and I didn’t drive off any cliffs – possibly due to the dream. Maybe it saved my life.
@74westy suggested you may feel frustrated. I said in reply, it may be a sign you are worried or frustrated with something, or it may just be that we all have those types of “trying to reach a goal but can’t get there” dreams, and they don’t necessarily mean anything significant.
But between this post of yours and your OP, you do seem to have issues with bridges both real and metaphorical, so maybe your dreams are a mirror of your conscious fears or worries. I hope you work out what’s troubling you and have more peaceful dreams in the future.
I feel like although I’ve still got a long way to go, I’m significantly closer now to addressing the root cause of what is troubling me in this case compared to a year ago.
Broad agreement here that dreams do not need to have deep meaning. Often do not. Other than the meaning we impose upon them afterwards.
But is there also agreement that if we are, even “subconsciously” working hard on some problem or issue, perhaps with some emotional salience, our dreams may connect to those issues or problems?
Certainly I have had that experience. Have others here as well?
I’ve floated this theory before, but it hasn’t really resonated with anybody here.
According to a gestalt therapy book I read many moons ago, each component of a dream has something to do with you, since you created the dream. Things like the road the OP travels down, the city he’s trying to reach, the car’s driver, all have reasons for being there. The study used a group setting, kind of like an AA meeting, where each participant would recount their dream. The instructor would then coax them to role play a component of their dream, and explain why it’s there.
The OP could try role playing the driver, and have them explain why they’re taking a particular route, and why they’re refusing another. Maybe by coming up with all the possible reasons (“that way’s dangerous,” “there’s speed traps,” “my mother uses that route and I don’t want her to see me,” etc.), the OP will stumble across a reason that makes sense.
You could even role play the road. Why are you here? Where are you supposed to go? What are you supposed to represent?
Yup.
I’ve listed at least one above. There have been others.
Some dreams don’t mean anything in particular. Others do. The meaning’s going to be idiosyncratic to the dreamer, though – none of that ‘if you dream of a red fox it means X’ business. Dreaming of a red fox may mean one thing to one dreamer, something entirely else to another, and to most people only that they saw a picture of one once and their brain decided, for whatever reason, to throw that into a dream.
Funny I’ve sometimes had red fox related dreams.
I picked the ‘red fox’ either out of nowhere, or possibly out of some vague unconscious recollection that this was one of the things I’d seen on lists of dreams that were supposed to mean something; and then googled it and found that there are indeed people claiming that dreaming of a red fox means something in particular. But that sort of thing is nonsense – that is, it may indeed mean that to some particular dreamer, but it will mean something else altogether to another particular dreamer, and nothing in particular to quite a lot of people beyond the fact that they’ve in some fashion become aware of the existence of real and/or fictional foxes.
Well he, Redd Foxx, was pretty funny. I could see one of his routines coming up in a dream …
In the dreams, I feel like the driver is for some fuzzy, vague reason conspiring against me, maybe they are following instructions from my family not to take me to the city which in real life they opose me going to because heaven forbid, I’m actually happy there compared to in my home town.
Do you know the driver? Maybe they represent tradition, which you’re trying to evade.
No, the driver always looks like some unidentifiable shadow.