My most common ones are the one where there is Something Bad in my room but I can’t see it or escape from it because I am completely paralysed, I can’t even move my head to see what it is. The other one is where I am trying to find my family/friends because there is something trying to hurt them, but we are all moving around a really bad platform game at exactly the same speed, so I have to try and find shortcuts to get to them. And the graphics are really bad as well, for some reason.
One that I have been having more recently is messing up some medical procedure, for example a consultant tells me take a blood sample from a patient, but I have to use a scalpel instead of a needle.
I have never had a dream involving innappropriate nakedness, school, exams, or teeth falling out. Not sure what that means.
Wow, I have never had the teeth one, but I probably will now!
The most frightening recurring dreams I have ever had are the ones in which I am killed by a bear or bears.
I have never died in any other dreams, but if there are bears in it I am a goner. The circumstances are never the same, but I have been killed by bears in my dreams about 5 times now. That is why I don’t go bear hunting, I’m hoping if I leave them alone they’ll reciprocate.
I’ll bet the dream I had last night is pretty damned common: Being yelled at by your boss. (Month-end is stressful here.) The funny thing is, my bosses/supervisors are all super nice, “You’re doing a great job,” etc. no matter how stressed I get. So I had to invent an imaginary boss from “upstairs” to come down and scream at me for being a slack-assed incompetent nincompoop. (Our office is only one level, and my superiors are satisfied with my performance. Argh. I can’t win against the Man Inside.)
I have all three of the OP’s dreams, and Sampiro’s dream also. I remember in one of my most vivid dreams I was subbing for David Cross on a special episode of Mr. Show, and I had no idea what to do. The sketch involved a baby, covered in chocolate syrup, crawling around on a kitchen floor. I frantically tried to think of something funny to say, and I said, “Oh, baby!” The crowd booed and Bob Odenkirk gave me a withering look of disapproval. I was very relieved when I woke up.
I’ve had a few truly horrible nightmares in my life, but nothing recurring. I do have at least 3 recurring unpleasant-but-not-scream-inducing dreams:
(1) I’m driving, and there are stopped cars ahead of me, and I try to brake and/or steer out of the way, but I just can’t break fast enough, and I run into them. Note that it’s never a flaming fiery death, just a 15-mph “damn my insurance premiums are about to go WAY up and I feel irresponsible and helpless” situation
(2) I’m playing frisbee and I just can’t remember how to throw a frisbee well (this probably relates to inner guilt about being out of shape compared to when I played ultimate frisbee in college)
(3) Like Kairos… I need to pee, but all the toilets/urinals are flooding or somehow too public (like a toilet with no walls around it right next to the sink in a public bathroom). Frequently there’s a “this bathroom was built 140 years ago at the dawn of the age of toilets” vibe. I should point out that it’s not raw sewage and outright gross stuff all over, but there are (for instance) flooding-but-not-obviously-full-of-poop toilets with water spilling out that I have to walk through, etc.
Teeth falling out – yup, as described and with this variant: my mouth is full of some substance that I keep pulling out by the handful but no matter how much I remove, there’s always more
Nude dream – had it a couple of times. Definitely not a regular.
Elevator dream – sometimes. When I have it, it’s like the elevator car is on a roller-coaster track.
Phone dream – all the frickin’ time! I pick up the phone to dial, and there are voices on the line. Or I repeatedly misdial the number. Or I dial correctly but I can’t get through or other people pick up.
Gotta pee and the toilets are disgusting – yup!
Another one I have pretty regularly has to do with seeing weird stuff in the sky. One variant is that the stars are doing bizarre things — like a line of stars tracing spirals and arabesques.
The other variant is big, scary aircraft. Miltary jets that swoop out of the sky to street level. Bizarre, menacing aircraft that hover.
I have this one too! (Well, the toilets are never strange contraptions, but they are usually too vile or dirty to consider using.) The only difference is that when I wake up, I have to go, badly. I had been thinking that the nastiness of the facilities in the dream is my brain’s way of making sure I don’t actually urinate in the dream, thus wetting the bed.
I’ve heard that’s a very common reason for having that kind of dream, so I was surprised to see someone who it doesn’t happen to.
I have the Final Exam dream a lot, or a variation on it like I’m going back to graduate school and have moved into a new apartment and then realize that something is horribly wrong like I didn’t do something that I needed to get funding or to finalize getting in - and that means all of my plans are coming apart and I can’t get in after all and hey wait a minute I’m married, where’s my husband and… and then I usually wake up.
I have dreams about being unable to figure out something at work or just being swamped by demands.
I have the tooth one now and then, ack. Hate that one.
I’ve had the tooth falling out dream. Someone told me once that it comes from not speaking up about things. I don’t know whether I believe that but after I heard that I don’t know that I ever had that dream again. However now I have a similar dream where I’m looking in the mirror and I try to extract a blackhead or get some dirt off my face or something and I accidentally completely disfigure my face like by tearing a hole in my cheek all the way through or something. So I’m standing there at the mirror with the realization that I’m not going to be able to fix it, ever.
I have to admit that when I have the inappropriate sex partner dream I never feel ashamed til I wake up! The worst part of those dreams is that the whole dream is great and it’s not until I’m awake and painfully conscious that I realize what was wrong with that picture.
My most common bad dream is trying to run away but the air is like molasses.
You know, since I’ve been obsessing about this all damn day, I have a tooth dream too. I don’t lose my teeth, but they are loose - front teeth, and I know (in the dream) that if I lose my front teeth the rest will fall like dominoes.
I also have the I’m late for work/school/live-or-death-important event and can’t get there.
Example: No signs on the express subway platform and if I get on the wrong train, I’ll be going a half our in the wrong direction. The train is coming, I’m going to be late, but is it the right train, or the wrong train?
I’ve frequently had the final exam dream. I’ve also had a variant on the theatre dream - I’m arguing a case in front of the Supreme Court of Canada, and it’s going well, but then the questions start coming from the bench, and I realise I’ve briefed the wrong case and can’t answer any of the questions they ask about the real case.
I don’t have bad dreams too often. Usually they are random and dumb or pleasant.
In the past six months though, I’ve had one dream where my brother died and another where my dad died. Woke up crying. No fun, messed me up for a few days.
But the recurring bad dream usually is the scenario where I am back in junior high or high school and can’t find my class or locker, can’t remember locker combination, can’t find my books or homework etc. I am in the hallway freaking out or running around trying to find my class. I spaz out easily in these situations in real life and in the dream it’s worse. I have a variation of this dream every few months or so.
I too have had the dream where my teeth are falling out, though it’s usually more like this:
I’m standing in the bathroom, brushing my teeth. I look into the mirror and notice that my teeth look really yellow, so I start brushing harder, and pieces of my teeth start to come off and disintegrate; the way this looks always reminds me of the old Ren and Stimpy toothache episode. I stop brushing, but my teeth continue to disintegrate until nothing’s left.
Then a brand new batch of perfect, white teeth push their way out through my raw gums, and right before I wake up I realize that I now have the perfect smile. I’m sure that there’s some significance to this, but I sure don’t know what it is.
I also have had a dream several times recently where I was supposed to be performing several pieces on Piano accompanied by an orchestra, and I find out the night before. I have to learn the extremely difficult music in under 24 hours. This dream usually feels like it lasts about 22 hours; I wake up right before I’m supposed to go on stage.
I’d left my car with the mechanic, and he gave me a ride to the railway station in his SUV. We went over the edge of a cliff, and there was a deep valley below, but, in the style of Wile E Coyote, we went straight out into mid-air then stopped. I remember realising I was dreaming at this point, and I had the option of waking up right away, or of falling, then waking up before we hit the bottom. I opted for the latter. While we were falling, I was thinking that I never actually stay in these dreams long enough to experience the impact, and in true Doper-spirit I decided to do so, in the interests of scientific research. The impact was very, very sanitised by the dream - just a non-lifelike THUD, and then I woke up.
It was only after I woke that I remembered the schoolyard notion of dying in your dream means dying in real life. I wonder if I’d have gone through with it if I’d remembered that in the dream.
Naked in a public place: half check (usually, I am just shirtless, but somewhere where that is very inappropriate, like teaching a class (I am a professor))
I have the school one pretty often (I skipped class a lot when I was in school, but always managed to get good grades and never missed tests).
I have nightmares about being pregnant a lot. I find out that I’m VERY pregnant and having a baby I don’t want RIGHT NOW (once in a shopping mall). I have the baby, and there is always something wrong with it, and I always hate it and feel like my life is ruined. I take this as a sign that my decision not to reproduce is a good one.
I also have the naked one, where I’m walking around a store and realize I’m not wearing any clothes. This only bothers me a little bit, though, and in the dreams I just go about my business and brush it off.
I forgot about the phone dialing one where I am trying to make a call but no matter how hard I try I can’t dial the right number and have to keep starting over. Sometimes it’s an emergency call where I need to tell someone that they’re in danger but I can sit there forever dialing the number wrong and having to start over.
Terrible, terrifying, gruesome, scary. I’ve been clean of tooth dreams for a while now, but I it’s only a matter of time before the next one strikes.
I remember one awful night back at the start freshman year of University, I experienced something completely out of the ordinary (and I say this as someone who’s experienced lucid dreams and sleep paralysis). It was a nesting of dreams, i.e. a dream within a dream within a dream. Oh, and every dream was exactly the same. And my teeth were falling out. Basically (forgive me, I know that it’s boring to hear other people’s dreams), I was lying in the bed of my dorm room, I got up and went into the bathroom/shower cubicle and looked in the mirror. My teeth fall out into my hand. I then proceed to ‘faint’, while still being cognisant, cracking my head on the wall near the sink and puking. Repeat this 5 or 6 times, and wake up in that bed again genuinely not knowing whether you are back to reality or not.
Utterly terrifying.
Sleep paralysis is just as awful. The suffocating blackness. The hag is coming to steal my soul. I CAN’T MOVE. I CAN’T BREATHE. HELP ME. SOMEONE FUCKING HELP ME.
Wow. I have the first two as well. The second one I haven’t had in a long time, but the plane dream was just the other night. I call them ‘anxiety dreams’. An additional wrinkle for #2 is that I’m back in the military and missing a deployment flight, which is even more stressful.
