Naked in public – class, even though it’s my ten year anniversary this year; the mall; work. And nobody even notices. They tend to ask me, when I start freaking out, why I think it’s such a big deal. There’s other naked people wandering around, too. :sad:
Without fail, at least once in the week or two before I fly and/or after I buy a ticket, I have the missing-the-flight dream. Like I get to the airport and I don’t have my driver’s license or – my most recent one – I go on a trip and drive about 200 miles away from the airport and, when I’m at that destination, suddenly remember I need to be on a plane in thirty minutes. Most often I’m just in the terminal and I suddenly can’t find my boarding pass.
This results in me being frighteningly OCD when I’m at the airport. I check that I have my boarding pass, my driver’s license, my birth certificate, all that stuff every five minutes. Luckily once I have a real live passport I should stop being such a dink.
It also resulted in some severe panic on my last trip back from Toronto. I was an HOUR early for my flight, but they suggest being 90 minutes early to get through customs. I showed the lady my ticket at the front airline desk and her eyes widened. “Oooh, you’d better hurry, you might miss your flight! Come back here if you do but I don’t know what we can do for you…” Panicking, I ran – after my feet were blistered and bloody and sore from having walked through every museum in Toronto the previous day, plus watching the Cavalcade of Lights, plus walking around town later that night – and got through customs without a hitch, without even waiting in line. Caught the short shuttle ride down to the international terminal, sat in mild fuming annoyance for 30 minutes before they let me on my plane.
Last night I dreamed I was keeping Chris company while he was in line getting his pills, a bunch of bottles of pills I assumed were somehow chemo. Of course in real life he was diagnosed with acute leukemia on Tuesday and died on Friday so I never got to keep him company. Two of my co-workers from New York were in the line with me; it was a busy urban hospital so we were resigned to waiting a long time.
Teeth loose/falling out - I am so glad to see this on this list because none of my friends have had this dream! Glad to know I am not crazy.
Running/hiding from killers/monsters - the worst one was where I crawled into a tunnel and the tunnel kept getting smaller and smaller until soon I was forced to inch along by pushing only my feet. I can assure you that I would rather get killed then end up in a situation like that.
Trying to run and can’t move fast enough, Late/can’t get somewhere, Job gone awry, Trying to scream/yell and can’t, Multiple awakenings, Living in a strange/bizarrely changed place, Disfigured or self-mutilated, inappropriate sex partner, Zombies (this dream was actually pretty cool), Trying to find/rescue someone, Pregnant/unwanted baby
I’m not sure if I’ve had “Unprepared for exam” or not.
In my psychology text they have a list of the most common dreams of Americans and Japanese. Percentage wise, people had dreamed of:
Being attacked or pursued 77 American 91 Japanese
falling 83 American 74 Japanese
trying again and again to do something but failing 71 American 87 Japanese
frozen with fright 58 American 87 Japanese
arriving too late 64 American 49 Japanese
loved person being dead 57 American 42 Japanese
Failing an exam 39 American 41 Japanese
unable to breathe 44 American 33 Japanese
being nude 43 American 17 Japanese
seeing self as dead 33 American 35 Japanese
What an awesome topic. It truly is amazing how universal all these themes are.
I usually have very intense or involved dreams. I’ve had the exam, underwear, and teeth dreams, but not the actor or elevator ones. In the school ones, I don’t miss the final, but I find out about halfway through the semester that I’ve missed assignments and tests, and I’m trying to find the professor so I can talk to him about how to keep my grade from getting screwed. My underwear ones could be more accurately described as “partially clothed,” as in I forget to put on pants.
On top of losing my teeth, sometimes I have dreams where there’s an infinite amount of fur or grass in my teeth. I keep pulling it out but I can never get rid of it. I’ve also lost my hair or discover a huge cancerous sore on my body. For example, once I poked through some soft skin on my right index finger only to find most of the bone and flesh underneath had been eaten away (incidentally, I’m right-handed).
With the inability to yell, run, or fight, I suspect that happens when you’re thrashing or talking in your sleep. I’ve actually woken myself up trying to yell out a stream of profanity, which was in reality a wheezing, out-of-tune gargle of pseudo-words.
Occasionally I have dreams where I wake up and find out that the last five or ten years were a dream, and the reality of the “dream” was different enough to make it tough to adapt to the “real world” again. I also have dreamed that either I or someone I care about has done something bad or stupid enough to ruin my/their life and the dream is spent waiting for the other shoe to drop or help the other person get off.
I feel the same way. Back in 2000 the family dog fell over one night and died in my mom’s arms while all I could do was watch. Since then I have a dream at least once a year where he either comes back to life or was never dead. I’ve told my mom about it and she apparently has the same kind of dreams about him.
Also, over the past few months I’ve had dreams where I got back together with an ex and was very happy about it. These were emotionally intense dreams, and I’ve had one for each of the girls I’ve dated seriously. A couple have ended when my alarm goes off. I get pulled out of the dream as I start waking up, and I start trying to tell them as much as I can. Other times, we reconcile, agree to meet later, and the dream ends as I’m walking around trying to find her. Dreams like that throw me off for the entire day.
I’ve had to kill a few of my pursuers too. Once I took on two guys at once. I killed the first guy, and then chased down the second one because I knew he was gonna come after me again.
Here’s a particularly elaborate dream I had a couple of years ago that works in quite a few of the themes mentioned so far:
I got into a fight with a guy, and our rage ended up launching us both a few thousand feet into the air. We started to fall, grappling and struggling to get the other guy to hit the ground first, but when we were about to hit, we turned and fell HORIZONTALLY and ended up flying into an alley. When we hit, my enemy was lying in a blue, broken heap among some garbage bags while all that was left of me was a crescent shaped smear of blood and kibbles on the wall.
My ghost walked around for a while, checking to make sure the guy was really dead, and then I went back to my house. My family was there, and my mom was sort of in a daze that I was dead. She’s Christian, but not crazy religious or a creationist by any stretch. In the dream, though, she’d reacted by taking on some bizarre fundamentalist-like notion of how to keep me from going to hell for being an atheist (which I am). Whatever it was, it pissed me off enough such that I actually willed myself back into existence to convince her that she was wrong.
When I came back to life she went back to her old self, but for the rest of the dream I was pacing around the house trying to figure out if I was was still dead or going to disappear or whatever was going to happen. I think I was going to go to the hospital to see if I was physically real, but then I woke up.
That was probably the most fucked up dream I’ve ever had.
I do occasionally have theatre dreams, only they’re always double-edged. I’ll dream that, right before the play, the director tells me the star is sick so I’m filling in and I’m like, “fantastic! I already know all the lines!” and then totally blank out onstage
I occasionally have the dream where I can’t find my class or I’m late for class or I’m walking around school and can’t find anyone I know and realize too late that I’m in the wrong school…
I have meat dreams and food dreams a lot. Where I’m with friends or sitting down to dinner munching on something, usually either someting very sugary or something with meat on or in it and then, about halfway through, I’m like, “what am I doing? I’m a vegetarian!” or realize I don’t know how much I ate and start trying to get it all out of my mouth
And I have dreams a lot that I’m in some situation where I’m in a seemingly innocuous position where my friends have control, but it turns deadly and they stop paying attention to me when I try to warn them. Frequently, I’m in some kind of water and it gets too high and they can’t hear me when I beg them to turn it off and I drown.
Or the same, only nobody has control and there’s someone else in the tank/room/somehow trapped somewhere and frightened and I can’t get to them and they can’t hear me.
Two of my co-workers from New York were in the line with me; it was a busy urban hospital so we were resigned to waiting a long time.