Not again! Via Alzwww @ Flickr.
It happens again and again and again, but I always wake up, relieved that I’ve never actually forgotten to fully dress myself before leaving the house.
I have to use the bathroom. The only restroom is communal, without separate stalls. There are just toilets everywhere so I have to go in front of everyone. And it’s disgusting. There is feces and blood and piss and toilet paper everywhere.
Again, I wake up, amazed that this horrible scene keeps playing in my unconscious mind. I wish these imaginary experiences would leave my brain so I don’t have to be tortured repeatedly by something both foreign and familiar. What’s odd – or maybe not odd at all – is that these two recurring dreams of mine both involve revealing my private parts in public. They are so distressing! A less frequent recurring dream is the one where I find myself on stage at my high school auditorium, and SURPRISE! it’s opening night of the play. But I haven’t learned my lines. I guess I still have some residual anxiety from my Drama Club days.
Do you have recurring dreams and/or nightmares? What are they like?
p.s. The Harpies won’t be posting much, if anything, for the next few days, because the five of us are spending a long weekend at the beach! A Dude is coming too but we did a security clearance on him. Have a great weekend!
At least once a month I dream of my teeth cracking and/or falling out. I can feel them with my tongue — you know that feeling when you were a kid and about to lose a tooth, and you could kind of wiggle the tooth back and forth? That’s the feeling in my dream. It makes me shiver just to think about it.
My tooth dream is a pretty common one and is supposed to signifiy a fear of impotence. I suppose that’s possible, as I am an anxious person and a control freak, but I think it’s far more likely that it signifies that I grind my teeth at night like crazy.
My other usual dreams, I imagine, are also pretty common — I cheat on my fiance by accident, somehow (in a previous life I was not the most faithful person), or I become pregnant accidentally. I think they’re all related to fear of losing something important.
I have a recurring dream where I must go back to high school for advanced math classes, even though I now have a Ph.D. Somehow, someone finds out how poorly I did in high school algebra and/or that I took NO math classes in college, and I’m struggling through high school math again. Of course, I still can’t do it and I fail algebra again.
@have.at.it: ooh, I’ve had that one too! I think Tony Soprano has that dream in at least one episode. Makes sense now that you tell me what it signifies!
I used to frequently dream about being naked in a classroom or at work, but no one ever noticed but me. I would just stand there being horribly self-concious, waiting for someone to notice. Don’t have to be Freud to figure that one out!
I never dream I’m topless, but all the women in my family have the – at least for us – classic “too-short-shirt-and-no-knickers-in-a-public-place” dream.
trigger warning on this, please feel free to skip over.
I haven’t had it in a while, which is a huge relief. But for a long time I kept having a dream about being sexually assaulted and no matter how hard I tried to scream, nothing would come out. Mouth wide open, screaming in my head, but no sound coming out. It was terrible. I’m sure it has to do with being a survivor, and the tons of unresolved issues related to that. But it still sucks. Come on, subconscious, give me a break!
Sarah! I have that dream about communal bathrooms all the time. Not necessarily the filthy part, but the lack of privacy part. What does it mean???
have.at.it, my mom has the teeth dream all the time, too! It’s a common one, apparently.
BeckySharper, that’s basically what mine is like. I become aware of my nakedness (usually just on top) and panic sets in. Nobody confronts me about it or even stares at me, really.
Spark, I don’t know! It’s awful. The bathrooms are usually HUGE, too. Like – hundreds of toilets. Sometimes they’ll be separated by a flimsy sheet or something.
Sarah, and everyone else is acting like it’s normal. *shudder* That’s my least favorite recurring dream right now. Though every now and then I have a dream about being pursued by (fast) zombies, which is super scary.
Have fun at the beach, ladies. Good call on bringing a Dude to serve you cocktails.
When I was in middle school I had to wear headgear–though thankfully only in the confines of my home or car (which was embarrassing when we were driving by a cool kids house and *gasp* they might see me!)
anway, i know have dreams where I am out in public and I am having trouble articulating, only to realize I’ve been wearing my headgear.
I also have dreams about flying, which are my favorite.
@ImTheMarigold I often have that dream too… I’m hoping it’s more to do with surviving than going back…hoping
I have a recurring dream, since I was about 10 or so, where I am in one of my grandparents houses, and there is a whole secret house attached to it that only I can get at. When I was younger I thought it was real, and I just didn’t remember it when I was awake, but then as I got older and kept having it, I started to enjoy it. Every time it is the same exact set up, and I just always meet different people in the passages and rooms. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it, just pops up from time to time.
@marigold: I used to have that one as a kid, that I was chased and attacked but couldn’t scream. HATED it! Worst dream ever.
:de-lurk:
I have a recurring dream where someone discovers that I am one class short and shouldn’t have graduated from college, and hence am kicked out of my graduate school program. I’m at least 15 yrs out of academia, so what the heck? I’m assuming it has something to do with a “being found out as a fraud” thing in my subconscious.
My mom told me she had the teeth falling out dream during each of her pregnancies, but never any other time.
I had a LOT of kidnapping dreams when I was younger, and the worst part was it would often happen right in front of my parents, but I couldn’t say anything or get them to turn around and see me being taken.
Also, the perpetrators tended to be the “bad guys” from the Home Alone movies. I DONT CARE, in my dream they were scary!
Now, I have a lot of topless dreams, and also a lot of “late for school, which school do I even go to, didn’t do my homework” yatta yatta dreams.
I had the naked at school/work/at a party dream all the time, too. My twist on that was that I was not so much embarrassed about my nakedness as I was about the fact that I had somehow chosen the wrong outfit to wear, like I was uncool. My dream was that I woke up, considered my clothing options and decided to go naked, and that was, when I got to work/school/the party, obviously the wrong choice of attire.
Also, for several years I had a dream about once a month about driving a car I couldn’t control- like the gears wouldn’t shift or the brake was stuck or the steering wheel wouldn’t turn. Sometimes it was a big trailer truck, sometimes it was a normal car. I thought I’d never stop having that one.
I had the teeth dream last night, even. One of my lower front teeth broke, and the other one just came out. But my dentist was gonna get her lawyer boyfriend to take my “case” pro bono… I don’t know why a lawyer was involved.
another teethfallingout dreamer.. i have that dream a few times a week if i’m really stressed out. my teeth become loose in my gums and eventually i spit them out in handfuls. i remember reading somewhere that it has something to do with vanity, or fear of aging and death, but to be honest interpreting dreams seems as sketchy as horoscopes to me – who isn’t afraid of death for fucks sake!
For many years my dream was as follows: I was sitting in a very posh hotel in the town i went to university with my mother and all my close friends. Looking out of the window I would see a giant tsunami approaching, I would tell everyone this and they would all dismiss my fears except for my mum. She always agreed to get the hell out of town with me. The dream ended just as our car pulled away from the town and the wave hit killing everyone else I knew.
Then the real tsunami happened and I’ve never dreamt it again.
I have the tooth dream too! In mine all my teeth have shattered and I am looking at myself in the mirror whilst pulling the little bits out. Grim. I also have the odd partly lucid dream, where I am aware that I am dreaming (sort of) and so decide to fly and sleep with a load of women. Hmmmm.
When I have a high enough fever, I dream static, like on a tv that is not tuned to a channel. It has a high pitched noise that goes with it that gets higher as the static gets more frantic.
That’s how I know that I am really, really not well.
I hardly ever remember my dreams anymore (boo), but when I was a kid, I had a recurring flying dreams. They ended differently but they always started out the exact same way: I was in the family room of the house we lived in when I was little, and there was a eerie hovering red balloon that kept floating out of my reach. I got up on the hearth to jump for it, and I start levitating. I start swooping around the room, and then fly out into my neighborhood and off to some rad adventure or another. I haven’t had them in years, but its one of the few dreams I recall vividly.
I’ve also dreamt that my teeth were shattering and falling out. I did not know that was a common dream!
In my early 20s, I frequently had that dream where someone was trying to break into my house to sexually assault me. Often, he would be climbing in the window. I would try to scream, but no sounds would come out. Finally, one night I was able to scream – and I screamed for real, causing my husband to sit bolt upright in bed. I never had the dream again.
It’s amazing how common many of these recurring dream themes are. I’m another teeth falling out dreamer. This usually happens at times in my life when I feel powerless so maybe the impotence thing is right, just not in a fertility sort of way. I also have academia themed dreams. Mine usually involve finding out only a day or two before a final that I am in a particular class, and freaking out over the impossibility of learning a semester’s worth of material in so short a time. I woke up once convinced that I didn’t actually graduate from law school. I also have drowning dreams; typically some placid body of water will suddenly start churning violently, and then rise up too fast for me to get out. And finally, I have the naked in public dreams. Damn, I need therapy!
I’ve never had flying dreams until a few months ago. Before that, I had ‘look I can jump very high’ dreams. Even in my dreams I’d know ‘this is kind of a lame power’. And then I’d jump over a house and all would be well again.
I’m also surprised at the recurring themes! I too dream about going back to high school because I’m a couple of classes short (usually math and/or Latin), and about being late for something important (school/work/a flight). Then there’s two more dreams that keep coming back. In the first one, I’m standing in front of my closet, trying to decide on what to wear, and I have all these awesome clothes that I forgot I had – and I wake up disappointed because I don’t actually have these clothes. Writing that down makes me feel pretty shallow
In the second dream, I’m driving a car, which I don’t know how to do, and I’m trying to keep it from crashing. The really funny thing is that I’ve gotten better at dream-driving over the years, even though I’ve never driven a car in real life. This dream usually ends with the intervention of a male authority figure (usually my father, but recently it was one of my professors). There’s a story there, for sure.
When I was a kid, I used to dream about being able to fly – I would simply rise up off the pavement by making a swimming motion. These dreams were so vivid that for a long time, I thought that I had really been able to fly.
I’m an orchestra musician and for years I’ve had the same recurring nightmare: Arriving fifteen minutes late for rehearsal. That’s it. Sounds benign, but I wake up in a cold sweat, practically hyperventilating every time.
As a young child, I had the recurring nightmare of being in a car in the middle of the woods, and all of a sudden this completely naked bald guy comes thrashing through the brush, getting closer and getting closer. I’m in my carseat, and I can tell this guy is dangerous but I just – can’t – reach the door lock. That’s when I would wake up.
As far as I know, I haven’t been the victim of any sexual abuse but that’s usually the first thing my therapists ask after I reveal this little nugget.