<p>Poor DH. He doesn’t remember his dreams, either, but has to deal with my doozie of a subconscious. He awoke to my unsettled mumbling one night.</p>
<p>“Aibarr. Wake up, you’re having a bad dream.”
“Mmmffghhh.”
“What’s wrong?”
“The Internet exploded,” I replied.
“…what?” asks my husband.
“Pop.” I said, sotto voce, matter-of-factly.
And then I rolled over and went back to sleep, leaving my husband completely confused.</p>
<p>He told me about it the next morning. I have no recollection of what I was dreaming at the time.</p>
<p>I’ve had the standards…flying, falling, forgetting to get dressed before going to school/work. However, I’ve also had one that HAS to be related to the geographic area in which I live.</p>
<p>I had dreams about tornadoes for years, beginning as a child. For the first few decades, the tornado never actually reached me before I woke up. I spent the time in those dreams trying to find some kind of shelter. Somewhere around the time I turned 40, the dreams changed, and the tornado actually arrived. And guess what, I survived! After several of this variety, the dreams stopped. I haven’t had one in a few years now.</p>
<p>Guess what? I’m from Oklahoma! I’m just guessing this dream doesn’t happen in other areas of the country!</p>
<p>I got my BA in 1975, MBA in 1980. My RECENT recurring dream is that I am in class in an MBA program with relatively young students. After a few minutes I wonder what the heck I am doing there since I already have an MBA… ???</p>
<p>justamom - I have dreamed about tornadoes and I’m in Maryland. I am also looking for shelter and I always find myself underneath a highway at the support section trying to remember whether that is a safe place or not. I also have a recurring tsunami dream. I lived through that one once. Once I was on a giant conveyor belt that was stapling as it moved along. I was desperately trying to avoid being stapled. That was exhausting.</p>
<p>When I was a young child a tornoado hit our neighborhood in Alabama. I remember sitting in the hallway by candlelight and my parents were telling us stories to keep us calm. The next day, I saw my next door neighbors had lost their roof, and a house down the street was completely demolished. I’ve been having tornado dreams ever since. I’m always running through town looking for a place with a basement.</p>
<p>I really hate those dreams. Yet I couldn’t keep myself away from the theaters when “Twister” came out. I’ve seen it multiple times, and I always watch the Discovery and The Weather Channels when they have shows about tornadoes or storm chasers.
I’m terrified of them yet fascinated at the same time.</p>
<p>The flying dream, yes. The search for bathrooms yes…although it dawns on me in mid-dream that I have to really go!</p>
<p>Dreamed I was in a blizzard…air-conditional was on blast and the room was freezing - lol</p>
<p>Falling - finally hit the ground in the dream and never had the dream again.</p>
<p>Escaping from some horror story graveyard (dead leaves, dead trees, unkempt, etc) in the new family station wagon. Passengers are always me, a cousin and my mom. As we leave the cemetery, the ground opens up and mom (always mom is driving) has to floor it to send the car over the ever widening chasm. I am always terrified about making it, but we do.</p>
<p>I believe I read somewhere that among mothers living near the Grand Canyon, dreams of their children falling in are common (or, at least, were common once upon a time). I’m sure that although anxiety dreams are universal, the particular manifestations of that anxiety largely depend on your geographical location, your culture, and your own experience (as with academic anxiety dreams). The worst nightmares I’ve ever had have been about my son falling through bridges into the water beneath, and my not being able to reach him in time and jumping in after him. It makes my heart beat faster just to think about them. But I’m sure that living my entire life in a region with many bridges has something to do with the form such nightmares have taken.</p>
<p>When I was a very small child (4 and younger), I used to have nightmares about falling down hills (like the ones in the parks we used to visit), and, for a time after I stopped sleeping in a crib, about falling out of bed during the night. With those, I usually woke up on the floor! (I must have been pretty late in moving into a bed, since I remember my crib rather well, although I know it happened before I was 3, since I remember my mother waking me up in my bed the morning of my third birthday.)</p>
<p>This morning a woman was vacuuming in my dream – I think I was staying in a hotel of sorts. Then I got up and when I opened the door, my son was putting the vacuum away – he’d broken a glass and was cleaning up. I always find it odd the way the mind incorporates outside sensory experiences into a dream.</p>
<p>Whenever I dream about being at home, it’s always the house I grew up in, not the house I live in now. Even though I’m dreaming about myself as an adult, the action takes place in my childhood home. Weird.</p>
<p>I once dreamt that the electric company was trimming our trees back away from the power lines. Only they were actually cutting the trees completely down. I was yelling at them to stop, but they just kept on cutting with their buzz saws. I finally woke up and realized that the chainsaw noise was actually my husband snoring. Time to retreat to the couch, lol.</p>
<p>I’ve gone to quite a few colleges, but only have dreams about 2 of them…decades after graduating.</p>
<p>One is the classic didn’t go to class/forgot to formally drop the class, with the most frustrating part being I can’t find the building in which the college posts the lists of where/when the final exams are being held. It’s not a huge campus, but nobody I ask knows where that building is. Actually graduated from this school in 1978, and still have the dream about 5 times per year.</p>
<p>The other is about a foreign university I attended…after I think I’ve finished the master’s degree, and have mved back to the USA, they contact me and tell me I flunked one course, and have to take it again. I have this one at least once per month.</p>
<p>It’s wonderful to hear so many other people have these dreams…but is kind of creepy and reminds me of “the Manchurian Candidate” (the original one with Frank Sinatra)and how all the soldiers were having identical nightmares years after the Korean war.</p>
<p>Mimk, you must be woman. If a guy had a dream in which a woman was using a vacuum cleaner in a hotel, it would probably have a different meaning.</p>
<p>Now that I’ve gotten into community theater, I’m not having the final dream any more. Instad, I’m on stage in a play. I don’t know what play it is. I just know it’s time for me to say something, and I have no idea what my lines are…</p>
<p>I have been painting the upstairs rooms in my home, and have twice had this dream. In it, my house has expanded into a mansion. Huge foyer, a barrel-vaulted music room, a formal ballroom, etc. Despite the elegant architecture, every room has peeling pain, 1970’s carpet, crumbling plaster and dirt. And some realtor has announced an Open House on the internet and hundreds of people are walking through saying, “What a shame, needs a lot of work…”</p>
<p>I think it’s the middle-aged equivalent to missing the final. Our deepest fears of inadequacy come out in dreams.</p>
<p>For some reason I have nightmares about missing the LSAT. Going to the wrong testing center, oversleeping, train breaking down on my way, all sorts of things. Probably a reprise of that time I thought I missed the SAT in high school and it was just a dream, only to wake up and realize that I actually did miss the SAT.</p>
<p>The house dream! Maybe it was mentioned before, but I love the dream where there is a whole floor in my house I didn’t know about. (What I find more disturbing are dreams where we have moved to a new house that doesn’t seem nice necessarily.) But almost always, the houses in my dream have a ridiculous amount of rooms. I think the meaning of the dream is that that I am not fully using everything that is available to me. I see it as a dream of unrealized potential and resources.</p>
<p>Speaking of scary movies, lately I’ve had some very upsetting dreams where I am slowly uncovering some really horrible stuff – for example, I’ll walk past a room and realize people are being tortured in it. Recently I had a dream that I was single-handedly uncovering some kind of terrible crime against humanity where people were being exterminated. In one of the dreams, I grabbed my 15 year old son – except that he was around 7 in the dream – and I was pushing him to run as fast as he could and to climb up a hill so we could get away. I wake up and my heart is pounding.</p>