In another discussion, people mentioned the recurring dream about finding out that you had forgotten you were enrolled in a class, failed to attend all semester, and now had to take the final exam. I thought it might be an interesting thread to share other odd anxiety dreams.
For example, last night I dreamed that I was staying in some kind of retreat center. When I got up in the morning, all of the bathrooms were occupied by Syrian refugees and I couldn’t take a shower.
Sorry, but that made me laugh.
Not stressful or anxiety-laden, but I just had my first dream about dying. All my family members, except my daughter and SIL, were killed in a hurricane. (I don’t even live in a hurricane prone area.)
It took us a while to realize we had died and then I only remember feeling sorry for my daughter and SIL. The sky was so beautiful. Very strange dream!
I thought it was pretty funny, too. What it means, I’m not sure.
I’ve been doing payroll for various entities for years. Last week for the first time I dreamt that I completely forgot to do payroll and everybody was mad because they didn’t get their paychecks. A more typical anxiety dream for me involves driving but I can’t reach the steering wheel or I can’t get the headlights to come on or for some reason I’m in the back seat and can’t get to the front seat.
Wait, is it dreamed or dreamt?
I have pretty odd dreams. The weirdest one was when I dreamed I was some kind of monk or priest who had to escort Bella Abzug to an audience with the Pope.
I have driving dreams, like Wellspring’s.
Ds1, dh and I just had a long discussion about this on our Thanksgiving drive. Dh and I rarely have anxiety dreams anymore, but ds1, who just started his first real full-time job, is in the throes of them. Ah, the advantage of being older and more settled in life.
However, I have really vivid dreams, and they stay with me for hours after I wake up. I really listen to them and what they’re trying to tell me. I love to interpret dreams!!! For everyone’s future reference, how you feel about the dream is key; people could have the same dream and feel very differently about it.
I have driving dreams, too, but they usually involve driving the car off an unfinished bridge, or into some kind of gaping pit.
Oh, Hunt, you sound stessed!!!
I have a driving dream where I can barely reach the pedals, I can barely see over the steering wheel, and to stop the car I have to press down so hard on the brake that it takes all my strength.
I think I just dream a lot. Probably comes from eating right before going to bed.
I have found I can’t read at night before falling asleep any more. I have dreams that I am one of the characters and replay the plot in my dreams. Last night, I was wrapping Christmas gifts while listening to Bing and Doris Day before bed. DH says I sang “White Christmas” aloud.
Re the college dreams of final exam horrors - I did that in real life. I still remember the sinking feeling as I walked into the room 30 minutes after the exam had started. To this day, I don’t know how everyone but me knew the correct start time. Luckily, I was well prepared and could finish in less than the allotted time.
Laurie Anderson has a song in which she sings, “I dreamed I had to take a test in a Dairy Queen on another planet.”
I was just talking about those college anxiety dreams with DH last weekend. I told him they weren’t really dreams, I was reliving my senior year…
That would be great. You could really have fun with book selections.
I dream that I’m somewhere in public – say, a store, or a party, or a meeting at work – and I realize I’m completely naked. Or just topless. And trying to be both discreet and at the same time cavalier about it, as if I really planned it that way.
Once in a great while, even after all these years, I still have nightmares about having a paper due the next morning in a course I didn’t know I was enrolled in. Or, worse yet, 35+ years after finishing law school, that I get a call from the registrar informing me that they just discovered that I never really graduated because I was several credits short, so I have to go back and re-enroll.
It’s much more common, though, to have bad dreams in which my boss at my last job is yelling and screaming and even cursing at me for something I supposedly did wrong. Such a relief to wake up and realize that I don’t work there anymore!
I occasionally have dreams that I am living in The Walking Dead world.
In my Walking Dead dreams, I have to protect Judith. Now that is a stressful dream.
And… my in-life size 9.5 foot is now about a size 5, and I keep thinking, “If my foot were bigger, I could reach the pedal.”