I have had the driving-but-the-brakes-don’t-work dream, too.
Maybe more often when my kids were in driver’s ed!
I interpret the driving dreams to mean that I’m anxious about something being outside my control. What better symbol of that than a car that I’m supposed to be driving but I can’t, because I’m in the back seat?
I think they more of a “night-terrors” than dreams, but when the kids were all home I used to wake up in a panic that I had forgotten to pick one or another of them up at soccer practice. I would picture them standing there all alone, waiting and waiting… I would jump out of bed and look in their rooms to see if they were there.
I have the one about having a final in a class that I forgot to ever attend, and the “showing up naked” one, and the out of control car one. All less frequently now than years ago. The one that recurs most often now is that my home is full of my students (all 300 of them) and I need to change clothes, or pee, or take a shower, and there’s all these kids everywhere and no privacy. And they ignore me when I ask them to leave. I get 15 to leave the bathroom nicely but here’s 12 more coming in. And five in the closet.
Well, then there’s the I-can’t-poop-because-no-toilet-is-clean dream. And the I-can’t-poop-because-no-toilet-is-private dream.
And @teriwtt, I do have size 5 feet, so that must be the cause of my driving dream!!
Wow… I have almost all of the above dreams…the test day of a class I never took , the being naked in public along with the toilet in the middle of the room. I also have variations of the driving in a car from the backseat with no control, as well as a rather frequent crossing a huge bridge to a city I don’t want to drive in…just today when I actually crossed the Delaware Memorial Bridge, the sight of the bridge triggered the memory of the repeated dream.
Those are the dreams that are anxiety driven , but I also have some odd , sort of pleasant dreams that come on a regular basis…one is of shopping in small Main Street type businesses that are selling beautiful earrings or ( and this strikes me as funny ) , brownies !
And another that features standing on our local beaches and seeing orcas , which are not in our waters , swimming , or also seeing skylines of either :
NYC or Martha’s Vineyard …which have brownies and earrings for sale 
What’s in those brownies? I want to dream of orcas!
I treasure the dreams in which my daughters appear. It’s lonely living alone. And sometimes my dad, dead now for almost 12 years, shows up. Those dreams are special, too.
I have peaceful recurring orca dreams, too!!! How weird! Never thought this was a shared trait!
I worked with someone who interprets dreams. He told me that he is documenting when people have dreams about future disasters, like Sep 11th kind of disaster. Many people said they had dreams about Sep 11th event prior to when it happened, so he set up a web site where people can document dreams of major disasters. If and when something happens, he could then go back to see if there were dreams relevant to it.
Last night I dreamed that I needed to yell for help and absolutely could not make a sound, no matter how hard I tried. I’ve had that dream before, but not for a while.
In addition to the dreams about taking a final for a class I never attended and forgot to drop (always an advanced math class), being naked in a public place, and not being able to find a toilet that can actually be used, I have a recurring dream about walking through a building that I’ve never been in before and then not being able to find my way out because the layout has changed.
I have that can’t yell or can’t speak in an emergency - dream; accompanied by a mouth full of thick chewing gum that is stuck to my back teeth - I keep pulling and pulling and pulling it out, but I can’t remove it all and can’t speak.
My stuck in a building dreams almost always involve steps missing from a staircase or getting from one room to another by squeezing through a tiny passageway.
It seems a lot of our dreams have to do with “modern” things – cars, toilets, college courses. I wonder what people dreamed about 300 years ago, or even 1,000 years ago.
I wonder if those dreams about not being about to find a toilet is the subconscious’ method of keeping us from wetting the bed.
I still have the “forgot to attend class but now have a final” dream A LOT. Lately I’ve been dreaming that there are several classes I keep forgetting to attend, and I’m upset because it’s going to blow my 4.0 I had previously, and I don’t know how I’m going to explain this to my parents.
I dream that I’m supposed to work, but can’t find any clean scrubs. I’m going through drawers like a thief ransacking an apartment.
I dream that a tornado is approaching and I’m running through town (and I live in a huge metropolitan city, not a “town” with a central square) frantically looking for a place with a basement or any kind of underground facility. Sometimes my daughter is with me (only ever D2, never D1), and sometimes she is running away, not listening to me.
I’ve also had the dream where I need to go to the bathroom, but can’t find a private one. They are always in some room, exposed.
DH thinks I’m completely psycho. He acts like I should be able to control this. When I tell him dreams, he shakes his head and goes, “Why don’t you just relax? Why do you always have to be so anxious?” DH never reports bad dreams, and he is annoyingly positive. He’s never afraid of anything, and always thinks things will go well. I, on the other hand, am a pathological worrier. I wish I could be more like him.
I often have dreams that I can’t see right. Or can’t dial a rotary phone. or can’t type because I can’t find the letters on the keyboard. Weird and scary.
I also have the testing/school anxiety dreams. That I haven’t been to class all semester, or can’t find the classroom, or my books and I don’t know anyone in the class.
I have some recurrent good dreams:
I’m jogging (or riding my bike), and no matter how fast I run or peddle, I don’t get tired.
I’m ice skating really well, doing all kinds of moves I could never do.
I suddenly realize I’ve got a whole wing of my house I didn’t know about. I find that I have a bunch of extra money to decorate this new wing, and I’m excited about making it look pretty.
@nrdsb4: I’ve had that last dream myself – regarding finding a whole new wing of my house. I think I’ve had it during periods of growth, when I was realizing that I had aspects to myself that I hadn’t recognized before. I always woke up from those dreams feeling incredibly upbeat.
I have the test dreams and the naked dreams pretty often, but not most of the other anxiety dreams you all are talking about. For a long time, a long time ago, I had recurring nuclear holocaust nightmares. The first ones always ended with the bomb exploding, but over time they shifted to the aftermath, with lots of radiation sickness and nuclear winter. But I don’t think I’ve had a bomb dream in 35 years.
The best anxiety dream ever was when my first child was about two months old. She barely spent any time awake, and didn’t seem to be developing the way I thought was normal. At the time, my wife still didn’t feel competent at all as a mother, and I was doing a lot of cheerleading for her. We hadn’t discussed my concerms about the baby at all, and I hadn’t even really acknowledged them to myself. In the dream, I was trying to cook in big kitchen that combined aspects of a couple places we had lived previously, but it was all dilapidated, dirty, and falling apart. And there was a sullen, disobedient African-American boy, six or seven years old, sitting at the kitchen table and doing all sorts of destructive things that were damaging the kitchen even more, and he wouldn’t stop. I woke up and started laughing – I had just dreamed that my home was being destroyed by a bad child who couldn’t be mine. My subconscious was telling me to stop repressing my fears.