Some people interpret their dreams as an exercise in self-discovery. Some let their dreams inspire them in the waking world. Others regard them more simply as a novelty of the human mind. Still more do a fourth or even a fifth thing I can’t think of (my list felt incomplete). Whatever your experience or opinions of dreams are, I think dreams are neat. We go to sleep and our brains hallucinate for a while and sometimes we remember it. I think we often forget how incredible that is.
If you’d be willing to share, I’d like to know about your recurring dreams.
Here’s mine:
I started having this dream in college. It used to happen more frequently, every couple of months. Lately it’s an annual affair.
I resolve into the dream, with naked understanding of how I got there and what I’m doing without ever being able to recall. Dreams are like that. I’m in a car. The car is full of other people. They could be my friends or family. I’m much younger than I am now, or I feel much younger. The delicate qualities of being a child have been wrapped around me. The others in the car don’t regard me as a child though. They are normally engaged with each other. They could be talking or arguing or playing a game. I can engage with them too without difficulty.
We are all in the back seats. The car is long. More of an SUV. Its interior is tall, but not tall enough to stand up in. The upholstery is grayish with well-worn seats. I might notice a thread-bear armrest or a tear in the ceiling, I might not. The car impresses familiarity into me like hands into wet clay. It’s the type of car a teenager might inherit from an older sibling who’d gone to college, who originally bought it off Craigslist. I’ve been in dozens of these cars in my life. The car I learned to drive in was similar, but this is one that’s never belonged to me.
The car is moving. Trees and landscape track across the windows. These are familiar sights. They’re the same rolling features of rural Midwest America I’ve grown up with. More than familiar, they are recognizable. They’re the telltale signs of heading to my parents’ house, the home they still live in, and the one where I grew up. My weight shifts as the car hugs the camber of the two lane road. The tug of inertia is too noticeable. The car is speeding. I look toward the windshield. We’ve crested the hill by the factory at the outskirts of town. I can see the farmland on either side of the road. The bottom of the next hill is visible, veering to the left before the road is obscured by trees.
No one is in the driver seat, of course. This wouldn’t be that memorable of a dream without some kind of strangeness. But no one else seems worried about it. They don’t mention it or seem to care. I’m not exactly worried either. But an unsaid expectation that I should be driving unravels from my mind. As if the placid unease of the dream so far was a ball of yarn in my head. Much too slowly, anxiety fills my veins. I usually can’t look away from the windshield.
I might try to reach the drivers seat, to rend control of the vehicle. Sometimes I do, and the dream is led into other, less stressful scenarios. Other times I, or someone else, is able to maneuver the car from the backseat using some other form of control, like switches and knobs or a phone or even telekinesis. Sometimes I am able to ignore the driverlessness and continue talking to the other people inside, where the dream conforms more to those conversations.
But most of the time I try to reach the driver seat. I might try to clamber over the other passengers. I might try to convince or plead with the others to do something. My seatbelt will become stuck or I will be ignored by the others or the car’s interior to become as navigable as an Escher drawing. Something will stop me from getting to the driver seat. The car will continue down the road, forever. In reality my parent’s house is no more than a minute away from the spot I realize there’s no driver in the car. In the dream, however, I will never reach my parents’ home. The road doesn’t extent and the landmarks don’t stretch out. We don’t teleport to a point further up the hill so that the landmarks repeat in a loop. The car doesn’t slow down, neither does time. The car simply speeds toward the bottom of the next hill, forever.
Often times the dream fades away. It becomes fuzzier and less defined until I’m not dreaming anymore. I will wake up some time much later. Other times the dream continues until my alarm rings. My memory of regular dreams tends to evaporate throughout the day. But when I have this dream I normally think about it for a few days. It’s been almost two weeks since I had the dream last, and just about the same amount of time since I started writing this post (I’m an extremely slow poster). I’m not one who lends much psychological relevance to the content of one’s dreams, nor do I believe they are prophetic or mystical. This dream has particular, private significance to me. Whether or not it’s revealing about who I am is up to you. It certainly makes sense to me.
For me it’s everyday scenarios in my life but always having the worst outcome.
Always a highway with some non-conventional road-design. Talking about weird, angled loops and multiple high-way bridges going 4 high above each other. I’m either walking along it or in a car driving/being driven, which is funny because I despise driving (don’t mind it on ebikes).
It’s usually night-time, with late-dusk being the earliest. Sky is painted with a brilliant ruddy hue with a thin, bright yellow line hugging the horizon where the sun just dipped below. I always end up at my grandmother’s house, but she is never there as she moved away a long time ago. Various things can occur there, where I meet old friends. Random events can seem to happen; most common I’ve noticed is zombies and I haven’t watched much zombie media in the past two years. Sometimes though, it’s just silence and being alone in a house that’s no longer inhabited.
Its fun to keep record so you can find dream signs for lucid dreaming. Common ones per usual are failing the finals, I’ll be 99 years old still having those but at least now I can ld if I have one of those, another common one is having some weird usually attractive dream spouse/boyfriend I don’t recall but my subconscious decided it wise to blurse me with, maybe even pull a Roy to really make me hate/love existence.
Lately its mostly work, which sucks we should get overtime for that, all the customers are the biggest wretches you can imagine, worse than rl, then its its work and supply chain issues getting fired, ever more ridiculous economic situation, war with everyone in their mother and ending up in jail.
Another reoccurring theme these days is elemental dragons that can polymorph and apparently are my hot boyfriend/theyfriend but are platonic (unlike the usual theme) and try to teach me things or give me gifts and then I say something foolish and offend everyone in a 100ft radius, and what makes it worse its usually shit if I said irl it’d offend me first off. I just need to dream of frost and fire and I win, I think, or maybe that’s not how it works.
The sort of recurring dream I have involve this girl in college I really liked. The details change but she is there. And these dreams are always bad because of the guilt and regret I harbour. I don’t recall seeing any other people in my dreams. Maybe I see them and forget. Can’t say. It is a bit strange really.
I can relate. I hate a crush in college who periodically appears in dreams, along with the same intense feelings.
9/10 times I am dreaming about either:
- Childhood and teenage loves (wishful thinking, made up scenarios).
- Arguing with my abusive parents.
- Fighting for myself with classmates or just school people/trying to protect myself.
- Lecturing people or speaking up for myself.
- Being humiliated in some way.
- Trying to figure out ways and using dreams to solve my IRL problems.
- Being assaulted by my old teachers.
- Living through my fears in terms of for example failing maths in highschool, while I finished with a grade 3 (out of 5).
- Different types of heroic (ik it sounds lame) ways of dying, implying that I am now gone in a worthy way.
Or a combination of some of these.
I had several nightmare periods (which seems to be gone by now apparently, with the “healing” of time) years back, they were horrible, you can imagine it in a similar fashion to what you may see in the O.A. series, if any of you are familiar with that. My phycologist couldn’t do shit about my case back then.
I also have a physical sensation, which is rarer by now and it’s not necessarily tied to an equivalent visual in the dreams. It’s that I’m falling. Like when we still had snow and climate change wasn’t making winter the way they are currently, we were sledging down big hills and there was a bump in the way, which we purposefully used to jump over with the sledge thanks to the high speed we were reaching. And that short flying feeling, that time in the air, the falling, I relieve that so many times, however in the dreams instead of quickly landing, I always see a big dip in the hill, like the RedBull ski event type bs and I just fall into a idek 40-50 meter flight. Whatever, this always ends up in me getting up in the bed, sweaty, gasping for air, feeling like something heave came off of my chest. This happens in other scenarios too, like jumping off of a bridge, being pushed over windows, etc. FYI I love heights IRL, so this is about some trauma, or medical condition, fuck knows.
I wanted to reply to the whole thread, my bad, missclicked.
Failing my studies as I am simultaneously naked.
I had this recurring dreams of aliens ending the world, I’m not kidding, I was usually either in school or walking somewhere randomly, when out of the blue, an UFO would appear and start wrecking everything, for example, one time I was with friends in the neighborhood near school when this giant UFO above just blew it up and then giant tsunami started to approach us, we made an escape by going through portal but while we did it, the whole city was destroyed in earthquake, rain of meteorites and sunk because of tsunami. Later the same happened to other cities which were continuously destroyed by natural disasters and in the end a whole earth until almost everything was vaporized or underwater. This dreams continued, along with this one, I vividly remember 3, but there were more, including the one where we were on a trolleybus, while the same thing was happening around us. One of the last times I had that dreams was when we actually blew up the main space ship after teleporting there there which killed the aliens and everything went back to normal.
Another weird dream happened when my friend made me really mad one day, so I was whipping his ass during the entire dream session and every single time I hit him with a whip, he would fly at least 200 meters away which ended up in forest with broken trees and holes in the ground like during anime fights and this continued over and over and over again until I woke up. Spoiler: the next day after I woke up we made peace, he said that he’s sorry for the yesterday and laughed his ass of while I told him about the dream,
I have no idea of the meaning of these dreams, if there even is one and I don’t think that I should question it in the first place because… Wtf was even happening lmao. Nowadays I don’t dream much, if anything, but I used to like that.
One of my earliest memories is a reoccuring dream I had for a few years. I remember waking up in terror when I was like 3 or 4 and my mom coming to calm me. I had the dream a few more times and I think I had it before the time I remember. The dream stopped when I was like 10 but the images are still there decades later.
I’m walking along the edge of an indoor public swimming pool and I fall in face first. I don’t slip or get pushed or anything. It’s literally like 2 seconds. I’m just moving along looking down to the left at the tiles of the edge of the pool and the water and then I fall in and wake up just before my face hits the water.
I had a dream like that when I was little that I still remember too. I only had it the one time, but I’m not gonna forget the dream where there were rats in my bed.
