What recurring dreams do you have?

An anvil drops on Dump's head, killing the evil.

Fucking hell, OP, that's grim. And I thought my recurring dreams were heavy.

For some reason, I have recurring dreams of my front yard (or front yards of my former homes) being infested with either snakes or alligators.

I have a recurring dream that I am in a house. The details of the house often change, but the general premise does not: I keep trying to access floors that are higher and higher. I usually must do this through secret staircases or other furtive means of access. I always want to reach the top floor but am stopped before I get there. Usually, the rooms are nicer the higher I climb.

The Ambassador Bridge between Detroit and Windsor — my family crossed it when I was a kid and it terrified me. I still don’t like bridges 55 years later.

Also, i can fly if I hold a leaf from a specific tree that was in the park across the street from my childhood home.

That all my teeth are falling out. Another is being back in high school and I haven’t been to a class all year.

I have three recurring dream topics:

1. I return to my first job out of college, a newspaper, and start working there again. 2. I go back to school to get my master's degree. 3. Something bad happens to my car.

R6 I have the exact same 2 recurring dreams (and sort of 1 from R7). In the high school dream, I look around the classroom and notice college classmates mixed in with ones from high school. Also, the teacher is passing out a text I haven't studied for.

Can anyone here interpret the meanings?

Sam Fricker

I had a sociology roommate in college and he use to do experiments by making up stories about me and telling them to other people who would then confront me about how terrible I was about something that never happened. In my recurring dream he did worse than that and actually drugged and raped me repeatedly and told everyone I had done that to him.

R10 Your dream sounds like an allegory. It's what Republicans have been doing to the Democrats in this country for at least the last 20 years.

I also have snake dreams, r3. Usually the snakes are all over the floor of my house and I'm trying to walk past them without getting bitten.

I have a few, but the one that I always remember when I wake up is me having an argument with my mother, and cursing her out. Saying very vile things to her. I'm sure Freud would have a field day with it.

R6 and R8, losing teeth and missing class are common dreams (I know I have had both). They are probably anxiety related.

I’m always dreaming about missing trains or getting on the wrong one. I’m always rushing in these dreams, as if my life depends on getting to the train. What say you, DL psychologists?

There are two: in one recurring dream, I witness a plane crash. I’m usually on another plane, occasionally on the ground, and I see it crash, but no one else appears to notice.

In the other, I witness bears attacking campers or people walking nearby. Sometimes I view it from inside a cabin, and I want to warn others, but I can’t for some reason, and I see them die. I haven’t been camping, or even around cabins for a long time, and bears were never a threat. I’m not normally scared or even think about bears. But the dreams are terrifying, very vivid. Occasionally, they chase me as well.

Of a god-damned tsunami! Repeatedly. I've had multiple nightmares of a third, great, worst tsunami this century and the dream always ends as a mountain of water is about to break for shore.

One of my favorite recurring dreams has me wandering through an unfamiliar part of some city that otherwise seems vaguely familiar, and I go walk up and down the blocks exploring it. I'm sure it dates from my time living in NYC. While the blocks of Manhattan up through about 81st street were quite familiar to me, everything beyond that was terra incognita, with a few exceptions (I was familiar with Riverside Dr up to the 100s). Inwood was particularly intriguing - very hilly, and seemingly completely cut off from the rest of Manhattan. And when I lived in Brooklyn, I used to take a bus from Williamsburg all the way to Brooklyn College in Flatbush. Every new block was a revelation. Heading east out of Williamsburg, there was Bushwick Ave - mysterious and very frightening in those days. (Lots of boarded up buildings). Going north from Manhattan, there were discoveries to be made along the Grand Concourse in the Bronx.

On a visit to NYC in the past 15 years, I was able to walk the Highline, above streets I was very familiar with at street level, but now with a totally different set of views. All these sorts of images appear in my dreams periodically.

In a recurring nightmare, I receive word there has been an error, and I’m one course short of completing my Bachelor’s degree (from the 1970s!). In the dream, that means my Ph.D. is not valid, and neither is my academic faculty appointment, until I complete my Bachelor’s degree.

In one version of this nightmare, I’m wandering around the (very large) undergraduate campus I went to, looking desperately for an office that can straighten this out, but I can't find anything on campus.

In another version, I’m going back to college and having to take a course in a subject that I’m completely uninterested in, and I don't know how I will be able to engage enough to pass the exams at my advanced age.

I've even had this dream at least once after I had been retired for a few years.

Hopefully, the dream won’t recur, unless writing about it stirs it up again!

I have these recurring dreams that I’m happy-then I wake up.

R6 I have that high school dream too but also have essays due. I have a recurring dream where I accidentally pluck out all of my eyebrows

I have a few.

One I have a lot: I’m trying to use my phone for directions or to call 911 and I can’t get it to work, or have forgotten how to use it.

Like others, I have the one about going to a class I’ve never been to before for an exam. More often than that one is where I’m about to go onstage for a play I’ve never rehearsed.

I have a lot of dreams where my parents are still alive. My mom died when I was in my 20s and I have the soap opera like dreams where she faked her death and was living another life and I find her.

Pastries and cakes everywhere

R18: “ One of my favorite recurring dreams has me wandering through an unfamiliar part of some city that otherwise seems vaguely familiar, and I go walk up and down the blocks exploring it. I'm sure it dates from my time living in NYC. While the blocks of Manhattan up through about 81st street were quite familiar to me, everything beyond that was terra incognita”

Ie, the whores were sufficient below 81st

For years, I had two recurring dreams: one involved discovering my best friend Gary, who died of AIDS in 1993, was still alive and was living one 🐴 away from me (city indistinct, but not NYC, where he lived nor Chicago, where we grew up). The other involved chatting with Chita Rivera—Kiss of the Spider Woman was the first Broadway play I saw on my first solo trip to NYC after Gary died. I stopped having the Gary visitation dreams (as such dreams are often called)) after his mother died two years ago (his father died earlier this year)( the Chita dreams stopped after she died. I guess both we’re busy, welcoming loved ones or catching u with those who went before them.

OP, that is a really sad dream! 😭 Did you go off to college in the 90s? Or to boarding school?

Can it be explained why some dreams are so universal? Why do so many people dream about their teeth falling out? Or taking a final in a class they had forgotten to attend all semester? Sure, they may be related to anxiety, but why wouldn’t individuals be dreaming about something related to what they are currently worried about? Why are we all dreaming about our teeth falling out? Or being naked in a class?

I would love to read some actual theories or research on dreams. Everything out there is all woo woo crap.

"Can it be explained why some dreams are so universal? ..... Or taking a final in a class they had forgotten to attend all semester?"

And what, R27, was the universal dream of people before they had schools with semesters and final exams?

In childhood I had a recurring dream in which I was seeking a box, and the contents of the box, which was deeply in storage in some dark place in the garage, many many obstacles keeping me from reaching it. As the dreams repeated, new obstacles would come up, and I would never reach the box. After the dream had not returned for fifteen or twenty years, one night in adulthood I had it again . . . only this time, after much effort, I finally reached the box . . . and opened it . . . and there was nothing inside.

High school. Can’t find my classroom or can’t open locker.

What do people who don’t go to school/college dream about?

My dreams are hyper sexual and the most beautiful women throw themselves at me and I say no because they are straight and I don't think they can please me! Also I have no desire to go 1st! Ha!!!

I have a recurring dream where I’m driving around trying to find this store that I’d been to before but can’t find it again. Sometimes I find the store, and it has all these amazing nerdy things I collect.

I have had variations on rhe academic anxiety standard over the years. I used to find myself returned to high school 25 years after graduation because they discovered that I somehow missed a requirement so my bachelors degree and my two masters degree are now invalid. It later shifted to trying to unsuccessfully find my way around my college campus on a finals day to find a course I forgot to disenroll from and have never attended or studied for.

Recurring Dream 2 is a variation around having to urgently poop and not being able to find a truly private restroom and being observed or found out that I had so much diarrhea that it overflowed the toilet bowl onto the floor. I have IBS so years ago used to have unplanned and urgent diarrhea issues while living in NYC, the city of limited restrooms.

I’m overly anxious and insecure I suppose.

R35 Thank heavens. I thought I was the only one!

I used to have a recurring dream I was walking to my friends house but for some reason the walk was along a highway and it was nighttime. I never arrived an it really creeped me out.

Regarding losing teeth, I read once that in dreams, teeth represent power.

My recurring dream, that I have only occasionally, is that I am home (not in my real home) and I remember that there is a wing to my house, usually upstairs and that I have to go through a hidden staircase or something to get to it. The wing is always a large, spacious living area, very nicely furnished but not really new. It's as if I always knew it was there but had forgotten about it. I always have a feeling of well-being when I wake up from that dream.

Do you grind your teeth in your sleep?

R17 is Parker Posey.

I hate when I have tornado dreams. Usually something bad happens the next day.

The class one is so common. I'm in high school and the year is winding up, but I realize there's a class I started forgetting to go to at some point.

Also I'm in the backseat of a car and I'm supposed to be driving.

Teeth, Finals, and this one: Flying. Loved this one. Used to have them a few times a year but it’s been ages now.

I used to have the backseat driving dream when I was a young child. I'd be reaching over the seat back, crying and trying to steer the car, and that's when I'd wake up.

Recently it's the one where I'm at a beach on a lake. I take an air mattress and sunbathe, and float away. I end up is a cove surrounded by cliffs. This is when it changes.

In some versions I paddle frantically trying to exit the cove and go home.

In other versions I reach the shore and have to avoid dangerous reptiles. Sometimes i make it to a forest criss-crossed with hiking trails. Long dead pets dogs and cats, join me as I explore but I lose them and forget their names along the way.

All depends on when I wake up.

Some dreams I’ve had for ahe’s are like old friends. When I awaken from them I feel happy solace that I’ve revisited a familiar place.

Not among those however are others. Like the one when I show up in my elementary school hallway. It’s still dark out and it’s raining, and I realize that I’m not wearing pants or underwear. Sometimes I’m a child, other times I’m my current age. I also have one that my teeth fall out one by one.

I didn’t test for HIV for a couple decades and during that time, I repeatedly dreamt about my dentist telling me that, of course, I was positive. I used to wake up drenched in sweat, which only exacerbated the feeling of dread. About five years ago, I finally got tested and now do so every three months. I haven’t had that dream since.

Then there’s the one in which I am driving, but the vehicle I’m driving is waaaaay too high and I can’t see the road and my brakes don’t work well. I have awakened literally straining my leg muscles and feet, pushing on the footboard of my bed.

To end on a happy note, one of my dream “friends” takes place in a big, grassy field near where I lived for a few years in the early 90s. My two cocker spaniels are off leash and chasing each other around like idiots. I call out to them and the run back to me and I always wake up just as they are about to jump on me. My ex used to tell me I called out their names in my sleep.

*ages

r38 I have a very similar dream (I am r4)

I repeatedly dream all of us on DL are located threatened and rounded up by the criminal president and his friends then forced to dig our own graves. Don’tcha hate when that happens?

I had a shitty childhood and used to have a variety of shitty relegating dreams, including teeth falling out and having physical fights with my dad. Sometimes I'd kill him and be wracked by guilt.

The most interesting repeating PATTERN, not a dream per se, is that interiors of any given building- a bank, an shopping mall, an apartment complex, and of course houses, rambled in layout THE CHILDHOOD HOME I GREW UP IN.

It was like a mental ghost house floating in my head, which transformed every dream building into itself

lol fucking autocorrect.

... But now I can't remember what "relegating" was meant to be

So we're all stuck with it

*resembled. Not rambled.

Ok I'm going back to drinking for the evening.

I've had several dreams about this good looking cashier at Trader Joe's who flirted with me one day. It was quite obvious. He introduced himself and shook my hand and asked where I lived- I got VERY uptight and was not too friendly back. After that he backed off. The dreams always took place at Trader Joe's but the store in the dream was completely different than any Trader Joe's I've ever been to. I had a dream about him this month and for the first time I was at his place and at one point he was naked. It was the most interaction I ever had with this handsome guy. It's sad I never really interacted with him in a real way but only in my dreams.

The only available toilet or shower is outdoors, where someone is throwing a huge party.

I have a DREEEEAMMMM! A dream about you, JUUUUUNNNE!

I have a dream where I am in college but I want to transfer - and I have not decided what to major in, or what schools are the best for that major/profession. There's fear about what I will do and where I will go. And I have no particular leanings in the dream... I really don't know what I want to do in life, I just know I'm not really doing anything at present. But time is running out.

It's strange that ordinary options aren't available in dreams. Like, the real life solution would be to seek out a GUIDANCE COUNSELOR or a PSYCHIATRIST. Or maybe drop out until you know what you want to pursue. But in the dream I'm just floundering, alone.

I keep returning to this house that contains the portal to hell. It's my house but isn't my house at the same time. I am always tempted to enter the portal which of course, is a hole in the ground, and as I progress downward through the "levels" i continue to see more horrific things until I wake up. I dont recall most of what I've seen when I wake though. I know the girl from The Exorcist was there once, but that movie permanently traumatized me as a kid.

Scary elevator dreams

I’ve mentioned this before here..over the years, at least the last 25 or so, I’ll have a Bruce Willis dream at least once a year.

Sometimes we are attending an award show together, sometimes we’re just shopping or walking a dog. The most frequent version is where we are shooting a sex scene together and the director wants us to make it more “real” and we wind up having full blown sex. Sometimes it’s just practicing in his trailer, sometimes we’re going at it while the whole crew watches and films.

I have occasional sex dreams about celebrities, but Bruce is the only one I’ve dreamt about multiple times. I do not know why. I’m not particularly a fan, and don’t really think of him in my waking life.