That would be a very good reasoning why I dont have (or cant remember) any such dreams the past decades. I'm just so bad in remembering and reminding my duties that I either have to instantly fire it into a electronic reminder/calendar thingy and forget or I need to get used to doing it regulary (brushing teeth). So I don't have this regular "I need to remember this or that" thing at all - which is a great piece of mind I can recommend to anybody. I have to ask kids and wife - which are dreaming a lot - and the later is just littering everything with pieces of paper with random todos.
Another reason could be that I use a tiny dose of a Z-Drug (2.5g, Zolpidem each night so I can fall asleep without two hours of endless thought circles...
"so I can fall asleep without two hours of endless thought circles..."
Are the the worry-thoughts that people have when trying to fall asleep ... just pre-dreams? Just that they're way more coherent because you're conscious, and when you have them asleep, they're disjointed and dreamy because those "make thoughts coherent" part of your brain is off?
Add some ashwaganda and you’ll probably recall your dreams. I’m sure someone on this forum knows why ashwaganda has the effect, but I couldn’t tell you why.
The thought circles of my first 4 decades were mostly just endless streams of associations, curiousitiy, recalls of situations, the day, things I had read or seen. Never got diagnosed but I might carry a AD(H)D spectrum brain. I tried like 90 percent of recommended things from meditation, self hypnosis, autogene training, sports, no sports, no blue light, no media, no blue light, all kinds of natural substances - but only this 2.5-5g of Zolpidem lets me really sleep especially after any social event in the night like a party, a networking event, meeting friends, watching a film...
I'm bad at remembering such things but also don't really bother to write things down consistently; never have such dreams either—in my case, maybe this is a sign that I don't really care deep down, or something. (Or else it's the buprenorphine; had terrible insomnia till I got on it, and now I can fall asleep any time any where! It's great.)
I've only ever had a single recurring dream, which I've probably had a good two dozen times. When I was a child, I had a close call with a notorious F5 tornado (Jarrell), and ever since I have—maybe once a year—had dreams wherein the tornado is getting closer and closer, and the wind starts to rise and wail, and the ground starts to shake and a deep roar fills the very fabric of reality, and I huddle over my cat to try to protect her maybe just maybe...
...and then I wake up. (In real life, IIRC, the tornado lifted up, roped out, and dissipated just before it got to us—wasn't actually close enough to shake the ground, but close enough to hear. Hard to see, because it was pitch fuckin' black like midnight, but I can still remember the ominous, absolutely gigantic ridiculous huge towering black blot stretching up into the sky...)
I was going to attribute this purely to fear, but perhaps it is related to "checking" after all. I don't recall the dreams starting until I was old enough to watch a weather radar, and ever since I've watched that sucker like a hawk every time a storm is on the way.
The effect of medication on dreaming might be worth investigating as well. I almost never dream while I'm taking anti-depressants. ...Which is unfortunate, seeing as dreaming is so much more interesting than being awake, even if they are nightmares. I still remember that one time I got stabbed through the shoulder with a katana. Didn't hurt as much as I thought it would, obviously.
"I huddle over my cat to try to protect her maybe just maybe..." Too real by half.
I wonder if the intensity of that experience imprinted on you so much that it drowns out all other fears, at least in your subconscious. I've never experienced a natural disaster (except for drought which is really just an annoyance in the first world); all of my scariest waking experiences have been connected, at least in part, to me forgetting things, and thus it makes sense that my most frequent dreams are the "I enrolled in a class and forgot to attend" or "I forgot my homework" varieties.
Strangely, I never had close encounters with tornados, but I dream of them now and then, tens of times. I don't hear the sound, but the special effects have gone as far as the tornado hitting a high-rise building where I stand in the dream, making it wobble, and I feel the lift created by the rising air current, even though the dream house, thank goodness, stays intact. The dream situations are different: once it was a classical smoke experiment setting where everyone else in the room was ignoring the tornado and the wobbling house and I was the only one finally running downstairs; another time I ran from a tornado, almost escaped, then realized I had left my kids in a house now destroyed by the damned weather event, turned around to run back with barely any hope left... it's recommendable to wake up at this point.
I have this condition. Not diagnosed, but I have it. Sometimes the "noises" wake me up and occasionally I think they were real for a short time.
I would never have guessed for a second, though, that it would be called "Exploding Head Syndrome". That's like calling mild myopia "Utter and Terrifying Blindness".
Also very bad at remembering such things (feels like I have a hard cap of 3 slots for such things, and not everything can go in an electronic aide). But I have the opposite reaction - I am nervous because it's very likely that I am indeed forgetting something I need to do. I'm not very stress prone in general, so I'm not terribly anxious about this unless I have a large number of important things to remember in a short time. I do have those dreams occasionally though, often with childhood themes (e.g. end of high school exam, and not forgetting to file my taxes).
Tangentially related, I'd be curious what the correlates of this character trait are. Personality and otherwise. And also the specific mitigations people use. Let's start a thread about it! :)
As mentioned - I had to embrace the electronic helpers early on. Never could work okish with analogue stuff like calendars, agendas, post-its and so forth. My electronic life is pretty well organized while my physical desks always looked cluttered at best and were piles of 3 years old docs pretty often.
Electronic helpers alone is not enough unfortunately. I've implemented an optimized a set of cloud service, computer, smartphone, smartwatch and processes for when and how and how often I set appointments, reminders etc. So I think up-front about the actual event, how many preparation in advance I need to do, how long it will take to travel to the location / setup the environment etc.pp.
On the other side I have disabled ANY other notification on my gear of news sites, Teams, WebEx, any other apps, games, even eMail - because its a medium I want to use on my own terms and not having to react when I'm not prepared to. So I get only alarms (for waking up, preparing the kids for school), a couple of reminders for appointments, pop ups sleeping in the notification bar for Todos, and notifications for messengers I use to stay in touch with friends. All that is happening mostly silent or vibrating on my smartwatch were I can have a short glance and see if its fluff of friends or an important appointment coming up.
What do you do about reminders not triggered by time. E.g. "when I see this friend, I need to return that thing they lent me." Or "I need to buy new shirts"?
And what about things you don't have time to put into your system? E.g. when cooking, there are a lot of actions that need to be performed, and if I'm roasting nuts while chopping a salad I need to remember to stir them every minute or so.
And ditto about cluttered desk (still!) but very organized digital folders, calendar, etc.
Good that you're asking about the kitchen: We only introduced Alexa smart speakers last year - but those were the best 25 bucks (per speaker) invested in a long time. Even wife and daughter (both hating but defending their todos on flying pieces of papers) who were complaining "about that damn computer" are now happily commanding our fleet of Alexas. At any period of 5-15 minutes in the kitchen we put a couple of things on our shopping list by saying "Alex, put X on the list". During grocery shopping we just go through the list in the Alexa App. Alexa can manage multiple named lists if necessary. We let Alexa turn and tune the lights. We run timers "Alexa, timer 10 minutes" - the speaker is showing the countdown and alarming when it fires off. then we stop it by "Alexa, stop". We set all kinds of further Alarms for cooking, baking, on-time or re-ocuring reminders for medication, kids preparing to school asf. I sometimes even set reminders for a kid at home from remote to remind it to do something while I'm away and not able to call. One of the mostly used feature is the Alexa speakers being the least expensive Multi-Room-Audio system - with free unlimited Spotify-like Radio. We permanently ask "Alexa, play Song XYZ" or "Alexa, play music of artist ABC" and it does exactly that continuing with more songs from the artist or fitting the mood or so. Way more comfortable and less expensive then a Spotify or Youtube prime subscription on your smartphone. From time to time Alex tries to sell us the Amazon music subscription but is letting her to stop instantly. Kids are asking Alexa from time to time so trivial pursuit questions. If its getting more complicated, we run one of the many Free-of-Charge skills which lets us talk with ChatGPT for free. So its like "Alexa, run AI" - "Hi - this is your AI, what you wane discuss today" - and its a handsfree conversation with ChatGPT. This was possible long before OpenAI announced its own hands-free mode.
All that is hands free without any smartphone.
Then you asked - How to remind giving something back to a friend or other situational reminders. There are smartphone apps trying to do this based on your actual location - but I'm still to paranoid letting random apps track my locations all the time. But I use Microsoft todo app to remind me around a time or an event to remember Xyz. Generally I have really good experience with real-world situational reminders. For example I mainly pay for short term parking fees by using a popular parking app - and often forgot to cancel it when leaving. These days I put something unusual on to the steering wheel and know in an instant I have to cancel the parking app when I come back. So I mostly will try to find a virtual or physical related thing/action/reminder to that meeting a friend etc. Its more like proper processes built around my cheesy brain. Putting "abc needs a new shirt" onto the shopping list is like a situational reminder as well. We dont buy shirts in the grocery store but the next time we are in a mall (doesn't happen all to often) we go through the list as well and see the shirt.
Given how much brainspace is used for social stuff, I wouldn't be surprised if those common dreams about "embarrassment of not being prepared for X" were centered around "fear of social disapproval."
When I had/have the "didn't prepare for a test/performance" dreams, it was rarely about "oh no I don't know the answer to number 4!", the parts I remember after waking are the "other people had expectations for me, and are now disappointed."
I agree. I think most anxiety dreams are about reinforcing social norms into memory. Feeling shame over failure to live up to one's responsibilities is a common dream theme.
If the root of these social dreams is an experience of shame, in a more ruthless society than ours losing teeth may be the literal origin of "losing face". Prehistorically, when people didn't live long, you were more likely to lose teeth from losing a fight badly than from gum disease. Getting disfigured in a fight was shameful. Way worse than walking around naked.
oh yeah, I didn't even think about that in the context of the losing teeth one, you're totally right, that fits the model.
We associate "food" with "rewards" and certainly in an earlier society, someone losing their teeth will have trouble eating food, and symbolically (or maybe the dream goes back so far that it is "literally" from when we were creatures who needed their teeth to hunt) incapable of providing for the tribe. Plus your smile, a key feature for persuading others that you're on their side, and not a threat to them, is now less appealing - a very important thing back then.
Dogs obviously have dreams about chasing prey. Do wolves have nightmares about losing their teeth?
Reinforcing social compliance seems spot on to me: just as social anxiety generally makes sense (we have much more control, historically, over not being cast out than over external threats) so do those dreams. They remind people to take care of their reputation basically.
Somewhat by-negation anecdata: my social anxiety is low by human standards and I don't have "humiliated or fast out" dreams, and didn't have them as a teenager either, my recurring unpleasant dreams are either about physical threats or about responsibility for others (so essentially I will die or I don't save others from dying).
Makes sense, but why are these dreams about certain specific situations only? At least for me. For example, I never have dreams about missing a deadline at work, even though it's quite a salient fear for me, but still get dreams about being unprepared for something at school.
I am not a brainologist, but I assume that for your sleeping brain, they basically are in the same category of emotion, and it happening "at school" was just the scenario you remembered first, back when your brain was forming? i.e. your waking brain can tell the difference between "unprepared at work" and "unprepared at school" but asleep brain thinks "same thing"?
As a professor, I find that I often have dreams about being unprepared to teach a class but never about being unprepared to take one. Perhaps I was the kind of student that eventually goes on to be a professor, and thus never felt unprepared as a student, but started getting that feeling for the first time later, and that’s the one that stuck for me, while other people got a similar thing stuck earlier.
It might be worth surveying people about whether it’s a college class or high school class or middle school class or what that they’re unprepared for in their dream.
I also teach at a college and have these dreams. But I only have them starting about 3 weeks before fall semester starts up until the start of the semester. I also occasionally have the dream that I am missing a class I signed up for, even decades after finishing my own studies. When I was young, my recurring dream always had to do with getting on the bus and realizing I forgot my socks. I had that dream a lot all through my youth and adolescence.
That should be testable. Certain people are "shameless", meaning they really put little or no value on what others think of them. Do these people have those kinds of dreams at lower rates than average?
> Given how much brainspace is used for social stuff, I wouldn't be surprised if those common dreams about "embarrassment of not being prepared for X" were centered around "fear of social disapproval."
I mean, I understand that The Website Formerly Known As Twitter is ever more of a verbal Thunderdome, but damn.
Agreed. It's been about 20 years since the last time I was in a play, but I still have dreams where I'm about to go onstage and I realize I never learned my lines, don't know what my cue is, and/or can't find the stage itself.
this is roughly how the un/underdressed dreams go for me. I'm in a situation where other people (potentially) exist and find myself without shoes or other clothing. There's no sense of shame or embarrassment, nor even a sense that *I* have made an error, just "ugh, now i have to manage other people's perceptions more carefully because i am marked as Other/Deviant"
yeah, that makes sense, I assume cultures that have totally different dress codes than us wouldn't dream about not having pants, but they might dream about forgetting the socially-appropriate hat or shoes or whatever.
I'm a "pathological lucid dreamer", of the kind Scott mentioned in his post Bad Dreams. Quoting him:
> Somewhat related to epic dreaming are pathological lucid dreams. Normal lucid dreams are fun experiences where you realize you’re dreaming, take control of the dream, and spend the rest of the dream riding dolphins or kissing supermodels. Pathological lucid dreamers realize that they’re dreaming, but this somehow turns the dream into a nightmare in which the dreamer is attacked by demonic figures, all while fully conscious and realizing the nature of the phenomenon. These dreamers report experiencing real pain from the attacks and sometimes go to great lengths to stay awake and avoid having to subject themselves to further dream attacks.
My recurring dreams are mostly nightmares, reflecting back on real-world traumatic events. I used to not know that, but as I 'unlocked' traumatic memories with a therapist, I now understand. There is one recurring nightmare I have that is not yet solved -- being swarmed by insects, enduring their very painful bites. I don't know if that relates to anything in the real world.
Among non-nightmares, the most common recurrence is needing to urinate and seeking for a suitable place to do it. That I can pretty trivially connect to a urination-related OCD theme.
I never had recurring dreams of being late, or being embarassed by being naked, or anything else that is a common genre. Although I have no internal nudity taboo and this doesn't sound embarassing to me at all. I remember _one_ dream of teeth falling out, and I didn't know that is a common theme.
Sorry to hear about your recurring nightmares. Have you thought about trying hypnosis? I successfully used hypnosis to deal with a non-nightmare dream scenario that would wake me up at 3 am the Monday before I had to go to work.
In regards to needing to urinate in your dreams, do you actually have to get up and pee?
I'm a type I diabetic, and if my blood glucose levels are running high, I'll need to get up to pee during the night. When I start looking for a bathroom in my dreams, I know it's time to wake up and go pee. So, this fits Scott's external stimuli hypothesis.
As for nightmares, I haven't had any since I was about six years old. But I remember that I had them frequently as a little child (a creature would come out from the washing machine in the basement and steal my mom away). After sixty years, I still prefer to sleep on my left side because that was how I slept with my back against the wall facing the door as a child. When I was about six years old, I was lucky enough to encounter a guardian entity in my dreams that showed me how to escape the cycle of nightmares. It showed me how to walk outside and explore the world outside my bedroom, and the nightmares couldn't follow me when I went out exploring. Since then, I haven't had nightmares — though some of my dreams may be disturbing, they're disturbing in nonterrifying ways.
Maybe, engaging in dream yoga might be interesting since you already got the lucid dreaming down.
> There is one recurring nightmare I have that is not yet solved -- being swarmed by insects, enduring their very painful bites. I don't know if that relates to anything in the real world.
Something somewhat similar appeared for me in meditation (randomly being eaten by maggots in my case). Imagine it's far less real than a lucid dream but the solution might be the same.
Being eaten/bitten/swarmed by insects isn't actually a problem unless we make it one same as with everything else. At least that's true from some frames (e.g. timeless, or self-less frames). This is somewhat what enlightenment is about. However, re-framing is something we often do to solve problems (e.g. thinking outside the box).
Gampopa's String of Pearls involves "seizing the dream" to become lucid in the dream. The practitioner continually reminds themself to see/imagine all perceptions and thoughts as a dream during the day. Then, they must go to sleep with a strong determination to recognize they are dreaming within the dream. Gampopa has a visualization practice with a mantra that's supposed to spontaneously produce the experience of lucid dreaming. There are more steps to this than that, though. I never tried this myself.
There's also a Tantric practice that utilizes our "third eye" to enter a state of lucid dreaming. The third eye is the patch of phosphene activity that's between your eyebrows above the level of your eyes. Not everyone seems to have this phosphene patch, but some people, myself included, have the perception of phosphene patterns around that spot when they close their eyes. If you can detect it, try to concentrate on that area when you close your eyes before sleep. Keep concentrating on it to try to stabilize the phosphene pattern so turns into a glowing ball of light. At some point, you'll enter the hypnogogic transition state before you black out into your initial sleep state. Try to hold on to the glowing patch in your hypnogogic state. You should still have some conscious will in the hypnogogic state, and you should try to clearly enunciate in your mind that you wish to have control of your dreams. It will likely take months of practice before you can will yourself to dream the themes you choose.
As I said, some people either don't have to have the third eye, or they're unable to perceive it. If you can't detect a patch of phosphene activity between your eyebrows, you're SOL for this method. :-)
But a quick Google turned up a couple of lectures by Geshe Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche about Bön lucid dreaming practices.
Dream Yoga: Lucid dreaming from the Bön Buddhist tradition of Tibet
I don't think you need the phosphene patterns or third eye whatever it just helps. From a more meta-level meditation perspective you could do a light kassina practice (which you can bootstrap from the empty visual field https://firekasina.org/, or get a light nimitta from any meditation practice (have high enough "meditation" concentration and that ball of light might appear anyways) ). Then there are techniques to stay aware even during sleep which is different from lucid dreaming. All of this is usually a bit more high level I just wanted to mention it. There are also people like Beowful mentioned who are more naturally talented. I have friends who could always just pick a color from their close eyed visual field and fill the field with it.
If you have questions about enlightenment stuff in general we could chat some time/I could point you at some people. For other rationalists into enlightenment there is e.g. Sasha Chaplin or Kaj Sotal, on Twitter strong practitioners/teachers are Wystan and Roger Thisdell. There is dharmaoverground as a public forum. I am in a discord with a lot of experienced pracitioners. I know one person with a stronger dream practice but he is 4th path and I don't remember anyone who started off with a real dream practice.
Interesting, I also have the "need to urinate" dream, typically when I have a full bladder in real life. Often, when I have the dream, I'll find a place and unleash an extraordinary jet blast of pee, and yet feel no relief; this prompts a moment of lucidity where I realize I'm dreaming, and then I wake up. I don't normally have lucid dreams otherwise.
Recently, I was dreaming that I was being strangled by someone much physically stronger than me, so that I stood no chance of overpowering him. I knew something else had to be done, immediately, and I came up with a pretty reasonable plan of how to get out of this situation. I don't know if the plan would work in real life, but it impressed me by being somewhat realistic when I woke up (as opposed to the nonsense we sometimes think when we dream).
This seems very related to this whole "be prepared" topic - like I tried to prepare for an real-life attack by coming up with a plan for countering it in a dream. But it's not like I have brain cells going "hey, I should check if I'm being strangled right now". Maybe dreams are related to preparedness in some broader way as well?
That's what I always figured, since most of mine seem to revolve around various threats that I've run into or could run into at various points in my life. It's the brain's prep-for-potential threats mechanism running on idle. A sort of 'danger room' (thanks Joey Miller below).
Of course, it's probably a lot of different things that can produce a dream--some of that, some of Scott's prospective memory thing (and in that sense it's a threat to prepare for), some of the body sensations he talks about. It's one of the reasons they're so bizarre.
Sort of makes sense to me; my only recurring dream is a nightmare wherein a tornado is coming, except unlike in real life, it's not lifting up and dissipating but just getting stronger & stronger. I often think about what I'd do if I knew one was coming now that I'm an adult, so... could be related.
Freud's theory of dreams was that a central purpose that dreams serve for the organism is to keep you asleep even though various disturbances might wake you up.
Sounds reasonable with physical sensations during sleep -- your brain confabulates in details so it "makes sense" rather than having the physical sensation wake you up. Many frightening memories and emotional recollections that provoke bodily sensations seem like they could be similar. (Sometimes people wake up sharply from a nightmare, other times the nightmare continues like you describe and the brain tries to make the details make sense...)
Freud took this really far: he said this is the *only* way dreams function, so therefore apparently-random dreams must really secretly be the brain's way of dealing with unconscious drives. I doubt that.
But maybe it is the case sometimes, and might be at least part of why evolution selected for dreaming in many organisms.
Being strangled seems connected to being suffocated, and I think many dreams are related to sleep paralysis and the inability to control one’s breath while sleeping. I often have dreams where I want to yell something but can’t get the breath out.
Sorry you have PTSD, but this is interesting to me, because years ago I was also diagnosed with PTSD, and I tell myself I overcame it, but hearing your dreams—I still also have violent dreams like this, and I’m usually escaping. I sense most people don’t have such violent dreams. Which I guess they do say that PTSD causes night terrors, which is violent dreams adjacent.
Thought #1: I can't overpower him, so I need to figure out something else.
Thought #2: There is no need to overpower him, I just need to stun / distract / blind him for a moment so that he'd drop me. He just needs pain and disorientation.
Thought #3: He is strangling me with his bare hands, so his face is literally at arm's length.
Thought #4: I could poke his eye with my finger.
Thought #5: Finger's not good enough, not that firm and not that sharp, more likely to break my finger than anything. What's the sharpest thing I can reach?
Thought #6: I have my keys in my pocket. I can reach them. I will strike the attacker in the eye with my key.
Don't think we haven't noticed that you kept the plan secret, just to make sure you do have the upper edge in case some ACX reader ever felt like strangling you. Good OpSec. Constant vigilance.
Interesting, my recurring dreams usually involved being trapped in some sort of fictional horror story that I’ve consumed recently. Compared to that, I don’t have any of the dreams you mentioned, except occasionally flying away from the fictional horror monsters.
I could see the flying dreams falling into the same category if there was a brain function whose sole purpose was to monitor if and when you need to put your foot down to catch yourself. Walking is one of those things that seems really easy once you learn how to do it, but there is probably a whole slew of processes running in the background doing things like checking your balance, where your legs are, what you need to move next, etc. If one of those is in a loop triggering saying 'you need to put your foot down and touch the ground soon', but you never do, it could feel like flying.
This is how most of my flying dreams feel. I'm running, then forget to put my feet down and just start flying.
My "flying dreams" involve taking bigger and bouncier strides, and having to take strides in mid-air to stay up. A bit like a cross between the way you can "run" in water, the way astronauts look like they move on the moon, and Flappy Bird.
Have you tried gliding down staircases? That's the best way to get to the bottom. Unfortunately, I haven't figured out how to glide back up to the top. ;-)
Oh, I hate that, too! Until recently, I couldn't read in my dreams, so I couldn't read which gate the next leg of my flight was at. Recently, I've begun to be able to read in my dreams, but I need bigger letters than the ones on the departure boards. Very annoying that my visual cortex isn't able to enhance the details of my dreams.
Mine sometimes involve flapping my elbows really hard like I'm doing the chicken dance. Or sometimes I just have to will myself up hard enough and I float.
I've had a reoccurring dream of rollerskating through the woods and realising that when I take a big breath I ascend until I'm rollerskating above the canopy. I think it's during a lucid dreaming phase.
Maybe causality is the other way: it could be that sleep contains virtual exploration/rollouts of RL episodes, in some of them things go wrong because you didn’t put on clothes, and prospective memory, which would’ve prevented it, is reinforced in these dreams, and when you’re awake, you don’t want to end up in one of these dreams, so you take actions that avoid branches that lead to being stuck far away from home/hotels a couple of minutes before Shabbat.
A weird thing - not sure how it fits: apparently, dreams of flying are mutually exclusive with dreams of breathing underwater. How can such an exclusion work in this system?
In the same person! I've asked this of everyone I meet, and those who fly never dream of underwater breathing, and vice versa. N~47 (I think more but I only kept notes since a few years back.)
Okay now this is interesting! Both the "flying away, realize you are untethered" feeling and the "wait, why am I drowning, I just need to breathe normally" feeling? Was this at a similar period in your life or you were flying as a child and now you breathe underwater as an adult? Do these seem like interchangeable sensations?
As a child, I had the I'm flying this is fun WHEEEEE dream a couple of times. This was a highly coveted dream-treat.
As an adult, my "flying" dreams are more like the ones described in the article. Sometimes I can jump/launch and I can sort of descend very slowly, go someplace if I manage to propel. I guess the sensation is closer to swimming but it definitely doesn't have the same feel as my swimming dreams.
My swimming dreams are like you described. Oh no, I'm underwater...omg I can actually breathe. I find I have these most in the morning. If I wake up and then go back to sleep I often have more vivid dreams. Sometimes this triggers my awareness that I am dreaming because I know you can't breathe underwater and I've had this dream enough times. A few times I've been able to dip in and out of the dream while being aware of my cheek against the pillow. They usually feel darker or more compressed if that makes sense.
They don't feel interchangeable.
It's really hard to write about dreams! The urge to invent logic to explain the nonsense is strong.
I guess I can do both. I haven't flown in my dreams, but I can jump long distances in a single bound. Also, I have frequent water dreams where I'm underwater, but I'm not thinking about breathing when I'm submerged.
I dream of both flying, and of breathing underwater.
They are both enjoyable kinds of dreams - in each case being there is effortless and fun - but the water ones are better because of the fish, which are generally gorgeous.
I've had both kinds of dreams as well. And I think they are both just linked to physical sensations.
The breathing underwater dreams actually became an easy path for me to lucid dream. As it was a reliable anchor point in any dream of "this is not real".
Breathing underwater I think is related to my sleep apnea. Once I got a CPAP machine those dreams drastically decreased. For those who don't know, sleep apnea usually involves short periods of not breathing, where your air passage is blocked. Which would be easy to associate with being underwater where you hold your breathe.
The falling dreams always happened at the start of the night when my muscles were relaxing. I'd often wake up with a "slam" into the ground where i have a sort of whole body twitch / spasm.
As an anecdote counter to yours, I've been in the ER multiple times for apnea-related atrial fibrillation and never had the breathing-underwater dreams.
I can't recall ever having a "breathing underwater" but I used to frequently have "flying" dreams which were more akin to "swimming through the air". I always chalked this up to the fact that I spent a *lot* of my childhood in pools (And early childhood, especially - I learned to swim before I was even potty trained), but maybe there's another link there.
I've had both on multiple occasions! But I dream a lot, and remember dreams a lot, and my dreams tend to be fantastical or terrifying (rather than mundane stresses, although have those too).
After reading all these comments, it appears that I just lacked datapoints :) also Cunninghams law going strong! In any case, there goes my theory of "quasi-unicity of feelings in the conceptual dreamspace".
The defunct theory postulated that we never dream of the same intense feeling in different ways.
> Childhood me was afraid of monsters in the closet
I don't know about you, but childhood me had very frequent dreams about monsters in the... well cupboard, because I'm British and the word "closet" isn't much used here, but it comes to the same thing.
One of my more frequent dreams nowadays is having to go on stage and perform a role that I haven't rehearsed for at all and can't remember any of the lines or music.
Same, in childhood I had plenty of dreams about all kinds of monsters. They even lasted for a few years after I've grown up enough to not be afraid of monsters in the waking life.
Though it's been little while since the last one I had, I too had dreams about monsters as a child and continued to have them occasionally into adulthood. I think on a deep level I never really stopped believing in monsters, so they show up from time to time in my dreams.
Monster dreams are claimed to be common among little kids, and there are also the non-REM 'sleep terrors' where the monster 'stays' for a while after the kid seems to be woken up. I once had to put on lights and search the room to prove to my kid that the wolf was gone.
I definitely get the “never went to class” one. Also, for some reason I’m in a high school that is definitely my high school but doesn’t look like it, and I’m a 38 year old adult with a Masters degree retaking a class.
The other common theme I get is “I’m getting ready to go somewhere but keep getting delayed/forgetting things” and by the time the dream ends I still haven’t left.
Both of these fit your “prospective memory model”!
I get those dreams about college. There's a class that I signed up for, went to a few times, but then missed a week for some reason I can't recall, then just forgot to go back. Now it's the end of the semester and....wait a minute, I graduated and have been working for over a decade now. That's pretty much always how it goes.
I’m curious about what era of school most people have this dream about. I don’t have it about taking classes, but I do have it about teaching classes (which I’ve done for the past 15 years). Some people seem to have it from high school and others from college. I wonder if some have it from earlier education and some have it from med school or law school or grad school or whatever.
I have it for both high school and college. Slightly more often high school. Never had it about law school. Though usually, it's the point in the dream where I start thinking wait, why do I have to go back to high school when I already have a law degree? that I'm about to wake up.
I still have it about high school and college, but never about grad school. I also have "I'm trying to teach, but it's all chaos" dreams (used to be a teacher). Usually in my school dreams I'll realize "wait, I'm a 4X year old man with a PhD, why the heck am I in AP Physics again?" And the dream will transition to something else.
But why the situations are always the same and often implausible? And solutions tend to never materialize or be equally implausible/impractical? Seems more like a problem-solving engine running idle, decoupled from its normal task inputs (sensory organs) and the means to actually solve anything (body).
From the experience it seems that most people's brains can solve the problem "how to not be naked in the public" just fine - when awake, that is. Same for things like tests, being on time for your flight and so on - most of the people successfully do it most of the time.
It would be interesting to see if dream themes correlate with personality at all. My partner, who is high on neuroticism and very good at remembering appointments/obligations (presumably they have many functional "homework neurons") nevertheless has very mundane dreams ("I went to the store and bought an apple." "I saw my friend and had a conversation.")
The prospective-memory theory sounds reasonable, but doesn't actually explain that very well by itself.
Long ago I read about a study indicating that boring dreams are a symptom of depression. Don't know how true it is but the measure has seemed accurate.
I have a recurring dream/nightmare that I've experienced since I was a teen. The details vary, but the central theme is the same. I'm in a hurry to get somewhere, I'm running, and suddenly, with no warning, I become completely enervated. I lose all strength in my legs, unable to run, I have to walk, then stagger, then fall down and desperately crawl. It's usually somewhere around this point that I wake up.
This really doesn't feel like it fits the theory, to me at least.
According to the cognitive theory of dreams, what happens in dreams is what we expect will happen. In waking life our predictions and expectations are corrected by objective feedback, but in our dreams there is no feedback so what we expect will happen is what does. From that perspective your dream indicates that you believe that you are vulnerable and incapable. You have goals but they are unreachable because you lack the ability to reach them. In short, on a deep level you expect that you will fail.
If you can recognize and change that belief then the dream may stop coming back.
I usually only have that with my lungs in my dream - I need to breathe harder or say something loudly, but my lungs won’t work. Both of these seem related to the fact that the dreaming mind wants to control the body but can’t due to sleep paralysis.
That sounds like possibly a similar phenomenon to sleep paralysis, where your brain notices that it can't move your body (since physical movement is suppressed during sleep), and freaks out about it.
This reminds me of something I experience in dreams occasionally, where I need to shout or scream for some reason, but I can't make any sound louder than a sort of hoarse, quiet, rasp
It's probably one of these overdetermined things. Some of it's sensation during sleep, some of it's that prospective memory thing you're talking about, some of it's random associations. My favorite theory is that some of it's preparation for dangerous situations you may encounter, since most of mine are about some kind of threat like getting fired.
Maybe interesting datapoint: I have ADHD and, as far as I can remember, I never had dreams about deadlines or not being prepared to the test, or stuff like this.
I was going to share this in the comments as well. ADHD, don't seem to have that prospective memory "dedicated loop", and also have never had a dream of this sort. Perhaps worth some follow-up polling to see if this these are related?
"You’d have to have some kind of brain cell or whatever on a dedicated loop, checking every few hours to see if there’s a homework assignment you’ve forgotten about."
My personal theory is dreams are video games your mind plays with your virtual body because the mind is bored while the real physical body needs rest and because this is a good time for the mind to “practice” navigating the body in preparation for real life challenges.
So basically dreams are virtual training and amusement.
Also I dreamt last night that my ex husband was still my husband and we were staying at a hotel in Atlanta and attending a conference. He started serial murdering women but no one realized it was him. I was so scared that I’d be next. Then I found a gun and started planning to take him out, because I feared if I didn’t, he’d kill me first.
One of the craziest dreams I’ve probably ever had.
It also involved riding the Atlanta subway into an apocalyptic wasteland by mistake, and a dreamy stranger guy who helped me load my gun.
The dreams where I suddenly find that I'm back with my ex husband somehow, or he's around and I don't know how to get away from him, are the worst nightmares I have. much worse than my frequent dreams about being attacked by bears. I have both of these several times a year at least, and the ex-husband back in my life one is far more terrifying.
My alarm clock requires me to jot down the dream I was having when I woke up. I did some stats on it and have seen some interesting trends :
The "first" of a category tends to be more common. Ex: I am more often in either my childhood home or the first place I had lived by myself than any other place (including my current one). The people I meet are more often childhood friends than people I currently know. My first dog (dead of more than 20 years) is more commonly here that any more recent pet.
I have been traumatized by school : many dreams about having forgotten to do my homework or having to do a test without having studied, going back to school (I have been outside the education system for more than 10 years now)
"Nightmares" tend to involve mundane fears : having my wallet stolen, missing a flight
Dreams involving my smartphone tends to be about struggles : failing to book a room in a hotel due to a confusing user experience, failing to find my train ticket, etc...
Teaching college courses for a few years as a grad student permanently (it seems) rewired my "it's the last day of class and I haven't been all semester and now I have to take the final" dreams into "walking into a classroom unprepared to teach" dreams. (For example, I once dreamed I suddenly was teaching the first day of 5th grade.)
In fact, my advisor point-blank asked me one day if my dreams had switched from "it's the end of semester and you forgot to attend a class" to "it's the end of semester and you forgot to teach a class." My jaw dropped, and I told I'd just had such a dream recently. He smiled and said the switch-over happens to all teachers.
It did that for a while, but then when I stopped teaching, it went back to a mix of the two. Sometimes in the same dream where I'm teaching one HS class and taking another.
I also stopped teaching, and the dreams got really weird after that.
At first, I again started dreaming that I was signed up for a class that I had never attended. But then I remembered I had a PhD and already knew the material, so I knew I was going to ace the test so why was I worried?
Then I started dreaming I was in elementary school but I never went to class, but that was okay because I was an adult and wasn't supposed to go to class anyway.
Then I started dreaming I was in elementary school but I never went to class, but I was an adult, etc. But then the school would say they didn't care and were going to flunk me regardless.
At this point I decided my brain was trying to checkmate me any old way it could using that damn dream scenario.
My recurring dream is always that I have a mid-term and I don't actually know where my classroom is because I haven't been to class in so long (This actually happened to me once).
I don't usually remember my dreams, but I know I've had the one about discovering I'm enrolled in a class I never attended. I always assumed it was related to my actually having a school homeroom orientation I was supposed to attend but didn't until (I kid you not) September 11 2001, when everyone was too distracted by the big events that day being discussed on TV for us to do whatever we were supposed to be doing there.
I’ve had it where I discover I’m teaching a class I’ve never attended until partway through the term. My dream self doesn’t wonder why the students are all there waiting still.
Perhaps a hint: I only have the "forgot to prepare" dreams about school. But during a spell of unemployment, I began to have them about work. And I don't recall having them about school when in school. It's like I only have them about situations that are no longer relevant in real life.
This seems inconsistent with your observant friend's dreams about failing to prepare for Shabbat, but can anyone else corroborate having these dreams about work only while unemployed? For those who've gone back to school, do the dreams about being unprepared for class stop?
I only got the "forgot to prepare for a class" dreams after I left school, too! I've attributed it to how, when I was in school, I knew what classes I had at any time and knew I was staying on top of them.
Never gone back to school, though, so I can't help there.
This experience, which seems to be shared by others, seems to indicate that regular patterns of behaviour, doing homework or going to work, have deeply rooted in the mind and were once satisfied by the completion of homework or arrival at one’s place of work, but when those patterns are broken, by ageing out of education or becoming unemployed, these patterns are no longer being completed to satisfaction and the mind plays them on repeat, particularly during dreams. Similar to how ear worms, songs or jingles stuck in one’s head, are created by having an incomplete sound on repeat can be treated by listening to the whole song or jingle.
Unfortunately, one can’t treat anxious dreams of not doing homework by doing homework as the pattern does not need to be completed.
Wait, where is my childhood companion, the "floor collapses" scenario? I thought it was universal, or is it just a correlate of all the engineers in my family?
This feels similar to my concept that dreams have to be "solved" to stop recurring, but I wouldn't think that the solution here was "it's a car." Maybe your brain was trying to figure out what the sensation was but hadn't connected the two.
I find that mine are sometimes related to some activity that happened during the prior day, however tenuous. I played a particular video game? Aspects of gameplay might be present. That sort of thing. Not sure if that ties into any of your theories particularly well.
As for teeth falling out, that is an experience most adults have had! Humans do lose their milk teeth, after all.
Those sorts of things show up as surface coloration on top of other themes for me. Although I persistently have dreams involving World of Warcraft (or something that my brain labels as such despite being different)--the setting of the game evolves over the years, with the same characters as before but new scenes and adventures. I haven't played WoW for nearly a decade.
Acid reflux can be a cause of dreams about losing or swallowing a tooth. I've had many dreams about swallowing teeth, keys, staples, bolts etc but I'm more careful not to eat late at night and rarely have them now.
I also get the "forgot I was enrolled in class until late in the semester" dreams, and think I have a pretty good idea why I get those.
I had the experience in college of forgetting about big assignments until late in the semester, and rushing to get them done. Frequently I had the experience of getting a reminder several weeks after knowing of an assignment and getting a rush of anxiety about having wasted those weeks when I could have been working on it.
This seems to match with the prospective view.
I also get dreams about working in places where I used to work before. I think this happens when I'm particularly stressed at my current job, but I'm not certain of that. I am more likely to have dreams about working in a place that I found particularly stressful, though I also have dreams about working in a place that I quite enjoyed and was not nearly as stressed about. Coincidentally, I am having a busy week at work and dreamed the last two nights about working in my last two jobs.
I don't have dreams about tests I forgot to study for, but I have dreams that it's the start of a new school year and I have no idea where any of my classes are.
I think this is because I was academically smart, but disorganised. Curious whether the many other smart but disorganised people on here have similar dreams.
For me it became dreams about having to teach a class I’m unprepared to teach - as the kind of person who eventually became a professor I wasn’t particularly stressed while taking classes, but am often stressed about teaching them.
Interestingly, (or maybe I've just gotten older and more observant) but recently after I started using a calendar, I'm way more stressed out about planned events, and I've had nightmares over missing a date, even though the stakes for remembering that date have felt lower than say, a homework assignment(which I've never had nightmares over).
I gave up cigarettes 30 years ago, after many failed attempts which had me not smoke for a month or two and then relapse. About twice a month I still have a dream in which I have just put a cigarette out and I am thinking Damn! What a waste of so many years not smoking, now I have to de-addict myself all over again. The relief on waking up is indescribable.
- I am stuck in the middle of the road somehow, and I can see a cars headlights coming, but I can't move my body or can only move very slowly. My body is heavy. I would have said this was a childhood only dream, but I just had it again this week.
- I am chewing gum and I can't spit out all of it. It's actually a huge amount of gum and if I pull part of it stretches and stretches but I'm still left with a huge amount on my mouth. Sometimes its stuck to my teeth.
The former might be a sleep paralysis-type dream (can't move despite screaming to), the latter might be a variant on teeth falling out.
I have never been as terrified as the first time I experienced sleep paralysis in my late teens. I was lying in bed in my room, opened my eyes, and noticed that the light was an unusually uniform gray-blue before I saw a gray figure with long limbs, about the height of a child, slowly approaching me. My heart pounded faster and faster, and to my escalating, increasingly panicked despair, I couldn’t move at all. Not even my eyes, which were staring straight at the gray figure, could I close.
The almost worst part was that I felt like I needed to breathe faster, but I couldn’t do that either—it felt like a heavy weight on my chest, as if I were strapped to the bed. So while my heart raced at full speed, my breathing remained normal, and I thought I was going to suffocate. I don’t know how long it lasted. Maybe twenty seconds, give or take ten? And there I lay, completely paralyzed, terrified to the breaking point, in my own room down to the smallest detail—except for the eerie dim light and the horrific figure that slowly approached in total silence.
Everything in me screamed to move, but it was utterly useless until I noticed the faintest movement in the outermost joint of my right pinky finger. The motion was sluggish, but with frantic, panicked effort, I managed to move more and more, eventually gaining control over my wrist, then my arm, and finally my whole body. Still dazed and shaken, I sat up in bed and saw that the figure had vanished.
After the experience, I needed to make sense of what had happened, because never before or since have I felt such acute, suffocating panic—pure, crystallized terror. I came to three possible conclusions: either I had been the target of an attempted alien abduction, or an Old Norse troll or sprite had stopped by in the early morning hours, or—what I ultimately settled on—I had experienced sleep paralysis.
Now that I recognize the symptoms of sleep paralysis, I don’t get as frightened, though it’s still unsettling. I’ve also encountered the figure again, but now, since I recognize sleep paralysis when it happens, I understand that I’m dreaming. For a brief moment, the dream turns lucid, allowing me to steer it to some extent—away from that eerie semi-waking hallucinatory state—until it slips back into the uncontrollable dream world I normally inhabit at night.
Speaking of nightmares and the passing of a great man, it seems only fitting to thank David Lynch for the most terrifying dream film ever made—and, in my opinion, one of the greatest of all time: Mulholland Drive.
I used to have the recurring dream where I was late for a class I'd never attended and had to take an exam. They stopped immediately after I passed my comprehensive exams. I remember realizing it at the time, because the dream was frequent and the cessation abrupt. I think some part of my mind realized I'd never take a class or exam again.
Very interesting. This explains much of the psycho-reaction of the brain when the body is at rest - defenseless!
I can relate to the examples illustrated in this article. I have those very dream anxieties!
My mother’s dreams are increasingly more difficult for her to filter upon awakening. I have been told this is a common phenomenon in the elderly.
Jumping, I wonder if there is a physical connection to exercise and dreams - there is one for day anxiety - circulating the CNS fluid and flushing out cortisol and norepi. And for dream chemicals, and neurotransmitters?
"Flying: I don’t think my theory can explain this. I’ve heard claims that it’s because muscle feedback is blocked during REM sleep, so you feel weightless."
I have dreams sometimes where I'm driving but I can't really control the car well at all, so it slides all over and crashes into things. I suspect that's kinda the same situation: I don't feel the usual forces one feels when braking or taking a turn at speed in this dream, so my brain interprets that as the car having no brakes or the steering isn't responsive.
The rare driving dreams I get I'm usually too far from the steering wheel or brakes (sometimes in the back seat), which explains why my actions aren’t effective.
I will sometimes have the 'There's a big test today in some class I forgot about, and I don't even know what room/ building the class is in.' (or some variation) When I remember one of these I usually think to myself, "Huh I've been putting off doing X, I guess I should do that." Where X is usually some task that involves filling out some forms, or writing a check, or some such thing. So perhaps a weak data point in the prospective memory column.
Prospective memory as you describe it is the main idea behind one of the (supposedly) most effective techniques for instigating lucid dreams, namely the "MILD technique." From gpt:
-Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreams: This technique relies on setting a clear intention or “memory cue” to become lucid in the dream.
-Mantra or affirmation: Typically, you repeat a phrase before you fall asleep—something like “I am going to notice that I’m dreaming” or “I will have a lucid dream tonight.”
-Visualizing your desired dream: While lying in bed, you also try to visualize becoming aware in a dream scene.
Why it works
-The MILD method leverages your prospective memory (the ability to remember to do something in the future).
-Repeating the phrase and visualizing the dream state just before sleep helps prime your mind to recognize when you are dreaming later on.
The other major phenomenon about the content of dreams is that *repetitive tasks* make it into dreams.
Play Tetris all day and you'll have Tetris dreams. Pipette all day and you'll have pipetting dreams. Do data entry all day and you'll have data entry dreams. Scroll social media all day and you'll have social media dreams.
This doesn't map well with the theories that dreams emerge from our strongest emotional concerns (repetitive tasks are often pretty unemotional) or that dreams emerge from physical sensations during sleep (what physical sensation would make you imagine you're typing numbers into a spreadsheet?!)
But it does fit pretty well as a generalization of your prospective memory theory.
A repetitive task is a "running loop" that you goes through again and again, and once you get into the swing of it, there's a certain automatization or momentum to it; your brain "gets the rhythm" and just keeps on looping easily without much conscious exertion of will.
Checking if you've forgotten something is also a "running loop" that gets automatized.
Erik Hoel's theory is that the *function* of dreams is related to learning, specifically as a form of "self-play" or "synthetic data generation." If we're learning how to do a new task (which probably engages the motor learning system, even for some supposedly "purely mental" tasks --- finger, eye, and mouth muscles are still muscles!) then the dreaming brain generates fake training data, plus often some random variation to add more robust generalization, which is where the "weirdness" of dreams comes from. Usually we'll dream more heavily about the tasks we're *currently* learning, but probably we'll get some replay of long-ignored tasks like "remember to do your homework".
People do dream of fantastical things they've never experienced -- monsters, ghosts, etc -- but in my experience the prevailing theme of nightmares is urgent *action*. I am busy fleeing, or hiding, or fighting; the most vivid experience is of "what it feels like" to have to do these survival-necessity tasks. (Including when I've never done them.)
Dreams also seem to call up something like emotional postures; I often find that a dream solves a "problem" I've been having lately by reminding me of a "way I can feel" or "way I can relate to" something. I might be averse to something in real life, but a dream can "teach me what it feels like" to be at peace with it or appreciate it.
This doesn't fit well with teeth falling out or flying, which as you say might actually be about physical sensations during sleep, but I think it explains a lot of dreams.
I think there is a element of stress/challenge needed as well. I spend a lot of time scrolling social media but I have never had a social media dream. However, I often have puzzle dreams after staying up late doing puzzles, or spreadsheet dreams after crunching on a work deadline.
Prospective stress could explain why forgetting dreams are more often serious failures that don't happen often, like missing a flight or failing a class, instead of daily activities that should have a more frequent, more reinforced loop.
I often heard about recurring dreams, which I never had.
This article talks more about a recurring dream *theme*, which I definitely have. The dreams I remember are mostly about ridiculously complex ways of getting from A to B repeatedly. The individual dreams are quite different, though. It can be me as a child on a bike riding through a complex path (including jumping over a chasm on the bike) in the neighborhood of my childhood. It can be me not finding the entrance to the underground parking lot where my car is and then realizing that the exit is too tight for my car, it can be needing to navigate a complex canal system with or without a boat.
Interestingly enough, I cannot remember ever having this theme when awake or even on psychedelics. It's dreams only
For me it’s about navigating which airport I have to get to and how to make sure my luggage gets there too, and often realizing I’m going to an airport on the wrong side of the ocean (even though I’m doing the ground transport before the flight so this error makes no sense).
I also have recurrent themes but the details are always quite different. The themes are things that I have rumination about. The people are often from the same small set but the plots and settings are very different.
I had "sleep paralysis" dreams very regularly for many years. They mysteriously stopped almost entirely in my 20s, and then returned at a fairly low frequency (maybe 10 per year) more recently. They had recurring elements, and I eventually got so I could recognize them ahead of the actual paralysis part and try to wake myself up. I wonder what's up with those?
Another dream pattern that probably fits with the "be prepared" idea: I somewhat frequently dream that I'm driving a car whose brakes are failing, or somehow trying to drive from the back seat.
And another: Even more frequently I dream that it's the last day of school. Usually it's some year of high school, and I'm waiting around in some class with some classmates and talking. It's not stressful, and I guess is even pleasant by my usual dream standards. But why that particular thing???
Same!! I've had very regular paralysis dreams since about as early as I can remember and until somewhere in my early or mid 20s. And I also learned to recognize them - I would know I'm sleeping, I know (mostly correctly) which room I'm in, and even the position of my body, but I just can't move it. It wasn't scary in the normal sense, just an *incredibly* uncomfortable feeling, and the only way out was to try and move regardless. This would usually work and wake me up completely, but it required a *huge* effort of will, harder than the heaviest lift I ever done in a gym, or than anything else. I absolutely hated those dreams, and sometimes I would get a few in a row where I would manage to fully wake up by moving myself, fall asleep again, only to find myself back in the same dream a little time later.
Luckily they've almost completely disappeared at some point in my 20s and haven't returned so far and I dearly hoped they won't. I'm 32 now, is it younger than the age when your dreams returned?
To add, I also have that dream about waiting for a class in high school and talking to classmates, and it's usually pleasant in that I'm glad to see the people I haven't seen in a while. Although often it would continue with the class actually starting, and I become frustrated about why am I, a grown up professional, has to go through this bore again, and then my mind goes "hmm, why indeed?" and I wake up.
I think I was around 34 when I started noticing the sleep paralysis dreams coming back.
Notably, the dreams disappearing mostly coincided with me moving in with my now-wife and sharing a bed with her. And them returning sort of lines up with us moving to a different house. So it might be more of a sleeping circumstance thing, rather than an age thing?
No, for me at least I don't thing it's about the circumstance - I've lived in more places than I bothered to count over those years, and it also doesn't seem to depend on whether I share the bed with someone or not. May have something to do with sleep quality and consistent schedule I guess, I think both have significantly improved over the years.
I had the same experience as you. Same heavy feeling and an intense effort to fight out of it. I probably could have just gone back to sleep but that always felt like a dangerous thing to do even though I consciously knew it wasn't.
I am late 30s now and the paralysis hasn't come back except for a few times a year. The sleep paralysis was definitely correlated with my anxiety and depression.
Yes, sounds exactly like my experience. Doesn't make much sense but for some reason it feels so gratifying to finally find other people with the same flavor of sleep paralysis lol, even though it's online and I never even cared much about this thing.
I've never been diagnosed with either or had been too anxious in general, so don't think this is how it works for me. Thinking about it, in my case the best guess would be sleep quality and schedule consistency, those have definitely improved over the years... which kind of makes me wonder, may it be that for you anxiety and depression correlate with poor sleep quality (either by causing it, or by both being caused by some third factor)?
I had entirely forgotten the "trying to drive from the backseat" dreams until you mentioned it! Now I remember I've dreamed that probably dozens of times.
I always figured the teeth falling out dreams were relating to the trauma of actually having your teeth fall out as a kid, which is a pretty universal experience that would explain why they are so common.
Like others, I too get the "forgot about a class and now I'm going to fail it", which is almost always in a college setting and a coarse that has nothing to do with my major. I'll also get variations on "I'm back in high school and don't know my class schedule or locker combination." or "I'm back in high school and it's time for final exams and I haven't studied" or "It was discovered that I didn't take some required coarse back when I was in high school, so now I as an adult have to go and take that class" (one variation put me in elementary school). Also common are "It's time to go to high school and I've missed the bus so now I have to drive in but it's snowy and your brakes don't work" The last actually happened to me once in high school, though it was on the way home after they let us out early during the middle of a blizzard (because why on earth would you let the students out Before the blizzard...). I was the first vehicle that did not join the multi-car pileup in front of me, and merely slid off the road when I applied the brakes.
Also, I did frequently have monster related nightmares as a kid. At some point I read about lucid dreaming and really wanted to be able to do it. I was never very successful, but it was enough that any time I had a monster nightmare after that I'd sorta start to realize I was dreaming which would let me get superpowers to fight off the monster and then sink back into a different dream.
When I became a professor I immediately switched over from (rare) dreams of taking a test I forgot to study for to (rare) dreams of having to give a lecture I hadn't prepared. I think I also had a couple of dreams about discovering it was the end of the semester and I had completely forgotten to teach one particular course. How would I assign grades?
David Allen (Getting Stuff Done) says every undone thing--the outlet plate that needs to be screwed back in, the dome light on your car that stopped working, etc--is an open cognitive loop that your brain occasionally checks. Get it all out of your head into a note-taking system you trust and you'll be okay.
Just a couple nights ago, I had a dream that I was failing choir class because I hadn't been doing the additional assignments (like watching season 2 of squid game? I never even watched season 1), and I got an email from my choir director telling me I had a 68% in the class and was going to fail.
I am part of a choir, and it does go on my transcript, but it has no bearing on my academics!
I'd really like to have a good answer for why fever dreams are so weird and unpleasant, like I'm orbiting around the same thought constantly. The last time was after I binged Disco Elysium in the course of a couple days, and then I had an interminable fever dream about communism, which frankly I consider to be a core part of the DE experience.
I've wondered about the anxiety dreams about school indicate that there's something unhealthy about school. It's at least interesting that they're typically about the logistics of school (I'd have them about having an exam in a course I hadn't taken) rather than about difficulties in learning, or even about about bad grades.
My recurring dreams fall into 2 categories. 1. trying to find my way somewhere in a city and am unable to get my phone/googlemaps to work; and 2. taking place in 2 specific locations: a)my mini farm of 30 years where a good 'ol country family has built a house and machine sheds and drive their equipment up and down my driveway; and b)a building I don't think I've ever been in where I am taking tests or trying to find food or some other form of wandering around. the layout is pretty constant while the rooms change (like when someone moves out of an office and someone else moves in).
It doesn't have to be monocausal, right? Like, there can be multiple ways that ideas or experiences are drawn into dreams, and more than one of those pathways can involve common human experiences that transcend individuals or cultures.
I appreciate the discussion above and take it as evidence of multi-causal pathways and against monocausal theories of recurring dreams.
So, Brodmann’s Area 10, aka the frontal pole, the most anterior part of the prefrontal cortex is critically involved in prospective memory and is also more active than other frontal regions like the DLPFC during REM sleep, so you might be on to something with this hypothesis.
The Bruxism is interesting too. Base rate in the population as a whole is about 10%, but it’s much much more common in people with chronic fatigue and long covid, at least anecdotally in my clinic (I work in neuro rehab) and to the point where dentists I’ve asked have seen this relationship too. Not sure if the literature has published on this yet. My psychological theory is that stressful anxiety dreams correlate with Bruxism and also daytime exhaustion due to poor sleep. My more out there neurological theory is that some of these women (it’s nearly always women) may have an autoimmune condition causing reduce hypocretin aka orexin, which normally results in the normal sleep paralysis/atonia we all experience to prevent sleep walking and other parasomnias. Clearly the normal sleep atonia isn’t working in the night time Bruxism. A friendly psychiatrist could prescribe Clonazepam and see if that reduces the Bruxism, improved sleep and reduced fatigue as it does for other REM sleep behaviour disorders.
Mine is realizing I'm naked during any other dream. It doesn't need to be giving a speech or something; in some of my random dreams, when the storyline is progressing, I suddenly realize I'm naked and try to find ways to hide myself or cover up and that effort hijacks the entire storyline. Many times I woke up cursing this recurring dream-virus of preventing me from seeing the end of the dream.
Is there also a known phenomenon about nonexistant places in dreams? I lived in 2 separate cities in the last ~25 of my ~40 year life. When my dreams are set indoors they are indoors, but when they are outdoors and it's not completely fantasyland, there's a big chance it takes place in the dream-version of one of those 2 cities. Over the years I have been to so many different part of those, I can maybe even draw crude maps of those, and there are vistas from those dream version of real cities that I can recall in my mind's eye just like a vista from the real versions of those cities. In fact a few times in the more recent few years I had to use google maps inside the dream and so I also vaguely remember some details to those cities that don't exist in reality but only in dream-versions.
I feel like some part of recurring dreams is just that you dream about X a few times, and then next time you are dreaming and your brain is trying to autocomplete what happens next some part of you realizes "oh, I am dreaming, so maybe X will happen again".
I consistently lucid dream, though I rarely try to interact with the dream "story," and my recurring dream concepts now are usually tied back to something in high school. Not stresses, but things like "watching the talent show" or "going to a friend's house," with set locations that are not accurate to that actual space. As a child, though, I had quite a few recurring dreams that always cut off and woke me up, until a friend suggested solving the dream or speeding through it mentally to force it into the next part of the story, which caused those dream concepts to end and never return again. My "falling down a massive well" was fixed when I gave myself moon shoes to bounce back up, "all my friends are vampires" was fixed when I wore garlic to protect myself, the series of being held captive and escaping out the window to fly (my flying was more of walking on air, at a speed like walking on an airport moving walkway) was fixed when I became friends with the bad guy's henchmen and got them to help me.
Herodotus 6.107, the dream of Hippias before the Battle of Marathon, mixes dreaming with real life tooth loss:
"The barbarians were conducted to Marathon by Hippias. the son of Pisistratus, who the night before had seen a strange vision in his sleep. He dreamt of lying in his mother's arms, and conjectured the dream to mean that he would be restored to Athens, recover the power which he had lost, and afterwards live to a good old age in his native country. Such was the sense in which he interpreted the vision.
He now proceeded to act as guide to the Persians; and, in the first place, he landed the prisoners taken from Eretria upon the island that is called Aegileia, a tract belonging to the Styreans, after which he brought the fleet to anchor off Marathon, and marshalled the bands of the barbarians as they disembarked. As he was thus employed it chanced that he sneezed and at the same time coughed with more violence than was his wont. Now, as he was a man advanced in years, and the greater number of his teeth were loose, it so happened that one of them was driven out with the force of the cough, and fell down into the sand. Hippias took all the pains he could to find it; but the tooth was nowhere to be seen: whereupon he fetched a deep sigh, and said to the bystanders:
"After all, the land is not ours; and we shall never be able to bring it under. All my share in it is the portion of which my tooth has possession."
So Hippias believed that in this way his dream was fulfilled.
My favorite power of my dream self is what i call “GPT Mode”. Whenever I am like 75% asleep, meaning I’m aware of my prone position and have a sliver of free will but I’m still hallucinating visuals, I can summon a sheet of paper to mind and begin to scan it. As I do so, I can viscerally feel my mind trying to generate words before my eyes land on them, in a way very reminiscent of GPT’s token-streaming behavior. And the content of the text is like GPT-1: it’s well-formed English (I think, my metacognition is too impaired in this state to analyze or remember any specifics of what I’m reading) but it’s completely devoid of meaning, and ends up feeling like and endlessly florid run-on sentence of nouns and adjectives going nowhere and saying nothing. Whenever I experience this I have a profound feeling that my brain really does have some sort of token prediction mechanism embedded within it and GPT is actually a completely faithful reproduction of one of the primitive substructures of the human mind
I have some of these recurring dreams (flying, being late or unprepared for stuff, naked in public places). Also a dream about my pet rats escaping, being neglected for absurdly long time, injured etc, or that I somehow end up with new rat(s) that I don't have any proper setup for. That fits well with the prospective-memory thing.
But I also have some recurring dreams which are hard to explain in either of the frameworks and which are not anxiety-related at all. I regularly dream about looking for a new house/apartment to rent, or preparing to move in, and about visiting a new city. And I tend to do quite a lot of both IRL, but the process is not particularly anxiety inducing, either in dreams or in real life, it's somewhere between exciting and tedious. I also dream a lot about being back to school and the main emotion is frustration that I need to go through all these boring classes again. Another school-related dream is about talking to some random classmates from school, not even my closest friends or the ones I've kept contact with afterwards, just some people I knew.
I feel like a for whatever reason a disproportional amount dreams have to do with childhood, even from your graph, childhood-related dreams are only slightly less common, whereas in the waking life people presumably spend much more time thinking about their current adult life. Also from my personal experience, adult dreams get updated overtime (e.g. the pet rats in my anxious dreams are being gradually replaced by a dog after we've got one), but the childhood dreams have remained the same ever since I've left the school well over a decade ago. Something about concerns or experiences being "baked in" during some critical development period? (I've no idea what I'm talking about here)
I have these Shabbat/Passover panic dreams too. The Passover ones happen mostly just before Passover. It feels like they're training me for a real situation where I would not have planned enough and would have to improvise.
These dreams are somehow cathartic, as I rely mainly on my solid planning skills to ensure Shabbat is done on time. Having these dreams forces me to confront a situation where I have to find another way. They're making me a little less afraid of the unplanned.
For what it's worth (less than $0.02 adjusted for inflation, probably) I have sleep (and waking) bruxism, and the "teeth falling out" dream (and the Shabbat dream, but I'm not Jewish so that's easily explained) is the only example here which I have not repeatedly experienced.
I suspect that the lack of correlation is because tooth grinding, at least at the moderate level which I experience, feels similar to chewing. It's not an unusual sensation to me.
I had a recurring series of nightmares in my twenties where I would dream there was someone menacing in the house. I would walk to the door, or the bathroom or something, I wasn't running or anything I was just dazed, and then I'd realize it was a dream.
One time I got a flashlight from the car outside, intending to walk down to the police station, before I realized.
My recurring dreams are all about tornadoes coming and having to hide underground. Probably because tornadoes were fascinating and scary to me as a kid.
I'm sure I've never had a tooth-falling-out dream, and I don't remember ever having a forgot-event type dream.
When I do have bad dreams (not often), they're usually escaping/hiding related.
My most common recurring dreams are about exploring an endless-backrooms version of a familiar location (not scarry) either by myself or as an fps type game with friends or strangers.
The only unpreparedness dreams I remember I regularly have are that I'm in a play and I haven't learnt the lines. I don't think the deadline aspect fits to well here because when I was in (amateur) plays in real life, I generally learnt my lines well in advance anyway. My interpretation of this was that my brain conjures up this familiar scenario for the dream (I'm in a play), I try to remember what my lines are, and then as I have not actually been learning lines in real life for this dreamt-up play, I don't have anything to recall, so then the dream becomes about trying to get through the play without knowing my lines instead. In at least one case, the reason for the problem wasn't that I had neglected to learn my lines, but instead that I had been recruited to the play last-minute so it wasn't even my fault nor something that I would have had to prepare for, but it still fit as an explanation for why I was in a play and didn't know the lines. Oddly, it is quite common for me to dream of having memories that I never actually made in real life, and as far as I'm aware I didn't make earlier in the dream either, but perhaps there's too much detail in recalling my lines for a play for that to be filled in automatically or something.
This explanation would fit the test-taking dreams too, but not so much the airport or shabbat dreams.
I have more dreams when I'm something like stressed to the point of depression. When my life is going well, I either don't have dreams or don't remember them. And I remember/have fewer dreams now than when I was a kid. (So I guess that's good?) I assume I'm either getting more REM sleep or sleeping lighter so that I remember what happens in REM. But if certain conditions made dreaming more likely then that would bias what dreams I had.
I also used to have 'end of the world' dreams. And they were usually visually stunning, while also being rather disturbing. Imagine being on a Hawaiian island with white sand and a beautiful, saturated blue sky littered with a few fluffy white clouds. You notice that one cloud is a mushroom cloud. Then the blast hits and tears you and the room you're in apart.
I do wonder if 'end of the world' dreams are enough of a trope that anyone can relate.
I have some of these dreams, but they aren't anxiety-inducing for me.
Like I forgot I have a class / have a test I didn't study for. In the dream, my attitude isn't "Oh no!", it is "Huh. Okay. I'll still probably be able to pass this."
Or I show up somewhere and forget my clothes. No anxiousness - instead I spend the entire dream -annoyed- that I might get arrested for an honest mistake that doesn't harm anybody.
I've had the teeth falling out one once or twice, and my reaction was "Huh. That's not normal. I should probably see somebody about this" And then moved on.
So I definitely think the fear/anxiety connection isn't right, because I also have those dreams, without that connection.
(I don't really have nightmares - maybe two or three that qualify in my entire life. Well, I have dreams other people might consider nightmares, but they're rarely frightening, as my in-dream reaction immediately turns it into an action-fantasy. Sometimes, as if the dream is fighting this, I can't hurt my assailant, but my assailant can't hurt me either, so we end up in a strange confused stalemate before the dream "gives up" and moves on.)
You omitted a very common category, so well-known that there's a play written about it: The Actor's Nightmare. I'm an amateur actor and often find myself onstage without even having read the script, let alone memorized my lines.
Here’s a supplement to your theory: We have these dreams of not having it together in various ways because we have a dim awareness of being asleep. (Maybe the dreams occur after very brief awakenings, when we have one of those, “oh yeah, its the middle of the night and I’m in bed sleeping" moments). But our minds are too compromised to grasp the big picture, which is that we are asleep *and* it’s an appropriate time to be asleep, so it’s fine that we are not dressed, we are not on our way to scheduled appointments, we are not prepared to do demanding waking tasks (like take tests) and our teeth are all scuzzy from sleep. So we have a sort of “Oh no!” reaction in the form of an anxiety dream about being naked in public, missing a plane, or whatnot. Or I guess, using your model, you could say we woke up briefly, that set off our reminder loops, and we became aware that we had been ignoring them for hours and that set off anxiety about the consequences of disregarding the reminders.
And here’s something that’s sort of an extension of the sleep-self’s anxiety about performing up to the waking world’s standards: Sometimes when I first wake up I think about the things I have to do that day and feel very daunted, even though they are all things I do routinely: Meet with person A, meet with person B, call person C about X. I feel like a shy teenager at a new school, or like someone starting a new, challenging job. And I think something like “What am I going to do? I’m not up to meeting with person A and person B. I won’t even be able to think of anything to say . . .” But 10 mins. later I’m my usual morning self, and no longer feel worried at all about the day. I have a friend who goes through the same thing, and says “it takes a while in the morning for the essential manageability of life to become manifest.” And I’ll bet this is pretty common. Anyway, seems like a diminished, conscious cousin of those anxiety dreams about flunking some basic aspect of adult life.
Prospective memory theory intuitively feels right to me. The dreams are not just about anxiety-inducing situations but specifically ones you had to remember to prepare for. My personal top three are: test I forgot to prepare for, class I forgot I was taking, and, the most horrific one, my suddenly remembering that I adopted a puppy or a kitten and forgot about it, leaving the poor creature alone for two weeks as I went travelling, so it's certainly died a torturous death.
I also have ones related to public nudity and having to pee in public. I think those are from childhood. I'm guessing the nudity one must be related to how the idea of impropriety of public nudity is developed in kids: young kids have no qualms about nudity, and a pretty strong taboo must be installed in their brain to make sure they never forget to dress or stay dressed in public. Perhaps that leads to the development of a neural loop always checking "omg am I dressed?" that, similar to the proposed prospective memory loop is easy to suppress when awake but not in one's sleep.
Public urination is probably similar (in my case exacerbated by growing up in an environment where finding an acceptable place to relieve oneself outside of one's home ranged in difficulty from very hard to downright impossible).
Oh I have the neglected pet one too! And my version is the same as yours — it’s not just that I forgot to feed it last night, it’s that I forgot for several weeks or months, for so long that there
is absolutely no chance I have not killed the poor creature, and absolutely no way that I have not just gotten proof that I am a terrible person. I feel awful pity and guilt. Sometimes in the dream I had been carrying the pet in my pocket but forgot it was there, so I start feeling in my pockets for it, hoping against hope that it somehow survived.
"Prospective memory is the form of memory you use to remember that something’s coming up and you need to prepare for it." -- Do neurologists or psychiatrists recognize this as a distinct type of memory? 'Coz it's exactly what I haven't got, that other people do. I don't have a timer in my head that can be set to go off at some future time. If I have a meeting at 10 am, I have to set a timer for 9:53 pm to give me time to gather what I need and walk to the meeting room. And when that timer goes off, I have to stand up immediately and leave, without finishing what I'm reading or writing, without closing any file on my screen, without talking to my cubemate, because I'll forget the meeting as soon as I begin doing anything else, and nothing will remind me about it before it's over, because I /don't have a timer in my head./. I can't talk to anyone on the way for more than a few seconds; and if I stop for coffee, I may forget about the meeting while getting the coffee and go back to my desk.
Dreams seem related to 'if it fires it wires'. Dogs dream of running and hunting, their little legs shaking. Dreams we have with stressful situations might prepare us to avoid forgetting, or to act.
Uncomfortable dreams I've had often involve impotence to act. Chasing someone but not catching up. Pointing a gun but not being able to pull the trigger. Punching with zero force. I've wondered whether they're somehow preparing my brain/nervous system to fire in those situations. (Before anyone suggests an alternative Freudian interpretation, I have no problems in *that* department).
Your religious friend should know that the rabbis say that if you are still on a journey a long way from home as shabbat is about to begin, you should complete your journey regardless. I doubt whether it would stop the dreams, though.
I have no insight into the etiology of these or other kinds of dreams. But still, it'll fun to tell a few of my own. Skip to the next comment if you're more interested in explanations than in more grist for the mill.
One night I had a dream about my teeth breaking off. I had not been aware of any discomfort, but the next evening, when I was eating pasta, one of my teeth did split and a large piece came off. I suppose someone might say that the dream was a message from the future.
My recurrent anxiety dream is that it's the last day of classes and I have not attended even a single class in my math course. I'm desperately searching for the classroom so that I can attend the last class before the final. It's in the agriculture building and I walk through every floor and still cannot find the classroom. Then I wake up in relief, remembering that I graduated 50 years ago and then even completed a Ph.D. in chemistry. But I was never great as a student, and indeed, at some level, that still haunts me now, even during my waking life. (Or as waking as it gets....)
I had a recurrent dream that I guess would be called a flying dream. I grew up not far from the Whitestone Bridge in the Bronx and my family frequently drove across that bridge to our summer bungalow in Long Beach. The Bronx end of the bridge is in Ferry Point Park. In the dream I'm walking in Ferry Point Park and I climb up into the rigging of the bridge, climbing and swinging around like Spiderman, with a joyful sense of freedom.
I can well believe that the failure of muscle feedback could be involved. But for a long time, I had another recurrent dream that could have arisen from the same cause; but this dream was terrifying.
The first time I had it, I was sleeping out in the desert on the Navajo reservation, a good stroll away from my traveling companions, and in the dream, I felt like someone had grabbed the bottom of my sleeping bag and, standing, was spinning it around in a circle. I was literally paralyzed in the dream, unable to move a muscle. Then I woke up. I had a similar dream pretty frequently after that, in which I would, in the dream, wake up but be paralyzed I would try to move but could not. Then I would really wake up.
Or maybe I actually had awakened and actually was paralyzed for a few minutes before coming to. I could never figure out whether I had actually been dreaming or not. Over time, it became a lucid dream. When it happened, then, in the dream, if that's what it was, I just focusing on moving a big toe. I always eventually succeeded, and I guess that's when the dream stopped happening. Maybe it stopped being terrifying because I had learned to control it, so I no longer needed the dream.
I learned many years later that there is a name for this kind of paralytic experience, but I forget the name.
If nightmares teach by reminding us of what we should worry about, perhaps pleasant dreams reinforce our desires, encourage us to test the world around us to discover new paths to success. Flying dreams are about exploration and a sense of wonder that we can accomplish something previously thought impossible. In my flying dreams I usually fall to the ground when I start to doubt my gravity-defying abilities.
Sometimes, daytime events can influence my dreams, but I often go places and do things in my dreams that have nothing to do with my daytime experiences.
For instance, I had the most wonderful dream the other night. I walked through a doorway and was facing a giant wave caught in stop-motion. I could see sunlight shining through the wave and fish caught in the uplift of the wave. The wave wasn't moving. It looked like a sculpture, so I stepped through the door and out onto the wave and walked under its chicane. I noticed that if I stood in one place, my feet would begin to sink into the water — so I had to keep walking along the curve of the wave so I didn't submerge in the water. And I noticed the water droplets on the breaking curve were falling ever so slowly. I voice said, "You're in another universe where time runs slower." I nodded that I understood, and I walked back to the door that I came through, and I crawled back into my bed.
It seems difficult for me to tie this to anything that's been going on in my life recently or tie it to external sensations while I'm asleep. I haven't attended any surfing competitions lately. I went to the shore a month back, but I haven't looked at any photos or videos of waves lately.
Also, my main frustration in dreams is that I can't find my car again after I park it. I need to figure out a way to remember to use the keyfob in my dreams to set off the car alarm so I can find my way back to it.
Both theories could be true, you know. That is there could be more than one reason you have dreams. The way I explain dreams is that they are sometimes caused by anxiety about things like school (you forgot all about even being in a class and now it's time for finals), sometimes caused by external stimuli (I dreamed I was walking around in my underwear and nobody noticed but me) that's because I sleep in my underwear, not fully clothed, and sometimes caused by earlier horrific experiences (I'd had a recurrent, terrifying nightmare from early childhood until I was 19. Then one night I woke, once again, from that same nightmare and realized it was all about my younger brother getting hit and nearly killed by a car), I never had that dream again.
When I was a child, I once dreamt that aliens were taking over earth and in the dream I was the leader of a team who was tasked with breaking into the mothership to disable it. The first part of the dream was very much a nightmare: my team and I had jetpacked up to the saucer and cut into it, after which the rest of the dream was about navigating through dark corridors where any turned corner could mean discovery and death. I remember the fear growing. It was a loop of the same sensations: we'd walk down a hallway, my mind convinced that the unseen monsters were just around the bend, and then we'd turn the corner and the process would repeat. Every turned corner induced a surge of the same feeling you get when you almost hit the ground in a falling dream. Yet I couldn't wake up, nor did I come out of the dream. Instead, as my team reached the center of the alien vessel we entered into a ringed catwalk around a glass dome and I knew that this was what we'd come here to destroy. I knew that the stakes were existential. I knew that many other people had died to give us this chance and I knew that people were dying in a fight outside the vessel to keep the aliens distracted. I felt very afraid: on this catwalk, we were much more exposed than we were in the corridors. In the dream, I could not think through my fear. But my 'character' knelt by the glass and peered inside the dome. In an instant, I was a different 'character' and I felt perfect bliss. All my anxiety vanished: I was now one of the aliens inside the dome. There was an orderly peace within me. The rest of the dream consisted of a few repetitive tasks. I, as this alien, would receive an infant alien from a tube stem in the center of the dome. I would swaddle it and fuss over it and carry it to a nearby crib. (they were laid out around the dome). These cribs were attached to treadmills, and a platypus would run on the treadmill while the infants lay in the cribs, and the young aliens would rapidly age into mature soldiers who would then exit the vessel to join the fight outside. I repeated this process several times; it was a bliss-loop that was an almost perfect inverse of the terror-loop I had been stuck within for the first part of the dream. I want to get the point across: I felt that I cared deeply for these little babies. And then the dream ended with the room exploding and my world being consumed by a fireball while my alien character tried vainly to rescue one of the infants as we were both flung across the room. I then felt a fleeting moment of my human character's elation at having succeeded in saving the world, and I woke up very confused. Try to explain the processes behind that one! ;)
Not sure how this might help, but apparently it’s very common for people trying to quit cigarettes to dream about smoking and then remember they’re not supposed to and panic: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1757662
I had the same experience when I gave up meat.
It seems possible that this could be related to other guilt/anxiety-style dreams.
I think an underrrated explanation for dreams inolves the interplay between stretches of random stream-of-consciousness intermixed with moments of lucidity. Your brain throws random thoughts into your head, based on the kinds of thoughts you have normally during the day, and then occasionally you become briefly lucid enough to respond to them in a normal way.
Lucidity can just mean you can remember two thoughts at once instead of just one, but it can also be more substantial (the parts of the dream that feel logical, and that you tend to remember), all the way up to lucid dreaming where you're fully lucid.
In particular, you can get through quite a few random, nonsensical ideas without any lucidity at all. Each thought occurs in isolation, and attempts to link them together only occur later when you awake. This is why, for example, you can dream that you're hanging out with Darth Vader but for some reason he's also your mom, like he's both somehow...? You have both thoughts but happen to never examine them together until you're awake and suddenly notice the nonsense.
When some amount of awareness kicks in while still alseep, your brain does its best to "yes, and..." the nonsense. Sometimes that's trivial, sometimes it's so impossible that you realize you're dreaming (until you get distracted by another random thought), and sometimes the idea your sleeping brain constructed is explicable but only by supposing strange and upsetting circumstances that you don't experience in reality
In this case, the explanation is that you dream about having an exam, and then you become lucid enough to try to remember what the test is on, realize that you have no memory of the test being mentioned before (because obviously you don't), and react accordingly.
Or you dream that you're driving, and then you dream that it's Friday evening, and in your brief lucidity you realize that you are clearly not where you should be on Friday evening (because it wasn't Friday until your brain made that up moments ago) and respond accordingly.
Or you dream that you're on stage, and by habit you wonder about your appearance, which is habitually connected with getting dressed in the morning (while naked, obviously). Then you briefly become lucid and have these two thoughts, "I'm on stage" and "I'm naked," and you try to make sense of them. I remember having this dream once and I realized I had no memory of leaving the house naked. Unlike an exam with no class, I couldn't come up with any explanation for the lack of memory, so it ended up triggering a brief lucid dream.
I think the proactive attention loop mentioned in the article is a good explanation for why thoughts like these come up often. They're things you're in the habit of wondering about throughout the day, and when they ping and notice a potential problem you tend to break out of whatever routine you're in and think through the implications. They're also things where the kind of discordance that process will naturally point out to you is something you can process and respond to, because you sometimes really make mistakes like that and have a mental model for response.
This does not match my experience with what kinds of dreams I have.
My standard recurring themes are:
- Awkward/anxiety-provoking social situations and conversations. Often talking to an authority figure, or someone who I really NEED to understand what I'm saying, and feeling frustrated that I can't communicate properly to make them get it (whatever "it" is in the dream).
- Being chased by monsters (much more common as a child, still happens occasionally).
- Fictional scenarios (often scenarios that I know, in-dream, are fictional, though I don't make the leap from there to realizing I'm dreaming) related to media I've been consuming lately.
- Trying to apply domain-inappropriate skills or actions, typically ones I spend a lot of time doing in real life, to some problem, and getting frustrated that it doesn't work/doesn't make sense. E.g., trying to code my way out of a social situation, or trying to solve a work problem by building the right Minecraft thing.
A lot of these feel like the frustration of the sleeping self wondering why the mind or body isn’t working right - that’s how my sleep paralysis dreams feel, and some of the unprepared dreams.
Anecdotal data point: I have had the “unprepared for a class I forgot I was signed up for” for most of my adult life”, roughly once or twice a year. My only other recurring dream STARTED after a traumatic event that split up my family, and the dream is usually (loosely) a failed effort to rejoin the family. Not sure how this fits with your theory but it is a real phenomenon for me.
How frequent, or memorized, does something have to be for it to no longer be prospective memory? I'm asking because there seems to be a spectrum here- on one side, we have the Flying example, which you reject (although, a propsective memory maniac could say it is your prospective memory of walking), while on the other we have the homework assignment, which is unequivocally prospective memory. If prospective memory is truly this wide of a range, then I feel that its frequency in our dreams may be due to its frequency in our life, which just creates a correlation.
Related to "giving speech in your underwear" I have (and also heard other people having it) dreams about being naked. It only happens maybe 4 times in my entire life but it's the only recurring dream I can remember. The contexts are always different, but my reaction was always "well, guess I'm no longer wearing clothes from now on" and keep going.
I have a different theory I haven't seen mentioned yet in the comments. I think that dreams start from very simple templates that are established in childhood. So: the first house I lived in, school, parents, etc. But the initial setup to the scenario is minimal. Maybe it's just a place: you're at school. Then your brain starts winging it and improvising. I'm at school, so what's going on here? Maybe it's the first day!
Some amount of memory is inhibited to allow me to believe I'm somewhere besides my bedroom, but having convinced myself it's the first day of school, next I'm like, okay, so what are my classes? Where do I go? But it consults the real memory for this, not some invented-for-the-scenario scratchpad. My real memory system is like: I don't know anything about this. The same would be true for the "big test today" version: hey, memory, have I studied sufficiently for this test? Answer: what test?
Most people's theories seem to think you start with the anxiety and the brain tries to construct a scenario around the theme, but my theory is that the anxiety arises as an accidental byproduct of conflicts between your real memory and your relatively minimal invented-for-the-scenario memory.
As a side note I am a very non-neurotic person, am not anxious about school, haven't been in school for two decades, and I still have these unprepared-for-school dreams. I don't get super-anxious in them, either, just mildly concerned.
I had a similar thought: the reason we keep dreaming we forgot something important is that our sleeping minds conjure up half-baked scenarios without filling in the details, so we think we must have known the details at some point but forgotten them. I think it's a similar thing with time: I sometimes dream I'm supposed to be somewhere at a certain time, but when I look at a clock it's nonsensical or it disagrees with another clock. Because I'm actually asleep and don't know what time it is. The "I forgot it's almost Shabbat" dreams probably come from a similar place.
Yep, I have the "Big test today I forgot to study for", "Enrolled in a class I forgot existed for months and now it’s the end of the year and I’m going to fail it", "Trying to get somewhere but forget to get on or off the train or got the wrong one" nightmares several times a week.
And these were common events throughout my childhood. I was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult, as I am sure were half your audience, and never build up my executive functions to create todo lists and check my calendar regularly, and am constantly inattentive, so get mixed up on public transport far more than any adult should. I am hardly surprised I have these nightmares, but they are extremely annoying as they severely impact my sleep quality, and it is awful to wake up most morning my stress levels through the roof before I even get out of bed.
Yesterday I got my pinky bit by a small stray dog. The dog's tooth broke my skin a little but it didn't go through the gardening glove I was wearing and the dog was acting pretty normally other than being scared so I decided that I don't need rabies vaccine. Given that after developing rabies symptoms there is no cure possible and the only outcome is a painful death it was a pretty scary decision to make but I felt ok with my decision.
My subconscious was not happy though with my attempts at logic and I kept repeatedly dreaming that my finger is infected and I kept waking up to check on the small cut of which I was very aware even in my dreams. I barely got any sleep.
It's eerie reading about how similar your dreams are to some of mine. I mean, I know that certain themes seem common, but these somehow seemed more specific than I expected.
I also have recurring dreams where I can't quite fly, but I can jump and glide in ways that are almost flying (I love these dreams, BTW). And I also have dreams about forgetting about a class that I was in until the end of the semester only to worry that I'm going to fail (although those happen less frequently than they once did, maybe because I'm almost 20 years removed from undergraduate college). These resolve themselves once I remember that I already have a degree and a job, so I guess I was just auditing this class, and failing won't be a big deal.
I don't have dreams about being in my underwear, I have dreams about being completely naked. In my dreams, it's not that I forget to get dressed, it's that I start off thinking that being naked is no big deal but then find myself in situations where it is actually a very big deal (like church), and then I need to somehow get dressed or just play it off like it's nothing.
I'm not disabled in my dreams. My legs and feet work like they used to when I was a kid. I can walk and run without my cane. My body doesn't hurt either. In fact I've never once dreamed about being in pain, or my cane or other mobility aids, even though they have been a constant presence in my life for the last 15 years.
I've never had a dream about my teeth falling out, thats odd.
Part of the reason I've gotten into lucid dreaming is that I'm healthy in my dreams, so I try to make the most of them. I already spend so much time in bed I try not to waste it if I can. I also dream a lot about long dead family and pets. Its nice to see them again. I've gotten good enough at lucid dreaming that I know I'm in a dream most of the time, I know its not real. I know they're dead. I don't care.
Downthread someone mentions the effects of drugs and medication on our dreams. I actually quit drinking because it interfered with my dreaming.
My interpretation of "unprepared" or "being out of place" dreams is that they're just a result of us stringing together thoughts more haphazardly than when awake, and then trying to make sense of them. In most dream scenarios that our minds cook up, we just go along with the madness, but if it happens to be a situation that requires preparation, in comes the (true) realization that we have not been preparing. And scenarios that our dreaming minds cook up are often based on our memories, hence the exam scenario being so common. Same with the class you haven't been showing up for: the scenario was just you being in class, then you correctly remember you haven't been attending that class, and you try to make it make sense. And being underdressed: you have a thought "I'm giving a speech", and another thought, "I'm in my underwear", and then you realize there's a conflict and turn it into a story.
This doesn't seem to explain my recurring dream theme of "I have to do the entire university thing (sometimes even the entire school thing) all over again".
Any ideas why, despite "using phones and computers" being at this point perhaps a majority of my waking time, I'm basically never doing either in my dreams? Sometimes I lose my phone or laptop, or they're broken, sometimes I make or receive phone calls? But I'm never looking at social media or email or doing work or YouTube or anything like that. Why?
I've dreamt twice of a colleague who I suspect is not competent for the position she has been promoted to. I'm taking her to a meeting and I'm using back roads because I hate traffic. We can't quite get there but I feel like it will work out and she is getting quietly impatient (but she can't quite say anything because I'm senior to her). I keep saying, "it's fine. We'll get there.....so what if we are late", and I don't care that it is bugging her.
This is a new dream and totally unlike the "wtf, why didn't I go to class because now I am going to fail the test" dreams I've had in the past.
I have a lot of dreams where driving, riding are a metaphor of live and in particular control over it. For example breaks failing in my car, or being in cramped bud taking me somewhere
I was hoping for another section where Carl Jung swoops in to the rescue. None of these theories explain why people have *themes* that recur often in dreams, even if the particulars change. I, for example, seem especially prone to weathering storms on large bodies of water in a small boat. The particulars change--lake, river, ocean, canoe, sailboat, motorboat, lightning, wind, tornado--but always those themes.
It also doesn't explain why certain people seem to show up much more often in dreams than others, and it does not seem to be correlated with how well I know the person. Some friends I see almost every day virtually never show up in my dreams, while a few people I've met only once or twice show up all the time. I think Jung would have a field day with all that.
There’s the one I keep having where I’m in bed with Nicole Kidman but I’ve read enough Freud to know that’s really about being in a long train in the Alps and plunging into a deep mountainside tunnel. Or maybe smoking a big cigar or something.
This may be some interesting data: I have dreams like this, but often some logic center on my brain is still strong enough to counteract the example by shifting the agency to somewhere else.
For example: I haven't been in a play since high school but I still regularly have dreams about having to go on stage and realizing I don't know any of the dialogue. These used to stress me out, but at some point, I started going "wait, I've never forgotten dialogue in my life, if I don't know my lines, its because I wasn't given enough time to prepare for them, probably because I wasn't supposed to be in this play originally, this is all someone else's bureaucratic mix-up."
Similarly, I have a recurring dream where I'm trapped in a giant high school and can't remember which class I have next or how to find the room. But then I go "I got straight A's in high school, which means I should be able to find my next class, I got pretty good grades in college too actually...wait, I graduated college? Why am I in high school right now? Clearly someone has got their wires crossed here."
The end result of this process is always either that I wake up (which could mean that the logical interrupt is a sign of not really being deeply asleep enough), or that I keep dreaming the same dream, but it ceases to produce any form of anxiety.
Flying is really fun so I want to have those dreams. I turn normal dreams into flying dreams any time I’m lucid. So maybe we fly in dreams because what little control we have directs us that way.
My recurring dream is that I'm in a confusing situation and it turns out that what happened is I'm still married to my former wife. I find this to be quite un pleasant
I have a terrible (barely-existent?) prospective memory. The only bad dreams I have are various peculiar situations where I’m being wrestled/restrained; when I wake up, some part of the sheets will be wrapped around me that explains this perfectly.
I’d assume with all of these, the causation is that there’s a sensation (eg. can’t move left leg; fear of forgetting), and then the brain invents a story to justify the sensation. It may not have to be that specific a fear of forgetting, just whatever leaps to mind as something you might forget.
I feel like identities are like big self-constructed narratives. Narratives need sophisticated plots, intricate character motivations, and tension. However, they also need bigger picture themes. When writing stories, there is always a tension between these two extremes: you want to construct the story, write the characters as they would behave, and make the plot entertaining, while also having all of the action connect to whatever theme, set of themes, or broader feeling you want the reader to take out of the story. I feel like being awake makes us calibrate 'too far' in the story-construction direction at expense of the theme-construction direction.
To share for fun: my reoccurring dream is that there is an emergency and I have to act, but actually I'm only 14 years old and don't know how to drive and have no agency.
Not sure that fits into prospective brain cells, but there it is.
I don’t subscribe to the “perspective memory “ theory. I’m old, but I still have dreams about terrible situations involving my daughter as a young child (her being lost or hurt, somehow forgotten, etc.) I think they are tied to fear of failing to carry out a responsibility. They are a metaphor, my mind using a powerful example to worry about an existing concern. Likewise forgetting to go to class or to get dressed, I think, is a response to concern about being unprepared.
Maybe it’s because memory is usually impaired in dreams, so we’re dimly aware we’re forgetting something, but seriously mistaken as to what it is that we’re forgetting.
My airport dreams are often about trying to get to a plane that is supposed to go to LAX but for some reason is going to another airport instead (and I’m not even on the plane yet).
The brain actively goes looking for somatic signals in order to make sense of them, it does not just passively receive.
MAYBE it would rather not give up on having a body to get a response from, and goes into a loop not unlike the loop of perspective memory. Looping not as a vrain cell but as a neural oscillation, as a recursive reflection, that goes conscious and dreams.
A) the nightmare leads me to realise that the dream isn’t real; or
B) becoming lucid and trying to control the dream sometimes goes really out hand
… but, like most lucid dreamers, I have a really high tolerance for nghtmares.
You get this effect where someone who thinks they might like to try lucid dreaming reads the dream diaries of frequent lucid dreamers, and is like”oh my god, I never want to experience that” and that’s before they get to reading the sleep paralysis ones.
Scott probably hasn’t xperincedcthus one, but as someone with Graves’s disease, I have once experienced the thyrotoxicosis -> tachycardia -> hypoxia during sleep to the point where it intrudes into the dream and woke me up.
I used to have dreams where the car I was driving would suddenly start floating and then careen off into space. Then I would wake up.
I assumed the dream was just the product of some kind of latent anxiety related to driving. Then in college I read Kafka’s short story “The Bucket Rider” (https://www.nytimes.com/1974/02/09/archives/the-bucket-rider-a-short-story-by-franz-kafka.html), which seems to describe the same sensation but with a totally different vehicle. Now I wonder if these dreams are related to something more fundamental in the architecture of the mind.
My most memorable dream – though not recurring – happened when there was an event I had to host in a month with about 50 people. In the dream, of course, I showed up to the event completely unprepared, and the audience was actually a stadium of thousands.
Really interesting post. I never realized it, but a lot of my dreams do fit into the general idea of having to do something at a specific time and being unprepared. I've had the ones you describe as well as having to give a musical or dance performance that I haven't practiced enough.
Several of my dreams do not fit into that paradigm though. A very common recurring one is trying to find my way back home, often by train - and very often right before waking up. And another is losing control of a car (breaks don't work properly, or my driving skills suck), although I guess you could argue this is part of the theme of being unprepared (just not tied to a single event like a test or flight).
The brain is a prediction machine, using its own stored info about the world plus external sensory perception to predict what is happening/will happen. Classic example is turning the raw sensory input from your eyeballs into the stuff you actually think you're seeing (e.g. without a blind spot, without a super obvious (unless you're looking for it) dropoff in acuity away from the center of your vision, etc).
Dreams are the same prediction machine stuff, unconstrained by external sensory input.
Like what you say I think this explains some things but not others. But another point I'd make is that there's (potentially) a difference between what recurring dreams you *have*, and what recurring dreams you *later remember* that you have. Maybe there's an element of selective remembering/forgetting.
My recurring dream is having to go back to retake a class. Don’t know what this reflects other than maybe an adolescent tendency of feeling the need to “just get through it” or something.
I never have the dream about being in a class I forgot I enrolled in, but I have several times had the dream about discovering 2/3 of the way through the term there’s a class I was *teaching* that I had forgotten about.
It does feel thematically similar to the dream I sometimes have about going to the airport but having the wrong luggage, or realizing my flight is in a different airport, and the dream I’ve only had once or twice but others say is common, where one is in the back seat of a car but needs to be steering or driving it.
All of these seem related to me in some way to the fact that while you’re asleep, your agency is somehow farther away. It’s related to sleep paralysis, and the dreams where I’ve wanted to say something to someone but can only barely whisper something (which might actually result in sleep talking - I’m not sure).
The naked dreams and teeth falling out though all seems quite psychologically distinct from this extended family.
I have been recording my dreams since 2016 though and no two entries have been alike. So I think it's *really* unlikely that my dreamscape will change in the near or medium term, even though I probably will.
Thinking of the "dreams as threat assessment/preparedness" model, a weird example of recurring dream for me are invisible threats. These invisible threats are sources of true terror, unlike fear I've encountered in waking life but for maybe some heights (where I experience vertigo and physical unsteadiness on top of extreme aversion). I also deal with anxiety and have had terrible anxiety attacks through my teens and adulthood.
In one example, I was in a house I used to live in, but it was entirely empty and without furniture as I suppose in the dream I hadn't yet moved into this place, and when I walked upstairs and into what was my bedroom I was struck with a sense of pressure in my chest and a debilitating terror, so bad that I first doubled over before I could bring myself to run out of the room. Once out of there the feeling lifted. I believe I talked to my parents about this inexplicable feeling in the room, and eventually went back to try to figure out what was happening. Again, the space itself seemed to bear down on me with sheer terror. I finally returned a third time, this time without the terror, and began asking questions from whatever entity was occupying the room. Eventually, the terror hit again and I understood it wanted me out.
In another example, I was moving with my parents into a single story home I've never seen before, with many rooms stacked high with boxes. Again, one particular room was a source of terror.
In an example from childhood, I was being chased by some invisible monster that I thought of as a crocodile? I ran and hid in the bathroom and locked the door, until the light switch in the bathroom flipped off.
A number of other dreams involving either a space itself seemingly being a source of terror, or a moving invisible entity, in which it's usually something like an opening door or a flipped light switch that triggers the terror for me.
As an adult, I don't have a lot of nightmares (even somewhat scary or disturbing dreams are usually managed fine by me, usually feel more thrilling or weird or cool, and I sleep through them without trouble), but those (and spiders!) have been recurring nightmares. Routinely, it's threatening scenarios in which I can't see the threat that cause me to wake up feeling shaken.
I had dreams about irrationally scary room and after I mentioned this to my therapist we had some pretty pointed conversations about whether I was abused as a child. I thought it quite overblown at the time but reading your accounts I can see how the thought just springs to mind.
Scott, what about prophetic dreams and their connection to Jung’s synchronicity as a topic? I’m curious to know how common it is have had one or more prophetic dreams in one’s up to now lifetime. The criteria would be that you have a dream before whatever dreamt happened and then it happened.
I don't think this pattern of recurring dream has been mentioned yet, but my friends and I often go to concerts and have all reported "forgot about concert that you bought expensive tickets for" dreams.
Several years into retirement, I was surprised to start having dreams about being employed. It wasn't "oh no, I'm up against a deadline", but more often that I hadn't been to the office in a long time and I really should get around to quitting officially. (Which is weird because at my last job they even threw me a retirement party even though I'd been there only two years.)
More recently it's been that I knew I was still employed but that the understanding had been that they were happy having me on the books in case they ever needed me -- but times change and they were going to have to let me go, which was fine with me.
I'm not sure whether this fits in your theory, but have at it.
>Most people attribute recurring nightmares to “fear”. My friend is “afraid” of violating Shabbat; childhood me was “afraid” of having the assignment due the next day. This seems wrong to me. Childhood me was afraid of monsters in the closet; adult me is afraid of heart attacks, AI, and something happening to my family. But I don’t have nightmares about any of these things, just homework assignments and plane flights.
>So maybe the “unprepared” aspect is more important.
I think maybe when people say "recurring nightmares" they mean, well, the PTSD sort, which clearly have nothing to do with forgetting to do something. I'm not even sure I'd consider your recurring dreams to be "nightmares", just bad dreams.
Given the results we have to date from people's personal and data-light musings on the causes of dreams, I think Rule A here would be: "Reject personal and data-light musings". Rule B would be: "Set up a truly rigorous investigative process that gathers useful amounts of data".
Exhibit 1 here is, of course, Freud's "The Interpretation of Dreams", where Freud argued that dreams express hidden desires. (It helped make him famous, even though he wasn't the first to have the thought.)
"The Interpretation of Dreams" well illustrates just how personal and data-light thinking can go wrong: Freud had to invent a bunch of bunkum ideas, all the way up to penis envy, to justify the initial bad idea that he had fixed on.
There is now some useful neurological and psychological research on how dreams work and what function they perform (see e.g. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3220269/). It is not yet all that impressive.
So people keep on musing about dreams. They seem to be regularly on our minds.
My most recurrent dreams involved my high school crush. Back then she hated me but in my dreams we are friends most of the time. The last involved like some kind of boarding schoo/museum with random people but it switched to me finding out a photo of her in a wedding dress in a sort of FamilySearch like site, despite me not knowing if she is in that sort of relationship.
The second recurrent theme is me coming out as trans, either me confessing, they already knowing or someone slipping. These have involved many people but it tend to be my father who doesn't know.
I have never had any dreams about my teeth until now. This night, after reading this post directly before going to bed, I had a nightmare about a dentist having to remove three of my front teeth.
This is interesting because I never had any anxiety or fears regarding teeth. My dentist is a family friend I've known since earliest childhood and all my memories regarding dental hygiene/going to the dentist are positive.
I dream a lot but nightmares are very rare for me.
My two recurring nightmares (less than once a month) are being in school and unprepared for a test or having a mild car accident.
The school dream usually ends with me complaining about not needind to be there since I have already graduated university. The driving dream is much more annoying. Im trying to park or am in very slow traffic. Then I try to use the brakes, but the car won't stop and hits the car in front of me with glacial pace. There is never any damage to the cars but I'm always forced to discuss insurance information with the other cars owner and the police.
Weirdly, I have the being naked in school variety more often than the being unprepared variety even though I was the type of person to genuinely not study math for an entire semester untill I was hopelessly far behind by the time of the exam. If you asked me to explain why that is before reading this post, I'd have said that being socially ridiculed is a deeper (not necessarily bigger) fear of mine than failing exams. If you asked me how confident I was about this theory though I'd have said not at all.
My top five recurring themes/nightmares, other than the teeth and forgot to go to class all semester one (which I get all the time):
Going into a public restroom to use it and every toilet is clogged, the whole restroom is disgusting, covered and smeared with feces everywhere, used toilet paper everywhere. It's huge and I'm trying to tiptoe through without touching anything, to find one clean stall. Inevitably, I realize I'm barefoot in this filthy disgusting room and revolted at the thought of my bare skin touching the filth.
Chased and attacked by bears. Across the rooftops, up scaffolding, up trees, trying to break down doors and get inside. Most of the time they are trying to kill my dogs who I'm trying to rescue, but sometimes they're chasing me.
Brakes in car don't work and it won't stop accelerating.
Betrayal by friends or lovers, and they don't care when I find out, and ignore and have no reaction to my crying and anguish. I ramp up trying to make them care and they still dont. It turns into a fight where I end up ripping off pieces of their face to try to get them to care, but they still don't care.
I realize I have a baby for some reason, but keep forgetting it exists and leaving it in dangerous placesvor forgetting where it is because I can't remember that I have it.
Please tell me I'm not the only one with these. Especially the filthy bathroom one, I hate that one the most.
You are definitely not the one with the filthy public restroom dream, it’s a recurring staple of mine. I don’t perceive mine as a nightmare though, more like my brain is trying to wake me up so I can go use the restroom.
“For the whole semester, I half-forgot that I was taking a math class, and now I’m finally being forced to confront it, and all the other students are so far ahead of me that I can never catch up”
I have this exact dream often! So weird that we're dreaming the exact same thing. Even weirder because in real life I had an easy time in school and I was never worried about tests or falling behind, but in the dream it's a nightmare for some reason.
I'm skeptical of the 'brain cell loop' part of the theory. It seems much more likely that we have a dormant pathway that is triggered by anything tangentially related that has for a long time not been triggered. So, for example, in college you may have felt anxiety for any number of reasons at which point your brain goes "huh, what's causing this?" And it reaches for the checks that, at that time, most commonly give a reasonable answer. It fires the "did I do my homework" path and the "am I late to something" path and so on until some path comes back and gives a "yes! You should be anxious about that because you forgot XYZ!" At which point the path ends up promoted higher on the list for next time. This is way more efficient than dedicating thinking power to run a CRON type of job regularly in perpetuity.
So - how does this translate into dreams? Well, suppose that you feel anxious in the middle of the night and your brain starts running through the anxiety pathway checks. It checks the ones that are currently top ranked - AI, family, health, etc. For all of those, though, your brain has already been devoting brainpower regularly to thinking about them during the day time. The all have, if not an answer, at least a resolution. As you go farther down the list though eventually your brain hits a long dormant "is my homework due" pathway. Not only do you not have a "cached" answer from daytime thinking but you actually, while asleep, may not have any way to resolve the loop. It hasn't been fired really since the days when it was reasonable to wonder if you have homework due so your subconscious is in a state of A.) checking if homework should be due B.) believing that's a reasonable thing to wonder C.) having no ready answer. So, you dream about it to try to resolve the worry.
I never learned to drive a car, but I often get recurring dreams about being somewhere in the middle of nowhere and needing to drive a car to get home, often in weird road conditions such as crazy inclines. That sounds *very* much like your friend's shabbat dreams, but of course I've never driven a car, never had to be prepared to drive one, never been in the position of seriously considering driving one. I won't quite say it contradicts your theory because there definitely still is an element of "preparedness" there, and a feeling of having missed some important detail and being caught with your pants down, but I doubt my brain ever developed "remember that you can't drive!" circuitry in the same way I definitely have homework assignment circuitry.
No one ever mentions a strange female recurring dream type that I know to be somewhat common (at least 3 people have seen them, does that count as common?). The dream goes like this: you have newborn children, either one or several, and forget to feed them. The children grow smaller and smaller and finally die. You are overwhelmed by shame: what if people find out what you've done? This fits with the remembering brain cell theory - the cell is preparing to remember to feed the child, right?
I had this dream several times some years before actually having kids; learned that a female friend with no kids also had these, and noticed a pregnant lady on social media describing the same. The one on social media was a simple soul and got herself very anxious about what disaster such a dream might predict. After I got the first real newborn, I realized that children are in fact highly effective in reminding us to feed them; those dreams stopped entirely and were replaced by the ones in which I leave a kid behind and cannot find him.
2. In my dreams it is not teeth, but my meat falling of the bones, in the form of ... peels ... like my leg is wrapped in a thick meat-sheet, 3 times round the bones and then the sheets fall of. A few times per year. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9f/Lady_Gaga_meat_dress.jpg School nightmares became rarer over the years, at over 50 they hardly happen anymore. I sure had this "homework forgotten" dream at school - usu. waking me up at 4 am, which was fine, as I *always* had assignments not done! Nowadays, more often intense travel dreams (I did some long trips in Russia in the nineties).
The weak form is "dreams are informed by existing mechanisms in the brain", which they obviously are, but is not very informative.
The strong form is some attempt to find a SINGLE mechanism from which dreams springs, which seems a weird assumption. Why can't dreams simply draw from all sorts of wellsprings? There are definitely dreams about fears that have been deeply ingrained into us by habit (just today my wife was telling me that she had a nightmare about finding out tons of typos in her book that she spent so long editing). There also are dreams that seem connected to physical sensations, like the flying thing, or dreaming of running water when needing to pee, or sex dreams. There are dreams obviously connected to fairly short term memories, like when you watch a movie that impresses you with some imagery and then remix it in some way in your nightmares.
I'm not sure, basically, why would a search for a common, single origin make sense? There could very well be different types of dreams drawing from different origins.
I wonder if part of what's happening here is that prospective memory actually HAS to be weakly active during sleep, to wake us up at the correct time. We of course have alarm clocks now, but we evolved without them, and if I have an early flight I usually wake up before my alarm, even many hours before my normal wake-up time.
Maybe that prospective-memory/time-to-wake-up-for-my-flight brain function stays more "on" during sleep, compared to other functions, leading it to be disproportionately represented in dreams.
Counter/synthesis: recurring dreams come from corrections we are routinely forced to make against our habitual processes of thought and behaviour.
By “habitual processes” I mean our instincts, intuitions, and sensorimotor conditioning. Instincts, by definition, are inborn (or at least strongly pre-determined whenever they emerge in development); intuitions are formed in early development and very difficult to change; sensorimotor conditioning is stubborn but still highly adaptable. Overall there’s a set of processes in our brains that, once formed, have powerful sway over our minds by way of cognitive inertia.
Language and reasoning emerge later in development. Language and reasoning can dictate our behaviour through in-the-moment interventions, but with considerable lag time; and, when their input is not available, such as when making a split-second decision, we quickly revert to habit.
Example: even when I know the power is out in my apartment, I keep trying the light switch when I enter a new room. This tendency persists even if the blackout lasts for days.
There are some things about life that, no matter how well we might grasp them intellectually, we struggle to grasp them intuitively. Some subset of these struggles are strongly linked to things we do care about, like social approval and comfort. To close this gap, we are forced to build a habit of consistently making conscious interventions into our own habitual behaviour.
Making time to do boring work is the ur-example. Most of us hate to do it. Most of us underwent terrible stress at least once during our schooling years because we failed to do it. We learned this intervention the hard way. When we have dreams about missing homework or a surprise test, it’s because we’re rehearsing the particular thing we have learned to correct against—in this case, the consequences of being unprepared—and it takes the shape of school experiences because that’s the context that anchors the habit’s significance emotionally. I speculate that in dreaming, the emotional anchor is there, but the logical–verbal corrective is not, so the mind conjures the anxiety-provoking scenario. In my own experience, the bad feeling goes away exactly when I wake up enough to form a verbal thought like “Thank goodness I don’t actually have to deal with that.”
This explains dreams about being unprepared at school. It also explains dreams about being naked in school. In that case, the correction is against the consequences of not thinking about how you appear to other people. We aren’t born with the knowledge that our naked bodies have to be hidden. We have to learn it. As children, our naked bodies are unremarkable to us; we only learn their remarkableness from the reactions of others. My guess is that, the more prone a person is to dreams of being naked in the classroom, the more likely it is that “present yourself appropriately in public” was a lesson learned late in development, or accompanied by distress, or just left that person with a lingering sense that they didn’t quite “get it”.
Here’s my recurring dream. I dream I kill someone. The person is different each time, the means, motive, and opportunity all change. Sometimes the killing is based on a sense of injustice, sometimes it’s cold-blooded self-defense, sometimes accidental. What’s consistent is what follows: the fear of being caught, the anxious anticipation of punishment, the sorrow and regret. An interesting variation I’ll include is that in one case I didn’t kill anyone, but my family had been detained while traveling through North Korea in an arrest I’d somehow avoided. They were set to be executed. The feelings were the same: guilt, sorrow, and an awesome sense of irreversibility.
I think the irreversibility is the main thing here. As a kid I tended to daydream and act impulsively. I lost my mother’s pendant by spinning it too fast until the chain broke; I wasn’t punished but I felt the guilt. Another time I was threatened with a spanking for being too rowdy at a restaurant. My dad promised the punishment as we got into the car to drive home; I was terrified, crying and pleading the whole way. He did spank me. Another time, without quite knowing why, I scraped the paint on the roof of my father’s truck to “punish” him. He found about this and threatened to withhold from me the crystal rock candy experiment I was making. He didn’t do it. I guess the through-line here is that punishment was a constant threat, unpredictable but swift and harsh when it did arrive. And the emotional consequences were worse: being left to feel that things would never be the same because of something I did.
I think the correction I learned (mis-learned) was not to express or act on my rage, and not to “act” physically in general. Stay thinking about and interacting with systems; avoid the irreversible consequences of interacting with people.
"Enrolled in a class I forgot existed for months and now it’s the end of the year and I’m going to fail it" - thank you, now I feel less weird for having that repeatedly (even though having it twenty years after leaving university behind me is still weird).
I think the picture for this post is a bit much, I would rather not have seen it. In general I think the recent AI generated header pics are a bit icky, but if you're gonna post AI generated nightmare fuel now I would really ask you to reconsider.
I used to dream of contact lenses, the last thing id do every night ìs remove them, and first thing in the morning is put them in. Then I had laser eye surgery and stopped dreaming of that.
The thing underwear/naked thing is easily explained by theory that you are semi conscious enough to notice that you are not fully clothed while asleep, and it gets pasted into whatever anxiety dream you are akr sdy having.
Random datapoint: I have dreams (or nightmares, really) about unfriendly AI relatively frequently. Here's a recent one I wrote down that featured a friend of mine who works at OAI (name changed for privacy):
"It was happening on Mars. I could see your ship approaching before me, and I was following. When I arrived, I was shocked by the scale and grandeur. Past the airlock were high vaulted ceilings, merely the foyer of a vast space. "When prisoners are released," I thought (for there were prisons, here), "they'll be emerging to an almost unrecognizable place."
Incongruously, I spotted 2x4s in the construction. "Still, just to ship 2x4s here is itself an amazing feat." Then, in a nearby hall, I saw that they weren't truly wood, and were being produced in situ, on matter replicators. Workers took away some finished beams to be installed. "Matter replicators are real?!" I had the wild urge to take my phone out and take a picture of them, but there was the sense this would be looked on unkindly.
Nearby, an artist sculpted a 3D model hanging in the air before him - it looked like a prosthetic arm, perhaps. His work was still valued - he spoke of the delicacy and complexity of his craft.
Beyond lay the Room of the Prodigies, where Its presense was closest. In the sanctum, space seemed warped - distances weren't quite right, and movement was as gliding thought. Acolytes flitted about, carrying out Its will. The air was charged, and vague wonders turned at the edges of vision. In here, anything was possible. A deep amphitheatre held the full congregation, and an electric humming (or was it chanting?) filled the space. It was very close. I left.
Something changed. Darkness descended. No one remained, yet malice leaked from the walls. I ran towards the amphitheatre. On the ground, a dark shape. "Alex? Alex!" I bent, and in the one-third Martian gravity, easily picked you up. "I'm alive... almost," you whispered.
I looked around, and saw an emergency exit.
"Okay Alex, do you want to take the long way, or the short way?" I asked, but you were unconscious. So I pushed the exit open, and emerged into the cool night air. Then I woke up."
Exposure therapy. Start giving speeches with gradually less and less clothing. When you get comfortable giving speeches in your underwear, the dreams will no longer feel scary.
I've generally assumed that dreams (good or bad) are mostly going to be about things you've been thinking about recently, as your brain finds it easier to go there. Like you, I had a lot of nightmares about being chased by monsters, or being in a monster-attracting situation (like being outside at night on your own) a lot as a prepubescent. Because little kids are scared of the dark, and genuinely fear monsters might get them even when they're awake.
Once I got into my teens (again like you), the nightmares gave way to stress dreams about missed deadlines, forgetting I had an exam that day, and after a few more years, guilt dreams in which you've done something terrible and can't undo it. Because adults spend a lot of time worrying about screwing up day-to-day life, and at least sometimes worry that they've done the wrong thing.
Of course, these dreams can be symbolic, but in a really, like, blatant way. So if you've been worrying for a while about having to do a presentation at work, and then you have that dream where you're in a play but nobody's told you your lines, I think the connection is pretty obvious.
This theory would actually explain a series of dreams I had a couple years ago.
I had a dream that I'd forgotten to feed my bunny, and she was really really hungry because it had been a long time. When I woke up I remembered she had died 10 years earlier and that's why I no longer feed her every day. Then about two months later I had the same dream again, except she'd been fed recently so she was doing better. Then maybe a month later I dreamed about her again, but she mostly just wanted treats since she was being properly cared for again. After that the dreams stopped.
I suppose ghosts would also explain it, but I prefer the prospective memory one.
Most other dreams I have seem to be related to sensing things in my sleep or to experiences I had recently. For instance, I tend to have dreams about flying if I play with Minecraft creative mode a lot, and the night after I went skiing I had dreams about going down snowy hills really fast. This only happens for new things, not things I do every day.
What happened to the "Dreams help process the day's emotional experiences" theory? In 1987, the Max Planck Institute carried out a series of experiments where people that were to sleep in the lab viewed emotionally neutral or emotionally negative movies. Later that night they were waked during their REM stage and reported the overall emotional tone of any dreams they were having. Those that had seen the negative movie reported more anxious content than those that had seen the neutral movie. Many of them reported images taken from the movie.
Seems to me that dreams about being late to something or being embarrassed in public have more to do with self-image than anything else. Something recent may have triggered your self doubts and anxieties, and the most common life experience one has with that emotional tone is letting other people down. Somehow, the brain is processing the emotional content.
FWIW, I think a lot of these dreams boil down to insecurity, subconscious or otherwise. The only recurring dream I remember having, at varying fairly long intervals, was that I owned a second property but couldn't remember where! That started when I did own and rent out a second apartment, which was a source of occasional insecurity when awake (would the tenant keep paying the rent, and not trash the place, etc), but continued for quite a while after I had sold it. Most of my dreams are vaguely reminiscent of events, or films watched on TV, the previous day, although the associations aren't always obvious.
I still maintain that dreams generally first evolved in early amphibians as a crude "record and playback" mental facility to help them find their way back to water although, like quite a few adaptions, they may have been repurposed since. Aren't dreams by far the most vivid if the sleeper is thirsty, perhaps after drinking a skin full the previous evening?
I once worked with a guy who claimed never to have had a dream, or none that he remembered. That was amazing, although nothing in his character seemed out of the ordinary except that he drove cars like a thing possessed! (One of his hobbies was race track driving, although he treated public highways like one big race track as well and has probably been killed by now in a massive prang!)
One tentative hypothesis I have about dreams and their vividness is that the less deep your sleep the more vivid it is; and the less deep and the more intermittent your sleep, the more vivid and varied your dream. Lastly, the less deep, the more intermittent your sleep the more likely you're to recall your dreams. I suspect that serial and vivid dreamers are also shallow and sensitive sleepers. People who tend to sleep deeply quickly, and with total abandon and ease are less likely to remember their dreams if they dreamed at all.
For me, I think most of the fear/anxiety dreams have to do with sleep paralysis. When I’m deep in a dream, I’m probably experiencing something mentally but I never remember this part. But then my sleep gets a little bit lighter and at some point l try to do or say something in my dream, and because my body is paralyzed I can’t actually do the thing, and this manifests as anxiety, fear, feelings of worthlessness and incompetence, and shame. And yeah, the anxiety is often that “I’m late” to do the thing. But it’s literally just sleep paralysis, eventually I can wrench myself awake and move/speak! It sucks that this happens to me often, between most every sleep cycle, though.
Do others’ dreams manifest this way? I feel like probably, even though we may describe it differently.
I think giving a speech in your underwear could fit the prospective memory task theory without too much of a stretch. When giving a speech, there’s a bunch that has to be done simultaneously (being expressive, not saying um, etc.), but a lot of it is really specific to the individual speech.
Maybe a common or more generic brain loop left behind could be “Remember what you rehearsed for your presentation, don’t forget anything important.” Clothes are very important and generalize to even a low stakes presentation. This might cause someone to check for it when having a presentation dream (and proceed to realize they’re missing them), even though very few are at risk for forgetting their clothes in real life.
My repeated dreams are not always about being prepared to something. Some of them about my desires. For example, visiting a Japanese book store was a recurring theme in my dreams until I went to Korea, actually visited a book store and bought some books. Although, other recurring themes are playing an endless tag in an urban parkour, infinite stairs in an apartment, having trouble in elevators, having a fight with a stranger in a pitch-dark room (primitive survival related stuff). Also, some dreams have a sequel. Same setting but different related events. They are at max three episodes though.
One repeated theme in my dreams is that guns don't work right. I regularly get involved in firefights, but when I shoot someone, I have to explain to them (childhood game style) that "I shot you, so you need to be dead" before anything happens.
I also have dreams that alternate between being in a game/novel/movie and playing/reading/watching it. Sometimes with the knowledge that I'm inside the fiction with attendant attempts to speed run or sequence break out of boredom. Often it's the second or third time through the story.
Specifically for the "forgot about a test or a course" dreams, for me, it feels a little different - more related to the way dream logic works. Basically, I have a normal dream, which at some point is about me attending a course.
Brain: You are now studying!
Me: This does not seem like my calculus class. What am I studying?
Brain: Ummm... biology!
Me: Odd, I don't recall enrolling in a biology course.
Brain: Oh no, I guess you must have forgotten all about it up until now!
So. I just had a theory about the cause of the “doing stuff in your underwear” dreams.
Most people I know sleep in their underwear. What I think is actually happening is that sometimes the body is correctly noticing that it is only wearing undies, and it’s passing along that sensation to your dream self.
The implication of this is that people who sleep in proper pajamas will have the underwear dream less often.
Most women I know sleep in nightgowns, so we can test this by using gender as a proxy for pyjama sleeping and asking men and women how often they have the underwear dream and seeing if there is a male bias.
My recurring dream theme is running away from something, not terribly scary but somewhat, and not being able to run fast enough because my feet don't gain traction on the ground, like I'm half levitating in low gravity. This has to be common. I wonder what the source is.
I have the "I forgot about this class" anxiety dream, but when I have a high fever I have a more exotic version. I am responsible for keeping the world held together. Unlike Archangel Uriel, I am not using celestial kabbalah. I am using something more like legos. But like the Archangel's its a dynamic task that requires counterbalancing evolving forces. At some point I realize there was some part of the problem I was completely neglecting, its too late to fix, the world is ending, sorry. I wish I could say I did my best, but really I know I was just being lazy. That's actually an important part of it. I remember choosing to put something off.
Of the two options, I think this lends itself more to the sensory input model. With a high fever it makes sense that I am getting different, possibly more intense inputs. As the task I am doing is not rooted in any actual experience, it doesnt seem like I could have a left over prospective memory cell looping on this, but perhaps the fever corrupts its intended job.
I'm blaming this post for having dreamt last night that my teeth fell out - which I have never dreamt before (that I can recall) in my 51 years of life.
I get a few different recurring dream themes, including some of the classics, but the most unusual are probably the dreams where I'm trying to find my way around a large, indoor complex of some kind. Sometimes the setting is relatively realistic, like a school, or a performing arts center, or a hotel and conference center; other times it's more fantastical, like a space station, or an arcology, or an ewok-style treetop village. Either way, the space is always unfamiliar, complicated in three dimensions, contains a variety of large, open spaces and narrow passageways. These dreams aren't nightmares, but they typically involve some mild anxiety about trying to find my way from one part of the structure to another.
I used to have 'teeth falling out' dreams but that was when I was young and didn't have very good dental habits. I've also had the 'missing almost a whole semester of a math class' dreams more recently - I'm Gen X and long out of school - so I'd love to know more about those types of dreams. Lastly, I remember many dreams and had THE BEST lucid dream last night which included flying, but then I met a woman (with Blue Eye sockets, the whole eye and surrounding area, not iris) who told me that if I flew too long, I'd let the evil in. There were clouds and sun but a dark area, with some red in it, kept trying to come through. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
I suspect that some themes happen because of your theory while others are a natural consequence of the weird dream state.
For instance, there doesn't seem to be a strong coherence pressure in dreams so you probably just sometimes dream yourself into a situation and also dream that you are naked (perhaps especially if you sleep naked and partly wake up). That then gets noticed.
This agrees w/ my experience where the naked dreams usually involve me suddenly realizing I'm naked partway through and I suggest taking that at face value.
I figured dreams were just what we think about the most during the day. So recurring dreams are due to thinking about the dream during the day which causes you to have the dream more which causes you to think about it more, etc.
After about 8 years of smoking weed daily, I quit due to the associated anxiety modulation upregulating anxiety more than I could handle. The first two weeks entailed extreme stress while trying to sleep, and then conspicuously high confidence days akin to a rubber banding effect. Those weren't like dreams, but like sleep-thinking that I couldn't stop. After the first few weeks, I then had a repeat of a dream I had once as a teenager, but with considerable cinematic updates and a new scene at the end. It was an airbnb type situation where the host exited their room in the night with a knife and attacked me. The added scene revealed the character I was in the dream as having been complicit in horror dream simulations as a thing the host and they did for entertainment. There were other dreams that fit that same pattern: dream I had once decades ago, new added scenes, more obviously relevant to coherent AI and simulations problems with a component that felt like I had something important to learn from them, awful to experience in the moment but which I wouldn't have chosen to not have after the fact due to the utility of the awareness. There were no temporolocal repeats, each rehashed sometime from long ago with symbolism updated to be about things I reason about (previously via anxiety induced by weed).
Some of these dreams had content I won't relate due to preferences you've expressed, but one had a curious quality: not a repeat of another. I was in some small village in Maine in the winter, looking around at the neighbor's houses looking for anything that needed doing, like shoveling or anything like that. A friendly police officer who knew who I was showed up, having been called by a concerned resident that didn't. He asked some obvious questions and there was no associated stress, essentially a possible scene from real life. It was by far the least cinematic, and had only the one 'scene'. There was also one that wasn't a repeat, but was based on a very unpleasant thought experiment from Jessica Taylor.
Teeth Falling Out - I agree this could be related to a sensation experienced in the mouth during sleep. In these dreams I bring my hands inside my mouth and the slightest touch of my teeth makes them come away in my hands. During the dream, which recurs very often, I have no doubt that my teeth have been permanently removed from my mouth and I feel shame about how my mouth must look to others, even though it's usually just the molars I lose.
Need to Pee - in these dreams I usually find a bathroom and pee an enormous amount compared to real life. Thank heavens nothing happens outside the dream.
Topless in Public - recurs so much that even in the dream, I'm like "not again". I guess it's about being afraid of being humiliated, but in real life I never have to confront any similar situations.
Enrolled in a class I forgot existed for months and now it’s the end of the year and I’m going to fail it - this is the most stressful of them all, because I can't remember which class it was or where I can the classwork to catch up. I started having this dream at the end of my law degree when we had to enrol in a bunch of online subjects that I left till near the end of term to complete.
Tidal Waves - these dreams have been happening for over 20 years. They take place in difference locations, but always involve an enormous tide that smashes into the windows of the house I'm inside, or over a high sea wall I'm behind. These dreams usually wake me up as I am experiencing so much fear.
That would be a very good reasoning why I dont have (or cant remember) any such dreams the past decades. I'm just so bad in remembering and reminding my duties that I either have to instantly fire it into a electronic reminder/calendar thingy and forget or I need to get used to doing it regulary (brushing teeth). So I don't have this regular "I need to remember this or that" thing at all - which is a great piece of mind I can recommend to anybody. I have to ask kids and wife - which are dreaming a lot - and the later is just littering everything with pieces of paper with random todos.
Another reason could be that I use a tiny dose of a Z-Drug (2.5g, Zolpidem each night so I can fall asleep without two hours of endless thought circles...
"so I can fall asleep without two hours of endless thought circles..."
Are the the worry-thoughts that people have when trying to fall asleep ... just pre-dreams? Just that they're way more coherent because you're conscious, and when you have them asleep, they're disjointed and dreamy because those "make thoughts coherent" part of your brain is off?
Add some ashwaganda and you’ll probably recall your dreams. I’m sure someone on this forum knows why ashwaganda has the effect, but I couldn’t tell you why.
The thought circles of my first 4 decades were mostly just endless streams of associations, curiousitiy, recalls of situations, the day, things I had read or seen. Never got diagnosed but I might carry a AD(H)D spectrum brain. I tried like 90 percent of recommended things from meditation, self hypnosis, autogene training, sports, no sports, no blue light, no media, no blue light, all kinds of natural substances - but only this 2.5-5g of Zolpidem lets me really sleep especially after any social event in the night like a party, a networking event, meeting friends, watching a film...
I'm bad at remembering such things but also don't really bother to write things down consistently; never have such dreams either—in my case, maybe this is a sign that I don't really care deep down, or something. (Or else it's the buprenorphine; had terrible insomnia till I got on it, and now I can fall asleep any time any where! It's great.)
I've only ever had a single recurring dream, which I've probably had a good two dozen times. When I was a child, I had a close call with a notorious F5 tornado (Jarrell), and ever since I have—maybe once a year—had dreams wherein the tornado is getting closer and closer, and the wind starts to rise and wail, and the ground starts to shake and a deep roar fills the very fabric of reality, and I huddle over my cat to try to protect her maybe just maybe...
...and then I wake up. (In real life, IIRC, the tornado lifted up, roped out, and dissipated just before it got to us—wasn't actually close enough to shake the ground, but close enough to hear. Hard to see, because it was pitch fuckin' black like midnight, but I can still remember the ominous, absolutely gigantic ridiculous huge towering black blot stretching up into the sky...)
I was going to attribute this purely to fear, but perhaps it is related to "checking" after all. I don't recall the dreams starting until I was old enough to watch a weather radar, and ever since I've watched that sucker like a hawk every time a storm is on the way.
The effect of medication on dreaming might be worth investigating as well. I almost never dream while I'm taking anti-depressants. ...Which is unfortunate, seeing as dreaming is so much more interesting than being awake, even if they are nightmares. I still remember that one time I got stabbed through the shoulder with a katana. Didn't hurt as much as I thought it would, obviously.
"I huddle over my cat to try to protect her maybe just maybe..." Too real by half.
I wonder if the intensity of that experience imprinted on you so much that it drowns out all other fears, at least in your subconscious. I've never experienced a natural disaster (except for drought which is really just an annoyance in the first world); all of my scariest waking experiences have been connected, at least in part, to me forgetting things, and thus it makes sense that my most frequent dreams are the "I enrolled in a class and forgot to attend" or "I forgot my homework" varieties.
Strangely, I never had close encounters with tornados, but I dream of them now and then, tens of times. I don't hear the sound, but the special effects have gone as far as the tornado hitting a high-rise building where I stand in the dream, making it wobble, and I feel the lift created by the rising air current, even though the dream house, thank goodness, stays intact. The dream situations are different: once it was a classical smoke experiment setting where everyone else in the room was ignoring the tornado and the wobbling house and I was the only one finally running downstairs; another time I ran from a tornado, almost escaped, then realized I had left my kids in a house now destroyed by the damned weather event, turned around to run back with barely any hope left... it's recommendable to wake up at this point.
They name tornados? And they name them Jarrell!?!
Yep, same. Came here to say this as well. Feels likely.
More dream content, Scott, please! Hypnagogia is nuts. Have you seen this wild wikipedia page? It's real! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploding_head_syndrome
I have this condition. Not diagnosed, but I have it. Sometimes the "noises" wake me up and occasionally I think they were real for a short time.
I would never have guessed for a second, though, that it would be called "Exploding Head Syndrome". That's like calling mild myopia "Utter and Terrifying Blindness".
Also very bad at remembering such things (feels like I have a hard cap of 3 slots for such things, and not everything can go in an electronic aide). But I have the opposite reaction - I am nervous because it's very likely that I am indeed forgetting something I need to do. I'm not very stress prone in general, so I'm not terribly anxious about this unless I have a large number of important things to remember in a short time. I do have those dreams occasionally though, often with childhood themes (e.g. end of high school exam, and not forgetting to file my taxes).
Tangentially related, I'd be curious what the correlates of this character trait are. Personality and otherwise. And also the specific mitigations people use. Let's start a thread about it! :)
As mentioned - I had to embrace the electronic helpers early on. Never could work okish with analogue stuff like calendars, agendas, post-its and so forth. My electronic life is pretty well organized while my physical desks always looked cluttered at best and were piles of 3 years old docs pretty often.
Electronic helpers alone is not enough unfortunately. I've implemented an optimized a set of cloud service, computer, smartphone, smartwatch and processes for when and how and how often I set appointments, reminders etc. So I think up-front about the actual event, how many preparation in advance I need to do, how long it will take to travel to the location / setup the environment etc.pp.
On the other side I have disabled ANY other notification on my gear of news sites, Teams, WebEx, any other apps, games, even eMail - because its a medium I want to use on my own terms and not having to react when I'm not prepared to. So I get only alarms (for waking up, preparing the kids for school), a couple of reminders for appointments, pop ups sleeping in the notification bar for Todos, and notifications for messengers I use to stay in touch with friends. All that is happening mostly silent or vibrating on my smartwatch were I can have a short glance and see if its fluff of friends or an important appointment coming up.
What do you do about reminders not triggered by time. E.g. "when I see this friend, I need to return that thing they lent me." Or "I need to buy new shirts"?
And what about things you don't have time to put into your system? E.g. when cooking, there are a lot of actions that need to be performed, and if I'm roasting nuts while chopping a salad I need to remember to stir them every minute or so.
And ditto about cluttered desk (still!) but very organized digital folders, calendar, etc.
Good that you're asking about the kitchen: We only introduced Alexa smart speakers last year - but those were the best 25 bucks (per speaker) invested in a long time. Even wife and daughter (both hating but defending their todos on flying pieces of papers) who were complaining "about that damn computer" are now happily commanding our fleet of Alexas. At any period of 5-15 minutes in the kitchen we put a couple of things on our shopping list by saying "Alex, put X on the list". During grocery shopping we just go through the list in the Alexa App. Alexa can manage multiple named lists if necessary. We let Alexa turn and tune the lights. We run timers "Alexa, timer 10 minutes" - the speaker is showing the countdown and alarming when it fires off. then we stop it by "Alexa, stop". We set all kinds of further Alarms for cooking, baking, on-time or re-ocuring reminders for medication, kids preparing to school asf. I sometimes even set reminders for a kid at home from remote to remind it to do something while I'm away and not able to call. One of the mostly used feature is the Alexa speakers being the least expensive Multi-Room-Audio system - with free unlimited Spotify-like Radio. We permanently ask "Alexa, play Song XYZ" or "Alexa, play music of artist ABC" and it does exactly that continuing with more songs from the artist or fitting the mood or so. Way more comfortable and less expensive then a Spotify or Youtube prime subscription on your smartphone. From time to time Alex tries to sell us the Amazon music subscription but is letting her to stop instantly. Kids are asking Alexa from time to time so trivial pursuit questions. If its getting more complicated, we run one of the many Free-of-Charge skills which lets us talk with ChatGPT for free. So its like "Alexa, run AI" - "Hi - this is your AI, what you wane discuss today" - and its a handsfree conversation with ChatGPT. This was possible long before OpenAI announced its own hands-free mode.
All that is hands free without any smartphone.
Then you asked - How to remind giving something back to a friend or other situational reminders. There are smartphone apps trying to do this based on your actual location - but I'm still to paranoid letting random apps track my locations all the time. But I use Microsoft todo app to remind me around a time or an event to remember Xyz. Generally I have really good experience with real-world situational reminders. For example I mainly pay for short term parking fees by using a popular parking app - and often forgot to cancel it when leaving. These days I put something unusual on to the steering wheel and know in an instant I have to cancel the parking app when I come back. So I mostly will try to find a virtual or physical related thing/action/reminder to that meeting a friend etc. Its more like proper processes built around my cheesy brain. Putting "abc needs a new shirt" onto the shopping list is like a situational reminder as well. We dont buy shirts in the grocery store but the next time we are in a mall (doesn't happen all to often) we go through the list as well and see the shirt.
Given how much brainspace is used for social stuff, I wouldn't be surprised if those common dreams about "embarrassment of not being prepared for X" were centered around "fear of social disapproval."
When I had/have the "didn't prepare for a test/performance" dreams, it was rarely about "oh no I don't know the answer to number 4!", the parts I remember after waking are the "other people had expectations for me, and are now disappointed."
I agree. I think most anxiety dreams are about reinforcing social norms into memory. Feeling shame over failure to live up to one's responsibilities is a common dream theme.
If the root of these social dreams is an experience of shame, in a more ruthless society than ours losing teeth may be the literal origin of "losing face". Prehistorically, when people didn't live long, you were more likely to lose teeth from losing a fight badly than from gum disease. Getting disfigured in a fight was shameful. Way worse than walking around naked.
oh yeah, I didn't even think about that in the context of the losing teeth one, you're totally right, that fits the model.
We associate "food" with "rewards" and certainly in an earlier society, someone losing their teeth will have trouble eating food, and symbolically (or maybe the dream goes back so far that it is "literally" from when we were creatures who needed their teeth to hunt) incapable of providing for the tribe. Plus your smile, a key feature for persuading others that you're on their side, and not a threat to them, is now less appealing - a very important thing back then.
Dogs obviously have dreams about chasing prey. Do wolves have nightmares about losing their teeth?
> maybe the dream goes back so far that it is "literally" from when we were creatures who needed their teeth to hunt
I don't think any member of Homo ever used its teeth to hunt.
no, but the things we were before that did, and I assume they had dreams about it.
Reinforcing social compliance seems spot on to me: just as social anxiety generally makes sense (we have much more control, historically, over not being cast out than over external threats) so do those dreams. They remind people to take care of their reputation basically.
Somewhat by-negation anecdata: my social anxiety is low by human standards and I don't have "humiliated or fast out" dreams, and didn't have them as a teenager either, my recurring unpleasant dreams are either about physical threats or about responsibility for others (so essentially I will die or I don't save others from dying).
That would make sense to me, anyway! Do we have any data on Big 5 personality traits (neuroticism?) vs "types of dreams/nightmares" you have?
Makes sense, but why are these dreams about certain specific situations only? At least for me. For example, I never have dreams about missing a deadline at work, even though it's quite a salient fear for me, but still get dreams about being unprepared for something at school.
I am not a brainologist, but I assume that for your sleeping brain, they basically are in the same category of emotion, and it happening "at school" was just the scenario you remembered first, back when your brain was forming? i.e. your waking brain can tell the difference between "unprepared at work" and "unprepared at school" but asleep brain thinks "same thing"?
As a professor, I find that I often have dreams about being unprepared to teach a class but never about being unprepared to take one. Perhaps I was the kind of student that eventually goes on to be a professor, and thus never felt unprepared as a student, but started getting that feeling for the first time later, and that’s the one that stuck for me, while other people got a similar thing stuck earlier.
It might be worth surveying people about whether it’s a college class or high school class or middle school class or what that they’re unprepared for in their dream.
I also teach at a college and have these dreams. But I only have them starting about 3 weeks before fall semester starts up until the start of the semester. I also occasionally have the dream that I am missing a class I signed up for, even decades after finishing my own studies. When I was young, my recurring dream always had to do with getting on the bus and realizing I forgot my socks. I had that dream a lot all through my youth and adolescence.
That should be testable. Certain people are "shameless", meaning they really put little or no value on what others think of them. Do these people have those kinds of dreams at lower rates than average?
> Given how much brainspace is used for social stuff, I wouldn't be surprised if those common dreams about "embarrassment of not being prepared for X" were centered around "fear of social disapproval."
I mean, I understand that The Website Formerly Known As Twitter is ever more of a verbal Thunderdome, but damn.
(I jest, I jest, I know what you meant)
haha I refuse to call it the new name, because I need to use "X" for variable names!
*centuries of mathematicians adopting X as their variable name*
"But they were, all of them, deceived."
*Elon Musk forging the source code of X in the fires of Mount Doom and laughing*
Agreed. It's been about 20 years since the last time I was in a play, but I still have dreams where I'm about to go onstage and I realize I never learned my lines, don't know what my cue is, and/or can't find the stage itself.
This is me 100%
this is roughly how the un/underdressed dreams go for me. I'm in a situation where other people (potentially) exist and find myself without shoes or other clothing. There's no sense of shame or embarrassment, nor even a sense that *I* have made an error, just "ugh, now i have to manage other people's perceptions more carefully because i am marked as Other/Deviant"
yeah, that makes sense, I assume cultures that have totally different dress codes than us wouldn't dream about not having pants, but they might dream about forgetting the socially-appropriate hat or shoes or whatever.
I'll add myself to the datapoints here.
I'm a "pathological lucid dreamer", of the kind Scott mentioned in his post Bad Dreams. Quoting him:
> Somewhat related to epic dreaming are pathological lucid dreams. Normal lucid dreams are fun experiences where you realize you’re dreaming, take control of the dream, and spend the rest of the dream riding dolphins or kissing supermodels. Pathological lucid dreamers realize that they’re dreaming, but this somehow turns the dream into a nightmare in which the dreamer is attacked by demonic figures, all while fully conscious and realizing the nature of the phenomenon. These dreamers report experiencing real pain from the attacks and sometimes go to great lengths to stay awake and avoid having to subject themselves to further dream attacks.
My recurring dreams are mostly nightmares, reflecting back on real-world traumatic events. I used to not know that, but as I 'unlocked' traumatic memories with a therapist, I now understand. There is one recurring nightmare I have that is not yet solved -- being swarmed by insects, enduring their very painful bites. I don't know if that relates to anything in the real world.
Among non-nightmares, the most common recurrence is needing to urinate and seeking for a suitable place to do it. That I can pretty trivially connect to a urination-related OCD theme.
I never had recurring dreams of being late, or being embarassed by being naked, or anything else that is a common genre. Although I have no internal nudity taboo and this doesn't sound embarassing to me at all. I remember _one_ dream of teeth falling out, and I didn't know that is a common theme.
Sorry to hear about your recurring nightmares. Have you thought about trying hypnosis? I successfully used hypnosis to deal with a non-nightmare dream scenario that would wake me up at 3 am the Monday before I had to go to work.
In regards to needing to urinate in your dreams, do you actually have to get up and pee?
I'm a type I diabetic, and if my blood glucose levels are running high, I'll need to get up to pee during the night. When I start looking for a bathroom in my dreams, I know it's time to wake up and go pee. So, this fits Scott's external stimuli hypothesis.
As for nightmares, I haven't had any since I was about six years old. But I remember that I had them frequently as a little child (a creature would come out from the washing machine in the basement and steal my mom away). After sixty years, I still prefer to sleep on my left side because that was how I slept with my back against the wall facing the door as a child. When I was about six years old, I was lucky enough to encounter a guardian entity in my dreams that showed me how to escape the cycle of nightmares. It showed me how to walk outside and explore the world outside my bedroom, and the nightmares couldn't follow me when I went out exploring. Since then, I haven't had nightmares — though some of my dreams may be disturbing, they're disturbing in nonterrifying ways.
Maybe, engaging in dream yoga might be interesting since you already got the lucid dreaming down.
> There is one recurring nightmare I have that is not yet solved -- being swarmed by insects, enduring their very painful bites. I don't know if that relates to anything in the real world.
Something somewhat similar appeared for me in meditation (randomly being eaten by maggots in my case). Imagine it's far less real than a lucid dream but the solution might be the same.
Being eaten/bitten/swarmed by insects isn't actually a problem unless we make it one same as with everything else. At least that's true from some frames (e.g. timeless, or self-less frames). This is somewhat what enlightenment is about. However, re-framing is something we often do to solve problems (e.g. thinking outside the box).
I haven't heard of dream yoga, what source on it do you find most helpful?
There are some Buddhist yogic practices for dreaming meditation. Check out Gampopa's _A String of Pearls_
https://dharmaebooks.org/a-string-of-pearls/
Gampopa's String of Pearls involves "seizing the dream" to become lucid in the dream. The practitioner continually reminds themself to see/imagine all perceptions and thoughts as a dream during the day. Then, they must go to sleep with a strong determination to recognize they are dreaming within the dream. Gampopa has a visualization practice with a mantra that's supposed to spontaneously produce the experience of lucid dreaming. There are more steps to this than that, though. I never tried this myself.
There's also a Tantric practice that utilizes our "third eye" to enter a state of lucid dreaming. The third eye is the patch of phosphene activity that's between your eyebrows above the level of your eyes. Not everyone seems to have this phosphene patch, but some people, myself included, have the perception of phosphene patterns around that spot when they close their eyes. If you can detect it, try to concentrate on that area when you close your eyes before sleep. Keep concentrating on it to try to stabilize the phosphene pattern so turns into a glowing ball of light. At some point, you'll enter the hypnogogic transition state before you black out into your initial sleep state. Try to hold on to the glowing patch in your hypnogogic state. You should still have some conscious will in the hypnogogic state, and you should try to clearly enunciate in your mind that you wish to have control of your dreams. It will likely take months of practice before you can will yourself to dream the themes you choose.
As I said, some people either don't have to have the third eye, or they're unable to perceive it. If you can't detect a patch of phosphene activity between your eyebrows, you're SOL for this method. :-)
But a quick Google turned up a couple of lectures by Geshe Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche about Bön lucid dreaming practices.
Dream Yoga: Lucid dreaming from the Bön Buddhist tradition of Tibet
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0UTQ2SdZJg
Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche ~ The Tibetan Yogas Of Dream & Sleep
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vFm19Oqak4
Good luck!
Thank you for this, I'll try
* The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep: Practices for Awakening (just saw the other commenter mentioned it as well)
* Also MCTB2 for Enlightenment in general (https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/18/book-review-mastering-the-core-teachings-of-the-buddha/, it works as advertised)
* https://aella.substack.com/p/the-pool-of-infinite-sorrow For something more poetic pointing at something like enlightenment
I don't think you need the phosphene patterns or third eye whatever it just helps. From a more meta-level meditation perspective you could do a light kassina practice (which you can bootstrap from the empty visual field https://firekasina.org/, or get a light nimitta from any meditation practice (have high enough "meditation" concentration and that ball of light might appear anyways) ). Then there are techniques to stay aware even during sleep which is different from lucid dreaming. All of this is usually a bit more high level I just wanted to mention it. There are also people like Beowful mentioned who are more naturally talented. I have friends who could always just pick a color from their close eyed visual field and fill the field with it.
If you have questions about enlightenment stuff in general we could chat some time/I could point you at some people. For other rationalists into enlightenment there is e.g. Sasha Chaplin or Kaj Sotal, on Twitter strong practitioners/teachers are Wystan and Roger Thisdell. There is dharmaoverground as a public forum. I am in a discord with a lot of experienced pracitioners. I know one person with a stronger dream practice but he is 4th path and I don't remember anyone who started off with a real dream practice.
Interesting, I also have the "need to urinate" dream, typically when I have a full bladder in real life. Often, when I have the dream, I'll find a place and unleash an extraordinary jet blast of pee, and yet feel no relief; this prompts a moment of lucidity where I realize I'm dreaming, and then I wake up. I don't normally have lucid dreams otherwise.
Do you also have OCD?
Nope
I am diagnosed with a complex PTSD.
Recently, I was dreaming that I was being strangled by someone much physically stronger than me, so that I stood no chance of overpowering him. I knew something else had to be done, immediately, and I came up with a pretty reasonable plan of how to get out of this situation. I don't know if the plan would work in real life, but it impressed me by being somewhat realistic when I woke up (as opposed to the nonsense we sometimes think when we dream).
This seems very related to this whole "be prepared" topic - like I tried to prepare for an real-life attack by coming up with a plan for countering it in a dream. But it's not like I have brain cells going "hey, I should check if I'm being strangled right now". Maybe dreams are related to preparedness in some broader way as well?
That's what I always figured, since most of mine seem to revolve around various threats that I've run into or could run into at various points in my life. It's the brain's prep-for-potential threats mechanism running on idle. A sort of 'danger room' (thanks Joey Miller below).
Of course, it's probably a lot of different things that can produce a dream--some of that, some of Scott's prospective memory thing (and in that sense it's a threat to prepare for), some of the body sensations he talks about. It's one of the reasons they're so bizarre.
yep this fits my model. dreams are for simulated problem solving (or task learning generally). self-play for reinforcement learning.
Sort of makes sense to me; my only recurring dream is a nightmare wherein a tornado is coming, except unlike in real life, it's not lifting up and dissipating but just getting stronger & stronger. I often think about what I'd do if I knew one was coming now that I'm an adult, so... could be related.
Freud's theory of dreams was that a central purpose that dreams serve for the organism is to keep you asleep even though various disturbances might wake you up.
Sounds reasonable with physical sensations during sleep -- your brain confabulates in details so it "makes sense" rather than having the physical sensation wake you up. Many frightening memories and emotional recollections that provoke bodily sensations seem like they could be similar. (Sometimes people wake up sharply from a nightmare, other times the nightmare continues like you describe and the brain tries to make the details make sense...)
Freud took this really far: he said this is the *only* way dreams function, so therefore apparently-random dreams must really secretly be the brain's way of dealing with unconscious drives. I doubt that.
But maybe it is the case sometimes, and might be at least part of why evolution selected for dreaming in many organisms.
Being strangled seems connected to being suffocated, and I think many dreams are related to sleep paralysis and the inability to control one’s breath while sleeping. I often have dreams where I want to yell something but can’t get the breath out.
Yes!
Sorry you have PTSD, but this is interesting to me, because years ago I was also diagnosed with PTSD, and I tell myself I overcame it, but hearing your dreams—I still also have violent dreams like this, and I’m usually escaping. I sense most people don’t have such violent dreams. Which I guess they do say that PTSD causes night terrors, which is violent dreams adjacent.
What was your plan for escaping from a stronger attacker?
Thought #1: I can't overpower him, so I need to figure out something else.
Thought #2: There is no need to overpower him, I just need to stun / distract / blind him for a moment so that he'd drop me. He just needs pain and disorientation.
Thought #3: He is strangling me with his bare hands, so his face is literally at arm's length.
Thought #4: I could poke his eye with my finger.
Thought #5: Finger's not good enough, not that firm and not that sharp, more likely to break my finger than anything. What's the sharpest thing I can reach?
Thought #6: I have my keys in my pocket. I can reach them. I will strike the attacker in the eye with my key.
Don't think we haven't noticed that you kept the plan secret, just to make sure you do have the upper edge in case some ACX reader ever felt like strangling you. Good OpSec. Constant vigilance.
Interesting, my recurring dreams usually involved being trapped in some sort of fictional horror story that I’ve consumed recently. Compared to that, I don’t have any of the dreams you mentioned, except occasionally flying away from the fictional horror monsters.
I could see the flying dreams falling into the same category if there was a brain function whose sole purpose was to monitor if and when you need to put your foot down to catch yourself. Walking is one of those things that seems really easy once you learn how to do it, but there is probably a whole slew of processes running in the background doing things like checking your balance, where your legs are, what you need to move next, etc. If one of those is in a loop triggering saying 'you need to put your foot down and touch the ground soon', but you never do, it could feel like flying.
This is how most of my flying dreams feel. I'm running, then forget to put my feet down and just start flying.
My "flying dreams" involve taking bigger and bouncier strides, and having to take strides in mid-air to stay up. A bit like a cross between the way you can "run" in water, the way astronauts look like they move on the moon, and Flappy Bird.
Have you tried gliding down staircases? That's the best way to get to the bottom. Unfortunately, I haven't figured out how to glide back up to the top. ;-)
Y'all are lucky. My flying dreams inevitably involve being stuck in the back of Economy wondering whether I'm still going to make my connection.
Oh, I hate that, too! Until recently, I couldn't read in my dreams, so I couldn't read which gate the next leg of my flight was at. Recently, I've begun to be able to read in my dreams, but I need bigger letters than the ones on the departure boards. Very annoying that my visual cortex isn't able to enhance the details of my dreams.
Mine sometimes involve flapping my elbows really hard like I'm doing the chicken dance. Or sometimes I just have to will myself up hard enough and I float.
I've had a reoccurring dream of rollerskating through the woods and realising that when I take a big breath I ascend until I'm rollerskating above the canopy. I think it's during a lucid dreaming phase.
Maybe causality is the other way: it could be that sleep contains virtual exploration/rollouts of RL episodes, in some of them things go wrong because you didn’t put on clothes, and prospective memory, which would’ve prevented it, is reinforced in these dreams, and when you’re awake, you don’t want to end up in one of these dreams, so you take actions that avoid branches that lead to being stuck far away from home/hotels a couple of minutes before Shabbat.
A weird thing - not sure how it fits: apparently, dreams of flying are mutually exclusive with dreams of breathing underwater. How can such an exclusion work in this system?
Like in the same person, or in the same dream? Flying underwater is just swimming.
In the same person! I've asked this of everyone I meet, and those who fly never dream of underwater breathing, and vice versa. N~47 (I think more but I only kept notes since a few years back.)
I dream both!
Okay now this is interesting! Both the "flying away, realize you are untethered" feeling and the "wait, why am I drowning, I just need to breathe normally" feeling? Was this at a similar period in your life or you were flying as a child and now you breathe underwater as an adult? Do these seem like interchangeable sensations?
As a child, I had the I'm flying this is fun WHEEEEE dream a couple of times. This was a highly coveted dream-treat.
As an adult, my "flying" dreams are more like the ones described in the article. Sometimes I can jump/launch and I can sort of descend very slowly, go someplace if I manage to propel. I guess the sensation is closer to swimming but it definitely doesn't have the same feel as my swimming dreams.
My swimming dreams are like you described. Oh no, I'm underwater...omg I can actually breathe. I find I have these most in the morning. If I wake up and then go back to sleep I often have more vivid dreams. Sometimes this triggers my awareness that I am dreaming because I know you can't breathe underwater and I've had this dream enough times. A few times I've been able to dip in and out of the dream while being aware of my cheek against the pillow. They usually feel darker or more compressed if that makes sense.
They don't feel interchangeable.
It's really hard to write about dreams! The urge to invent logic to explain the nonsense is strong.
I guess I can do both. I haven't flown in my dreams, but I can jump long distances in a single bound. Also, I have frequent water dreams where I'm underwater, but I'm not thinking about breathing when I'm submerged.
Interesting. I'm not sure I've ever had either one, but I think maybe once the underwater breathing.
I have both of these also.
I dream of both flying, and of breathing underwater.
They are both enjoyable kinds of dreams - in each case being there is effortless and fun - but the water ones are better because of the fish, which are generally gorgeous.
I've had both kinds of dreams as well. And I think they are both just linked to physical sensations.
The breathing underwater dreams actually became an easy path for me to lucid dream. As it was a reliable anchor point in any dream of "this is not real".
Breathing underwater I think is related to my sleep apnea. Once I got a CPAP machine those dreams drastically decreased. For those who don't know, sleep apnea usually involves short periods of not breathing, where your air passage is blocked. Which would be easy to associate with being underwater where you hold your breathe.
The falling dreams always happened at the start of the night when my muscles were relaxing. I'd often wake up with a "slam" into the ground where i have a sort of whole body twitch / spasm.
As an anecdote counter to yours, I've been in the ER multiple times for apnea-related atrial fibrillation and never had the breathing-underwater dreams.
And I can just swim underwater without worrying about breathing.
I can't recall ever having a "breathing underwater" but I used to frequently have "flying" dreams which were more akin to "swimming through the air". I always chalked this up to the fact that I spent a *lot* of my childhood in pools (And early childhood, especially - I learned to swim before I was even potty trained), but maybe there's another link there.
I've had both on multiple occasions! But I dream a lot, and remember dreams a lot, and my dreams tend to be fantastical or terrifying (rather than mundane stresses, although have those too).
Hmm I don’t think I ever had either type of dream.
After reading all these comments, it appears that I just lacked datapoints :) also Cunninghams law going strong! In any case, there goes my theory of "quasi-unicity of feelings in the conceptual dreamspace".
The defunct theory postulated that we never dream of the same intense feeling in different ways.
I've had them both. Not commonly, but definitely had both.
> Childhood me was afraid of monsters in the closet
I don't know about you, but childhood me had very frequent dreams about monsters in the... well cupboard, because I'm British and the word "closet" isn't much used here, but it comes to the same thing.
One of my more frequent dreams nowadays is having to go on stage and perform a role that I haven't rehearsed for at all and can't remember any of the lines or music.
Same, in childhood I had plenty of dreams about all kinds of monsters. They even lasted for a few years after I've grown up enough to not be afraid of monsters in the waking life.
Though it's been little while since the last one I had, I too had dreams about monsters as a child and continued to have them occasionally into adulthood. I think on a deep level I never really stopped believing in monsters, so they show up from time to time in my dreams.
Monster dreams are claimed to be common among little kids, and there are also the non-REM 'sleep terrors' where the monster 'stays' for a while after the kid seems to be woken up. I once had to put on lights and search the room to prove to my kid that the wolf was gone.
I definitely get the “never went to class” one. Also, for some reason I’m in a high school that is definitely my high school but doesn’t look like it, and I’m a 38 year old adult with a Masters degree retaking a class.
The other common theme I get is “I’m getting ready to go somewhere but keep getting delayed/forgetting things” and by the time the dream ends I still haven’t left.
Both of these fit your “prospective memory model”!
Oh god, I was reading the schedule wrong and winding up in the wrong classroom in my dreams for something like 20 years after high school.
I get those dreams about college. There's a class that I signed up for, went to a few times, but then missed a week for some reason I can't recall, then just forgot to go back. Now it's the end of the semester and....wait a minute, I graduated and have been working for over a decade now. That's pretty much always how it goes.
I remember having one of these dreams then thinking "wait, I graduated already" then I woke up
Worst was when I was in high school and dreamed that I had overslept my alarm. I woke up in a panic. It was 3am. I did not go back to sleep.
I've also had that kind of dream: oh no I'll fail my exam ... wait that was years ago and I'm no longer a student and have a job now.
I’m curious about what era of school most people have this dream about. I don’t have it about taking classes, but I do have it about teaching classes (which I’ve done for the past 15 years). Some people seem to have it from high school and others from college. I wonder if some have it from earlier education and some have it from med school or law school or grad school or whatever.
I have it for both high school and college. Slightly more often high school. Never had it about law school. Though usually, it's the point in the dream where I start thinking wait, why do I have to go back to high school when I already have a law degree? that I'm about to wake up.
I still have it about high school and college, but never about grad school. I also have "I'm trying to teach, but it's all chaos" dreams (used to be a teacher). Usually in my school dreams I'll realize "wait, I'm a 4X year old man with a PhD, why the heck am I in AP Physics again?" And the dream will transition to something else.
As a general high-level model, what about dreams as a psychic “danger room” where the brain workshops solutions to prospective stressors/problems.
That's what I figured. I forgot the comic-book metaphor but that's great for this audience. Thanks!
But why the situations are always the same and often implausible? And solutions tend to never materialize or be equally implausible/impractical? Seems more like a problem-solving engine running idle, decoupled from its normal task inputs (sensory organs) and the means to actually solve anything (body).
Maybe those are the situations for which the brain has been unable to come up with a solution.
From the experience it seems that most people's brains can solve the problem "how to not be naked in the public" just fine - when awake, that is. Same for things like tests, being on time for your flight and so on - most of the people successfully do it most of the time.
It would be interesting to see if dream themes correlate with personality at all. My partner, who is high on neuroticism and very good at remembering appointments/obligations (presumably they have many functional "homework neurons") nevertheless has very mundane dreams ("I went to the store and bought an apple." "I saw my friend and had a conversation.")
The prospective-memory theory sounds reasonable, but doesn't actually explain that very well by itself.
Long ago I read about a study indicating that boring dreams are a symptom of depression. Don't know how true it is but the measure has seemed accurate.
I have a recurring dream/nightmare that I've experienced since I was a teen. The details vary, but the central theme is the same. I'm in a hurry to get somewhere, I'm running, and suddenly, with no warning, I become completely enervated. I lose all strength in my legs, unable to run, I have to walk, then stagger, then fall down and desperately crawl. It's usually somewhere around this point that I wake up.
This really doesn't feel like it fits the theory, to me at least.
According to the cognitive theory of dreams, what happens in dreams is what we expect will happen. In waking life our predictions and expectations are corrected by objective feedback, but in our dreams there is no feedback so what we expect will happen is what does. From that perspective your dream indicates that you believe that you are vulnerable and incapable. You have goals but they are unreachable because you lack the ability to reach them. In short, on a deep level you expect that you will fail.
If you can recognize and change that belief then the dream may stop coming back.
I usually only have that with my lungs in my dream - I need to breathe harder or say something loudly, but my lungs won’t work. Both of these seem related to the fact that the dreaming mind wants to control the body but can’t due to sleep paralysis.
That sounds like possibly a similar phenomenon to sleep paralysis, where your brain notices that it can't move your body (since physical movement is suppressed during sleep), and freaks out about it.
This reminds me of something I experience in dreams occasionally, where I need to shout or scream for some reason, but I can't make any sound louder than a sort of hoarse, quiet, rasp
It's probably one of these overdetermined things. Some of it's sensation during sleep, some of it's that prospective memory thing you're talking about, some of it's random associations. My favorite theory is that some of it's preparation for dangerous situations you may encounter, since most of mine are about some kind of threat like getting fired.
Maybe interesting datapoint: I have ADHD and, as far as I can remember, I never had dreams about deadlines or not being prepared to the test, or stuff like this.
I was going to share this in the comments as well. ADHD, don't seem to have that prospective memory "dedicated loop", and also have never had a dream of this sort. Perhaps worth some follow-up polling to see if this these are related?
Same
"You’d have to have some kind of brain cell or whatever on a dedicated loop, checking every few hours to see if there’s a homework assignment you’ve forgotten about."
I definitely don't have this.
My personal theory is dreams are video games your mind plays with your virtual body because the mind is bored while the real physical body needs rest and because this is a good time for the mind to “practice” navigating the body in preparation for real life challenges.
So basically dreams are virtual training and amusement.
Also I dreamt last night that my ex husband was still my husband and we were staying at a hotel in Atlanta and attending a conference. He started serial murdering women but no one realized it was him. I was so scared that I’d be next. Then I found a gun and started planning to take him out, because I feared if I didn’t, he’d kill me first.
One of the craziest dreams I’ve probably ever had.
It also involved riding the Atlanta subway into an apocalyptic wasteland by mistake, and a dreamy stranger guy who helped me load my gun.
Very video game dream.
Are you from Atlanta, or was your brain treating that as an exotic place to visit?
It was treating it as an exotic place. So weird. I’ve only been to Atlanta one time.
The dreams where I suddenly find that I'm back with my ex husband somehow, or he's around and I don't know how to get away from him, are the worst nightmares I have. much worse than my frequent dreams about being attacked by bears. I have both of these several times a year at least, and the ex-husband back in my life one is far more terrifying.
Right! So terrible! I agree.
My alarm clock requires me to jot down the dream I was having when I woke up. I did some stats on it and have seen some interesting trends :
The "first" of a category tends to be more common. Ex: I am more often in either my childhood home or the first place I had lived by myself than any other place (including my current one). The people I meet are more often childhood friends than people I currently know. My first dog (dead of more than 20 years) is more commonly here that any more recent pet.
I have been traumatized by school : many dreams about having forgotten to do my homework or having to do a test without having studied, going back to school (I have been outside the education system for more than 10 years now)
"Nightmares" tend to involve mundane fears : having my wallet stolen, missing a flight
Dreams involving my smartphone tends to be about struggles : failing to book a room in a hotel due to a confusing user experience, failing to find my train ticket, etc...
Is the school usually your elementary school or middle school or high school or what?
Teaching college courses for a few years as a grad student permanently (it seems) rewired my "it's the last day of class and I haven't been all semester and now I have to take the final" dreams into "walking into a classroom unprepared to teach" dreams. (For example, I once dreamed I suddenly was teaching the first day of 5th grade.)
School really is just that traumatizing for everyone involved, huh?
That happened to me too.
In fact, my advisor point-blank asked me one day if my dreams had switched from "it's the end of semester and you forgot to attend a class" to "it's the end of semester and you forgot to teach a class." My jaw dropped, and I told I'd just had such a dream recently. He smiled and said the switch-over happens to all teachers.
Yes. Yes it does.
With nurses, it becomes “I hear this beeping and I can’t find the patient” or “I finished my shift and realize I completely forgot a patient”
It did that for a while, but then when I stopped teaching, it went back to a mix of the two. Sometimes in the same dream where I'm teaching one HS class and taking another.
I also stopped teaching, and the dreams got really weird after that.
At first, I again started dreaming that I was signed up for a class that I had never attended. But then I remembered I had a PhD and already knew the material, so I knew I was going to ace the test so why was I worried?
Then I started dreaming I was in elementary school but I never went to class, but that was okay because I was an adult and wasn't supposed to go to class anyway.
Then I started dreaming I was in elementary school but I never went to class, but I was an adult, etc. But then the school would say they didn't care and were going to flunk me regardless.
At this point I decided my brain was trying to checkmate me any old way it could using that damn dream scenario.
And I haven't had the dream since.
(Now watch me have it tonight.)
My recurring dream is always that I have a mid-term and I don't actually know where my classroom is because I haven't been to class in so long (This actually happened to me once).
I don't usually remember my dreams, but I know I've had the one about discovering I'm enrolled in a class I never attended. I always assumed it was related to my actually having a school homeroom orientation I was supposed to attend but didn't until (I kid you not) September 11 2001, when everyone was too distracted by the big events that day being discussed on TV for us to do whatever we were supposed to be doing there.
I’ve had it where I discover I’m teaching a class I’ve never attended until partway through the term. My dream self doesn’t wonder why the students are all there waiting still.
I've heard in some third world countries it's common for teachers to just not show up.
Perhaps a hint: I only have the "forgot to prepare" dreams about school. But during a spell of unemployment, I began to have them about work. And I don't recall having them about school when in school. It's like I only have them about situations that are no longer relevant in real life.
This seems inconsistent with your observant friend's dreams about failing to prepare for Shabbat, but can anyone else corroborate having these dreams about work only while unemployed? For those who've gone back to school, do the dreams about being unprepared for class stop?
I only got the "forgot to prepare for a class" dreams after I left school, too! I've attributed it to how, when I was in school, I knew what classes I had at any time and knew I was staying on top of them.
Never gone back to school, though, so I can't help there.
This experience, which seems to be shared by others, seems to indicate that regular patterns of behaviour, doing homework or going to work, have deeply rooted in the mind and were once satisfied by the completion of homework or arrival at one’s place of work, but when those patterns are broken, by ageing out of education or becoming unemployed, these patterns are no longer being completed to satisfaction and the mind plays them on repeat, particularly during dreams. Similar to how ear worms, songs or jingles stuck in one’s head, are created by having an incomplete sound on repeat can be treated by listening to the whole song or jingle.
Unfortunately, one can’t treat anxious dreams of not doing homework by doing homework as the pattern does not need to be completed.
As a professor, they are now dreams about being unprepared to teach a class.
Wait, where is my childhood companion, the "floor collapses" scenario? I thought it was universal, or is it just a correlate of all the engineers in my family?
I used to have dreams where I levitated. Then, I realized it was << driving a car, without the car being there >>. That day, those dreams stopped.
This feels similar to my concept that dreams have to be "solved" to stop recurring, but I wouldn't think that the solution here was "it's a car." Maybe your brain was trying to figure out what the sensation was but hadn't connected the two.
I find that mine are sometimes related to some activity that happened during the prior day, however tenuous. I played a particular video game? Aspects of gameplay might be present. That sort of thing. Not sure if that ties into any of your theories particularly well.
As for teeth falling out, that is an experience most adults have had! Humans do lose their milk teeth, after all.
Those sorts of things show up as surface coloration on top of other themes for me. Although I persistently have dreams involving World of Warcraft (or something that my brain labels as such despite being different)--the setting of the game evolves over the years, with the same characters as before but new scenes and adventures. I haven't played WoW for nearly a decade.
Acid reflux can be a cause of dreams about losing or swallowing a tooth. I've had many dreams about swallowing teeth, keys, staples, bolts etc but I'm more careful not to eat late at night and rarely have them now.
I also get the "forgot I was enrolled in class until late in the semester" dreams, and think I have a pretty good idea why I get those.
I had the experience in college of forgetting about big assignments until late in the semester, and rushing to get them done. Frequently I had the experience of getting a reminder several weeks after knowing of an assignment and getting a rush of anxiety about having wasted those weeks when I could have been working on it.
This seems to match with the prospective view.
I also get dreams about working in places where I used to work before. I think this happens when I'm particularly stressed at my current job, but I'm not certain of that. I am more likely to have dreams about working in a place that I found particularly stressful, though I also have dreams about working in a place that I quite enjoyed and was not nearly as stressed about. Coincidentally, I am having a busy week at work and dreamed the last two nights about working in my last two jobs.
I don't have dreams about tests I forgot to study for, but I have dreams that it's the start of a new school year and I have no idea where any of my classes are.
I think this is because I was academically smart, but disorganised. Curious whether the many other smart but disorganised people on here have similar dreams.
Same here. ...Though, that might have something to do with never having studied for tests in the first place.
For me it became dreams about having to teach a class I’m unprepared to teach - as the kind of person who eventually became a professor I wasn’t particularly stressed while taking classes, but am often stressed about teaching them.
Interestingly, (or maybe I've just gotten older and more observant) but recently after I started using a calendar, I'm way more stressed out about planned events, and I've had nightmares over missing a date, even though the stakes for remembering that date have felt lower than say, a homework assignment(which I've never had nightmares over).
I gave up cigarettes 30 years ago, after many failed attempts which had me not smoke for a month or two and then relapse. About twice a month I still have a dream in which I have just put a cigarette out and I am thinking Damn! What a waste of so many years not smoking, now I have to de-addict myself all over again. The relief on waking up is indescribable.
This fits, if the future task is to not-smoke.
My reoccurring dreams not mentioned:
- I am stuck in the middle of the road somehow, and I can see a cars headlights coming, but I can't move my body or can only move very slowly. My body is heavy. I would have said this was a childhood only dream, but I just had it again this week.
- I am chewing gum and I can't spit out all of it. It's actually a huge amount of gum and if I pull part of it stretches and stretches but I'm still left with a huge amount on my mouth. Sometimes its stuck to my teeth.
The former might be a sleep paralysis-type dream (can't move despite screaming to), the latter might be a variant on teeth falling out.
Yeah that first sounds similar to the sleep paralysis type I get, though mine are usually about trying to say something to someone.
I have never been as terrified as the first time I experienced sleep paralysis in my late teens. I was lying in bed in my room, opened my eyes, and noticed that the light was an unusually uniform gray-blue before I saw a gray figure with long limbs, about the height of a child, slowly approaching me. My heart pounded faster and faster, and to my escalating, increasingly panicked despair, I couldn’t move at all. Not even my eyes, which were staring straight at the gray figure, could I close.
The almost worst part was that I felt like I needed to breathe faster, but I couldn’t do that either—it felt like a heavy weight on my chest, as if I were strapped to the bed. So while my heart raced at full speed, my breathing remained normal, and I thought I was going to suffocate. I don’t know how long it lasted. Maybe twenty seconds, give or take ten? And there I lay, completely paralyzed, terrified to the breaking point, in my own room down to the smallest detail—except for the eerie dim light and the horrific figure that slowly approached in total silence.
Everything in me screamed to move, but it was utterly useless until I noticed the faintest movement in the outermost joint of my right pinky finger. The motion was sluggish, but with frantic, panicked effort, I managed to move more and more, eventually gaining control over my wrist, then my arm, and finally my whole body. Still dazed and shaken, I sat up in bed and saw that the figure had vanished.
After the experience, I needed to make sense of what had happened, because never before or since have I felt such acute, suffocating panic—pure, crystallized terror. I came to three possible conclusions: either I had been the target of an attempted alien abduction, or an Old Norse troll or sprite had stopped by in the early morning hours, or—what I ultimately settled on—I had experienced sleep paralysis.
Now that I recognize the symptoms of sleep paralysis, I don’t get as frightened, though it’s still unsettling. I’ve also encountered the figure again, but now, since I recognize sleep paralysis when it happens, I understand that I’m dreaming. For a brief moment, the dream turns lucid, allowing me to steer it to some extent—away from that eerie semi-waking hallucinatory state—until it slips back into the uncontrollable dream world I normally inhabit at night.
Speaking of nightmares and the passing of a great man, it seems only fitting to thank David Lynch for the most terrifying dream film ever made—and, in my opinion, one of the greatest of all time: Mulholland Drive.
I used to have the recurring dream where I was late for a class I'd never attended and had to take an exam. They stopped immediately after I passed my comprehensive exams. I remember realizing it at the time, because the dream was frequent and the cessation abrupt. I think some part of my mind realized I'd never take a class or exam again.
Very interesting. This explains much of the psycho-reaction of the brain when the body is at rest - defenseless!
I can relate to the examples illustrated in this article. I have those very dream anxieties!
My mother’s dreams are increasingly more difficult for her to filter upon awakening. I have been told this is a common phenomenon in the elderly.
Jumping, I wonder if there is a physical connection to exercise and dreams - there is one for day anxiety - circulating the CNS fluid and flushing out cortisol and norepi. And for dream chemicals, and neurotransmitters?
Loved your article. Fabulous. Thank you.
"Flying: I don’t think my theory can explain this. I’ve heard claims that it’s because muscle feedback is blocked during REM sleep, so you feel weightless."
I have dreams sometimes where I'm driving but I can't really control the car well at all, so it slides all over and crashes into things. I suspect that's kinda the same situation: I don't feel the usual forces one feels when braking or taking a turn at speed in this dream, so my brain interprets that as the car having no brakes or the steering isn't responsive.
The rare driving dreams I get I'm usually too far from the steering wheel or brakes (sometimes in the back seat), which explains why my actions aren’t effective.
I will sometimes have the 'There's a big test today in some class I forgot about, and I don't even know what room/ building the class is in.' (or some variation) When I remember one of these I usually think to myself, "Huh I've been putting off doing X, I guess I should do that." Where X is usually some task that involves filling out some forms, or writing a check, or some such thing. So perhaps a weak data point in the prospective memory column.
This is a great concept; I can definitely understand paperwork being grouped in with schoolwork.
Prospective memory as you describe it is the main idea behind one of the (supposedly) most effective techniques for instigating lucid dreams, namely the "MILD technique." From gpt:
-Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreams: This technique relies on setting a clear intention or “memory cue” to become lucid in the dream.
-Mantra or affirmation: Typically, you repeat a phrase before you fall asleep—something like “I am going to notice that I’m dreaming” or “I will have a lucid dream tonight.”
-Visualizing your desired dream: While lying in bed, you also try to visualize becoming aware in a dream scene.
Why it works
-The MILD method leverages your prospective memory (the ability to remember to do something in the future).
-Repeating the phrase and visualizing the dream state just before sleep helps prime your mind to recognize when you are dreaming later on.
The other major phenomenon about the content of dreams is that *repetitive tasks* make it into dreams.
Play Tetris all day and you'll have Tetris dreams. Pipette all day and you'll have pipetting dreams. Do data entry all day and you'll have data entry dreams. Scroll social media all day and you'll have social media dreams.
This doesn't map well with the theories that dreams emerge from our strongest emotional concerns (repetitive tasks are often pretty unemotional) or that dreams emerge from physical sensations during sleep (what physical sensation would make you imagine you're typing numbers into a spreadsheet?!)
But it does fit pretty well as a generalization of your prospective memory theory.
A repetitive task is a "running loop" that you goes through again and again, and once you get into the swing of it, there's a certain automatization or momentum to it; your brain "gets the rhythm" and just keeps on looping easily without much conscious exertion of will.
Checking if you've forgotten something is also a "running loop" that gets automatized.
Erik Hoel's theory is that the *function* of dreams is related to learning, specifically as a form of "self-play" or "synthetic data generation." If we're learning how to do a new task (which probably engages the motor learning system, even for some supposedly "purely mental" tasks --- finger, eye, and mouth muscles are still muscles!) then the dreaming brain generates fake training data, plus often some random variation to add more robust generalization, which is where the "weirdness" of dreams comes from. Usually we'll dream more heavily about the tasks we're *currently* learning, but probably we'll get some replay of long-ignored tasks like "remember to do your homework".
People do dream of fantastical things they've never experienced -- monsters, ghosts, etc -- but in my experience the prevailing theme of nightmares is urgent *action*. I am busy fleeing, or hiding, or fighting; the most vivid experience is of "what it feels like" to have to do these survival-necessity tasks. (Including when I've never done them.)
Dreams also seem to call up something like emotional postures; I often find that a dream solves a "problem" I've been having lately by reminding me of a "way I can feel" or "way I can relate to" something. I might be averse to something in real life, but a dream can "teach me what it feels like" to be at peace with it or appreciate it.
This doesn't fit well with teeth falling out or flying, which as you say might actually be about physical sensations during sleep, but I think it explains a lot of dreams.
I think there is a element of stress/challenge needed as well. I spend a lot of time scrolling social media but I have never had a social media dream. However, I often have puzzle dreams after staying up late doing puzzles, or spreadsheet dreams after crunching on a work deadline.
Prospective stress could explain why forgetting dreams are more often serious failures that don't happen often, like missing a flight or failing a class, instead of daily activities that should have a more frequent, more reinforced loop.
I often heard about recurring dreams, which I never had.
This article talks more about a recurring dream *theme*, which I definitely have. The dreams I remember are mostly about ridiculously complex ways of getting from A to B repeatedly. The individual dreams are quite different, though. It can be me as a child on a bike riding through a complex path (including jumping over a chasm on the bike) in the neighborhood of my childhood. It can be me not finding the entrance to the underground parking lot where my car is and then realizing that the exit is too tight for my car, it can be needing to navigate a complex canal system with or without a boat.
Interestingly enough, I cannot remember ever having this theme when awake or even on psychedelics. It's dreams only
For me it’s about navigating which airport I have to get to and how to make sure my luggage gets there too, and often realizing I’m going to an airport on the wrong side of the ocean (even though I’m doing the ground transport before the flight so this error makes no sense).
I also have recurrent themes but the details are always quite different. The themes are things that I have rumination about. The people are often from the same small set but the plots and settings are very different.
I had "sleep paralysis" dreams very regularly for many years. They mysteriously stopped almost entirely in my 20s, and then returned at a fairly low frequency (maybe 10 per year) more recently. They had recurring elements, and I eventually got so I could recognize them ahead of the actual paralysis part and try to wake myself up. I wonder what's up with those?
Another dream pattern that probably fits with the "be prepared" idea: I somewhat frequently dream that I'm driving a car whose brakes are failing, or somehow trying to drive from the back seat.
And another: Even more frequently I dream that it's the last day of school. Usually it's some year of high school, and I'm waiting around in some class with some classmates and talking. It's not stressful, and I guess is even pleasant by my usual dream standards. But why that particular thing???
Same!! I've had very regular paralysis dreams since about as early as I can remember and until somewhere in my early or mid 20s. And I also learned to recognize them - I would know I'm sleeping, I know (mostly correctly) which room I'm in, and even the position of my body, but I just can't move it. It wasn't scary in the normal sense, just an *incredibly* uncomfortable feeling, and the only way out was to try and move regardless. This would usually work and wake me up completely, but it required a *huge* effort of will, harder than the heaviest lift I ever done in a gym, or than anything else. I absolutely hated those dreams, and sometimes I would get a few in a row where I would manage to fully wake up by moving myself, fall asleep again, only to find myself back in the same dream a little time later.
Luckily they've almost completely disappeared at some point in my 20s and haven't returned so far and I dearly hoped they won't. I'm 32 now, is it younger than the age when your dreams returned?
To add, I also have that dream about waiting for a class in high school and talking to classmates, and it's usually pleasant in that I'm glad to see the people I haven't seen in a while. Although often it would continue with the class actually starting, and I become frustrated about why am I, a grown up professional, has to go through this bore again, and then my mind goes "hmm, why indeed?" and I wake up.
I think I was around 34 when I started noticing the sleep paralysis dreams coming back.
Notably, the dreams disappearing mostly coincided with me moving in with my now-wife and sharing a bed with her. And them returning sort of lines up with us moving to a different house. So it might be more of a sleeping circumstance thing, rather than an age thing?
No, for me at least I don't thing it's about the circumstance - I've lived in more places than I bothered to count over those years, and it also doesn't seem to depend on whether I share the bed with someone or not. May have something to do with sleep quality and consistent schedule I guess, I think both have significantly improved over the years.
I had the same experience as you. Same heavy feeling and an intense effort to fight out of it. I probably could have just gone back to sleep but that always felt like a dangerous thing to do even though I consciously knew it wasn't.
I am late 30s now and the paralysis hasn't come back except for a few times a year. The sleep paralysis was definitely correlated with my anxiety and depression.
Yes, sounds exactly like my experience. Doesn't make much sense but for some reason it feels so gratifying to finally find other people with the same flavor of sleep paralysis lol, even though it's online and I never even cared much about this thing.
I've never been diagnosed with either or had been too anxious in general, so don't think this is how it works for me. Thinking about it, in my case the best guess would be sleep quality and schedule consistency, those have definitely improved over the years... which kind of makes me wonder, may it be that for you anxiety and depression correlate with poor sleep quality (either by causing it, or by both being caused by some third factor)?
I also get the driving from the back seat dreams.
I had entirely forgotten the "trying to drive from the backseat" dreams until you mentioned it! Now I remember I've dreamed that probably dozens of times.
I always figured the teeth falling out dreams were relating to the trauma of actually having your teeth fall out as a kid, which is a pretty universal experience that would explain why they are so common.
Like others, I too get the "forgot about a class and now I'm going to fail it", which is almost always in a college setting and a coarse that has nothing to do with my major. I'll also get variations on "I'm back in high school and don't know my class schedule or locker combination." or "I'm back in high school and it's time for final exams and I haven't studied" or "It was discovered that I didn't take some required coarse back when I was in high school, so now I as an adult have to go and take that class" (one variation put me in elementary school). Also common are "It's time to go to high school and I've missed the bus so now I have to drive in but it's snowy and your brakes don't work" The last actually happened to me once in high school, though it was on the way home after they let us out early during the middle of a blizzard (because why on earth would you let the students out Before the blizzard...). I was the first vehicle that did not join the multi-car pileup in front of me, and merely slid off the road when I applied the brakes.
Also, I did frequently have monster related nightmares as a kid. At some point I read about lucid dreaming and really wanted to be able to do it. I was never very successful, but it was enough that any time I had a monster nightmare after that I'd sorta start to realize I was dreaming which would let me get superpowers to fight off the monster and then sink back into a different dream.
When I became a professor I immediately switched over from (rare) dreams of taking a test I forgot to study for to (rare) dreams of having to give a lecture I hadn't prepared. I think I also had a couple of dreams about discovering it was the end of the semester and I had completely forgotten to teach one particular course. How would I assign grades?
David Allen (Getting Stuff Done) says every undone thing--the outlet plate that needs to be screwed back in, the dome light on your car that stopped working, etc--is an open cognitive loop that your brain occasionally checks. Get it all out of your head into a note-taking system you trust and you'll be okay.
Pł
Just a couple nights ago, I had a dream that I was failing choir class because I hadn't been doing the additional assignments (like watching season 2 of squid game? I never even watched season 1), and I got an email from my choir director telling me I had a 68% in the class and was going to fail.
I am part of a choir, and it does go on my transcript, but it has no bearing on my academics!
I'd really like to have a good answer for why fever dreams are so weird and unpleasant, like I'm orbiting around the same thought constantly. The last time was after I binged Disco Elysium in the course of a couple days, and then I had an interminable fever dream about communism, which frankly I consider to be a core part of the DE experience.
Former broadcaster here. "Dead air dreams" are quite common in this field. The equipment doesn't work, can't find the music to play, etc.
Also, why does my cellphone never work in my dreams, always has viruses on top of viruses, or an unrecognizable interface.
I've wondered about the anxiety dreams about school indicate that there's something unhealthy about school. It's at least interesting that they're typically about the logistics of school (I'd have them about having an exam in a course I hadn't taken) rather than about difficulties in learning, or even about about bad grades.
My recurring dreams fall into 2 categories. 1. trying to find my way somewhere in a city and am unable to get my phone/googlemaps to work; and 2. taking place in 2 specific locations: a)my mini farm of 30 years where a good 'ol country family has built a house and machine sheds and drive their equipment up and down my driveway; and b)a building I don't think I've ever been in where I am taking tests or trying to find food or some other form of wandering around. the layout is pretty constant while the rooms change (like when someone moves out of an office and someone else moves in).
My navigation problem dreams are usually about getting to the airport in a bus/taxi/whatever that is for some reason in the wrong city or continent.
We have friends who took the whole family on a trip to Spain and drove to the wrong airport. Not a dream.
It doesn't have to be monocausal, right? Like, there can be multiple ways that ideas or experiences are drawn into dreams, and more than one of those pathways can involve common human experiences that transcend individuals or cultures.
I appreciate the discussion above and take it as evidence of multi-causal pathways and against monocausal theories of recurring dreams.
So, Brodmann’s Area 10, aka the frontal pole, the most anterior part of the prefrontal cortex is critically involved in prospective memory and is also more active than other frontal regions like the DLPFC during REM sleep, so you might be on to something with this hypothesis.
The Bruxism is interesting too. Base rate in the population as a whole is about 10%, but it’s much much more common in people with chronic fatigue and long covid, at least anecdotally in my clinic (I work in neuro rehab) and to the point where dentists I’ve asked have seen this relationship too. Not sure if the literature has published on this yet. My psychological theory is that stressful anxiety dreams correlate with Bruxism and also daytime exhaustion due to poor sleep. My more out there neurological theory is that some of these women (it’s nearly always women) may have an autoimmune condition causing reduce hypocretin aka orexin, which normally results in the normal sleep paralysis/atonia we all experience to prevent sleep walking and other parasomnias. Clearly the normal sleep atonia isn’t working in the night time Bruxism. A friendly psychiatrist could prescribe Clonazepam and see if that reduces the Bruxism, improved sleep and reduced fatigue as it does for other REM sleep behaviour disorders.
Mine is realizing I'm naked during any other dream. It doesn't need to be giving a speech or something; in some of my random dreams, when the storyline is progressing, I suddenly realize I'm naked and try to find ways to hide myself or cover up and that effort hijacks the entire storyline. Many times I woke up cursing this recurring dream-virus of preventing me from seeing the end of the dream.
Is there also a known phenomenon about nonexistant places in dreams? I lived in 2 separate cities in the last ~25 of my ~40 year life. When my dreams are set indoors they are indoors, but when they are outdoors and it's not completely fantasyland, there's a big chance it takes place in the dream-version of one of those 2 cities. Over the years I have been to so many different part of those, I can maybe even draw crude maps of those, and there are vistas from those dream version of real cities that I can recall in my mind's eye just like a vista from the real versions of those cities. In fact a few times in the more recent few years I had to use google maps inside the dream and so I also vaguely remember some details to those cities that don't exist in reality but only in dream-versions.
I feel like some part of recurring dreams is just that you dream about X a few times, and then next time you are dreaming and your brain is trying to autocomplete what happens next some part of you realizes "oh, I am dreaming, so maybe X will happen again".
I consistently lucid dream, though I rarely try to interact with the dream "story," and my recurring dream concepts now are usually tied back to something in high school. Not stresses, but things like "watching the talent show" or "going to a friend's house," with set locations that are not accurate to that actual space. As a child, though, I had quite a few recurring dreams that always cut off and woke me up, until a friend suggested solving the dream or speeding through it mentally to force it into the next part of the story, which caused those dream concepts to end and never return again. My "falling down a massive well" was fixed when I gave myself moon shoes to bounce back up, "all my friends are vampires" was fixed when I wore garlic to protect myself, the series of being held captive and escaping out the window to fly (my flying was more of walking on air, at a speed like walking on an airport moving walkway) was fixed when I became friends with the bad guy's henchmen and got them to help me.
Herodotus 6.107, the dream of Hippias before the Battle of Marathon, mixes dreaming with real life tooth loss:
"The barbarians were conducted to Marathon by Hippias. the son of Pisistratus, who the night before had seen a strange vision in his sleep. He dreamt of lying in his mother's arms, and conjectured the dream to mean that he would be restored to Athens, recover the power which he had lost, and afterwards live to a good old age in his native country. Such was the sense in which he interpreted the vision.
He now proceeded to act as guide to the Persians; and, in the first place, he landed the prisoners taken from Eretria upon the island that is called Aegileia, a tract belonging to the Styreans, after which he brought the fleet to anchor off Marathon, and marshalled the bands of the barbarians as they disembarked. As he was thus employed it chanced that he sneezed and at the same time coughed with more violence than was his wont. Now, as he was a man advanced in years, and the greater number of his teeth were loose, it so happened that one of them was driven out with the force of the cough, and fell down into the sand. Hippias took all the pains he could to find it; but the tooth was nowhere to be seen: whereupon he fetched a deep sigh, and said to the bystanders:
"After all, the land is not ours; and we shall never be able to bring it under. All my share in it is the portion of which my tooth has possession."
So Hippias believed that in this way his dream was fulfilled.
My favorite power of my dream self is what i call “GPT Mode”. Whenever I am like 75% asleep, meaning I’m aware of my prone position and have a sliver of free will but I’m still hallucinating visuals, I can summon a sheet of paper to mind and begin to scan it. As I do so, I can viscerally feel my mind trying to generate words before my eyes land on them, in a way very reminiscent of GPT’s token-streaming behavior. And the content of the text is like GPT-1: it’s well-formed English (I think, my metacognition is too impaired in this state to analyze or remember any specifics of what I’m reading) but it’s completely devoid of meaning, and ends up feeling like and endlessly florid run-on sentence of nouns and adjectives going nowhere and saying nothing. Whenever I experience this I have a profound feeling that my brain really does have some sort of token prediction mechanism embedded within it and GPT is actually a completely faithful reproduction of one of the primitive substructures of the human mind
Huh, I feel like dream text is more like Dall-E, where it’s not quite coalescing into symbols I understand.
I have some of these recurring dreams (flying, being late or unprepared for stuff, naked in public places). Also a dream about my pet rats escaping, being neglected for absurdly long time, injured etc, or that I somehow end up with new rat(s) that I don't have any proper setup for. That fits well with the prospective-memory thing.
But I also have some recurring dreams which are hard to explain in either of the frameworks and which are not anxiety-related at all. I regularly dream about looking for a new house/apartment to rent, or preparing to move in, and about visiting a new city. And I tend to do quite a lot of both IRL, but the process is not particularly anxiety inducing, either in dreams or in real life, it's somewhere between exciting and tedious. I also dream a lot about being back to school and the main emotion is frustration that I need to go through all these boring classes again. Another school-related dream is about talking to some random classmates from school, not even my closest friends or the ones I've kept contact with afterwards, just some people I knew.
I feel like a for whatever reason a disproportional amount dreams have to do with childhood, even from your graph, childhood-related dreams are only slightly less common, whereas in the waking life people presumably spend much more time thinking about their current adult life. Also from my personal experience, adult dreams get updated overtime (e.g. the pet rats in my anxious dreams are being gradually replaced by a dog after we've got one), but the childhood dreams have remained the same ever since I've left the school well over a decade ago. Something about concerns or experiences being "baked in" during some critical development period? (I've no idea what I'm talking about here)
I have these Shabbat/Passover panic dreams too. The Passover ones happen mostly just before Passover. It feels like they're training me for a real situation where I would not have planned enough and would have to improvise.
These dreams are somehow cathartic, as I rely mainly on my solid planning skills to ensure Shabbat is done on time. Having these dreams forces me to confront a situation where I have to find another way. They're making me a little less afraid of the unplanned.
For what it's worth (less than $0.02 adjusted for inflation, probably) I have sleep (and waking) bruxism, and the "teeth falling out" dream (and the Shabbat dream, but I'm not Jewish so that's easily explained) is the only example here which I have not repeatedly experienced.
I suspect that the lack of correlation is because tooth grinding, at least at the moderate level which I experience, feels similar to chewing. It's not an unusual sensation to me.
I had a recurring series of nightmares in my twenties where I would dream there was someone menacing in the house. I would walk to the door, or the bathroom or something, I wasn't running or anything I was just dazed, and then I'd realize it was a dream.
One time I got a flashlight from the car outside, intending to walk down to the police station, before I realized.
My recurring dreams are all about tornadoes coming and having to hide underground. Probably because tornadoes were fascinating and scary to me as a kid.
I have had jumping/gliding dreams but not flying.
I'm sure I've never had a tooth-falling-out dream, and I don't remember ever having a forgot-event type dream.
When I do have bad dreams (not often), they're usually escaping/hiding related.
My most common recurring dreams are about exploring an endless-backrooms version of a familiar location (not scarry) either by myself or as an fps type game with friends or strangers.
The only unpreparedness dreams I remember I regularly have are that I'm in a play and I haven't learnt the lines. I don't think the deadline aspect fits to well here because when I was in (amateur) plays in real life, I generally learnt my lines well in advance anyway. My interpretation of this was that my brain conjures up this familiar scenario for the dream (I'm in a play), I try to remember what my lines are, and then as I have not actually been learning lines in real life for this dreamt-up play, I don't have anything to recall, so then the dream becomes about trying to get through the play without knowing my lines instead. In at least one case, the reason for the problem wasn't that I had neglected to learn my lines, but instead that I had been recruited to the play last-minute so it wasn't even my fault nor something that I would have had to prepare for, but it still fit as an explanation for why I was in a play and didn't know the lines. Oddly, it is quite common for me to dream of having memories that I never actually made in real life, and as far as I'm aware I didn't make earlier in the dream either, but perhaps there's too much detail in recalling my lines for a play for that to be filled in automatically or something.
This explanation would fit the test-taking dreams too, but not so much the airport or shabbat dreams.
I have more dreams when I'm something like stressed to the point of depression. When my life is going well, I either don't have dreams or don't remember them. And I remember/have fewer dreams now than when I was a kid. (So I guess that's good?) I assume I'm either getting more REM sleep or sleeping lighter so that I remember what happens in REM. But if certain conditions made dreaming more likely then that would bias what dreams I had.
I also used to have 'end of the world' dreams. And they were usually visually stunning, while also being rather disturbing. Imagine being on a Hawaiian island with white sand and a beautiful, saturated blue sky littered with a few fluffy white clouds. You notice that one cloud is a mushroom cloud. Then the blast hits and tears you and the room you're in apart.
I do wonder if 'end of the world' dreams are enough of a trope that anyone can relate.
I have some of these dreams, but they aren't anxiety-inducing for me.
Like I forgot I have a class / have a test I didn't study for. In the dream, my attitude isn't "Oh no!", it is "Huh. Okay. I'll still probably be able to pass this."
Or I show up somewhere and forget my clothes. No anxiousness - instead I spend the entire dream -annoyed- that I might get arrested for an honest mistake that doesn't harm anybody.
I've had the teeth falling out one once or twice, and my reaction was "Huh. That's not normal. I should probably see somebody about this" And then moved on.
So I definitely think the fear/anxiety connection isn't right, because I also have those dreams, without that connection.
(I don't really have nightmares - maybe two or three that qualify in my entire life. Well, I have dreams other people might consider nightmares, but they're rarely frightening, as my in-dream reaction immediately turns it into an action-fantasy. Sometimes, as if the dream is fighting this, I can't hurt my assailant, but my assailant can't hurt me either, so we end up in a strange confused stalemate before the dream "gives up" and moves on.)
I have a range of emotional reactions to these dreams, and sometimes they are mostly neutral like this, though usually there’s a bit of stress.
You omitted a very common category, so well-known that there's a play written about it: The Actor's Nightmare. I'm an amateur actor and often find myself onstage without even having read the script, let alone memorized my lines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Actor's_Nightmare
Here’s a supplement to your theory: We have these dreams of not having it together in various ways because we have a dim awareness of being asleep. (Maybe the dreams occur after very brief awakenings, when we have one of those, “oh yeah, its the middle of the night and I’m in bed sleeping" moments). But our minds are too compromised to grasp the big picture, which is that we are asleep *and* it’s an appropriate time to be asleep, so it’s fine that we are not dressed, we are not on our way to scheduled appointments, we are not prepared to do demanding waking tasks (like take tests) and our teeth are all scuzzy from sleep. So we have a sort of “Oh no!” reaction in the form of an anxiety dream about being naked in public, missing a plane, or whatnot. Or I guess, using your model, you could say we woke up briefly, that set off our reminder loops, and we became aware that we had been ignoring them for hours and that set off anxiety about the consequences of disregarding the reminders.
And here’s something that’s sort of an extension of the sleep-self’s anxiety about performing up to the waking world’s standards: Sometimes when I first wake up I think about the things I have to do that day and feel very daunted, even though they are all things I do routinely: Meet with person A, meet with person B, call person C about X. I feel like a shy teenager at a new school, or like someone starting a new, challenging job. And I think something like “What am I going to do? I’m not up to meeting with person A and person B. I won’t even be able to think of anything to say . . .” But 10 mins. later I’m my usual morning self, and no longer feel worried at all about the day. I have a friend who goes through the same thing, and says “it takes a while in the morning for the essential manageability of life to become manifest.” And I’ll bet this is pretty common. Anyway, seems like a diminished, conscious cousin of those anxiety dreams about flunking some basic aspect of adult life.
This makes a lot of sense.
Prospective memory theory intuitively feels right to me. The dreams are not just about anxiety-inducing situations but specifically ones you had to remember to prepare for. My personal top three are: test I forgot to prepare for, class I forgot I was taking, and, the most horrific one, my suddenly remembering that I adopted a puppy or a kitten and forgot about it, leaving the poor creature alone for two weeks as I went travelling, so it's certainly died a torturous death.
I also have ones related to public nudity and having to pee in public. I think those are from childhood. I'm guessing the nudity one must be related to how the idea of impropriety of public nudity is developed in kids: young kids have no qualms about nudity, and a pretty strong taboo must be installed in their brain to make sure they never forget to dress or stay dressed in public. Perhaps that leads to the development of a neural loop always checking "omg am I dressed?" that, similar to the proposed prospective memory loop is easy to suppress when awake but not in one's sleep.
Public urination is probably similar (in my case exacerbated by growing up in an environment where finding an acceptable place to relieve oneself outside of one's home ranged in difficulty from very hard to downright impossible).
Oh I have the neglected pet one too! And my version is the same as yours — it’s not just that I forgot to feed it last night, it’s that I forgot for several weeks or months, for so long that there
is absolutely no chance I have not killed the poor creature, and absolutely no way that I have not just gotten proof that I am a terrible person. I feel awful pity and guilt. Sometimes in the dream I had been carrying the pet in my pocket but forgot it was there, so I start feeling in my pockets for it, hoping against hope that it somehow survived.
I hate that dream.
"Prospective memory is the form of memory you use to remember that something’s coming up and you need to prepare for it." -- Do neurologists or psychiatrists recognize this as a distinct type of memory? 'Coz it's exactly what I haven't got, that other people do. I don't have a timer in my head that can be set to go off at some future time. If I have a meeting at 10 am, I have to set a timer for 9:53 pm to give me time to gather what I need and walk to the meeting room. And when that timer goes off, I have to stand up immediately and leave, without finishing what I'm reading or writing, without closing any file on my screen, without talking to my cubemate, because I'll forget the meeting as soon as I begin doing anything else, and nothing will remind me about it before it's over, because I /don't have a timer in my head./. I can't talk to anyone on the way for more than a few seconds; and if I stop for coffee, I may forget about the meeting while getting the coffee and go back to my desk.
No one ever believes me when I tell them this.
This sounds very familiar (very like myself). It’s possible you have an attention issue.
Dreams seem related to 'if it fires it wires'. Dogs dream of running and hunting, their little legs shaking. Dreams we have with stressful situations might prepare us to avoid forgetting, or to act.
Uncomfortable dreams I've had often involve impotence to act. Chasing someone but not catching up. Pointing a gun but not being able to pull the trigger. Punching with zero force. I've wondered whether they're somehow preparing my brain/nervous system to fire in those situations. (Before anyone suggests an alternative Freudian interpretation, I have no problems in *that* department).
Your religious friend should know that the rabbis say that if you are still on a journey a long way from home as shabbat is about to begin, you should complete your journey regardless. I doubt whether it would stop the dreams, though.
I have no insight into the etiology of these or other kinds of dreams. But still, it'll fun to tell a few of my own. Skip to the next comment if you're more interested in explanations than in more grist for the mill.
One night I had a dream about my teeth breaking off. I had not been aware of any discomfort, but the next evening, when I was eating pasta, one of my teeth did split and a large piece came off. I suppose someone might say that the dream was a message from the future.
My recurrent anxiety dream is that it's the last day of classes and I have not attended even a single class in my math course. I'm desperately searching for the classroom so that I can attend the last class before the final. It's in the agriculture building and I walk through every floor and still cannot find the classroom. Then I wake up in relief, remembering that I graduated 50 years ago and then even completed a Ph.D. in chemistry. But I was never great as a student, and indeed, at some level, that still haunts me now, even during my waking life. (Or as waking as it gets....)
I had a recurrent dream that I guess would be called a flying dream. I grew up not far from the Whitestone Bridge in the Bronx and my family frequently drove across that bridge to our summer bungalow in Long Beach. The Bronx end of the bridge is in Ferry Point Park. In the dream I'm walking in Ferry Point Park and I climb up into the rigging of the bridge, climbing and swinging around like Spiderman, with a joyful sense of freedom.
I can well believe that the failure of muscle feedback could be involved. But for a long time, I had another recurrent dream that could have arisen from the same cause; but this dream was terrifying.
The first time I had it, I was sleeping out in the desert on the Navajo reservation, a good stroll away from my traveling companions, and in the dream, I felt like someone had grabbed the bottom of my sleeping bag and, standing, was spinning it around in a circle. I was literally paralyzed in the dream, unable to move a muscle. Then I woke up. I had a similar dream pretty frequently after that, in which I would, in the dream, wake up but be paralyzed I would try to move but could not. Then I would really wake up.
Or maybe I actually had awakened and actually was paralyzed for a few minutes before coming to. I could never figure out whether I had actually been dreaming or not. Over time, it became a lucid dream. When it happened, then, in the dream, if that's what it was, I just focusing on moving a big toe. I always eventually succeeded, and I guess that's when the dream stopped happening. Maybe it stopped being terrifying because I had learned to control it, so I no longer needed the dream.
I learned many years later that there is a name for this kind of paralytic experience, but I forget the name.
If nightmares teach by reminding us of what we should worry about, perhaps pleasant dreams reinforce our desires, encourage us to test the world around us to discover new paths to success. Flying dreams are about exploration and a sense of wonder that we can accomplish something previously thought impossible. In my flying dreams I usually fall to the ground when I start to doubt my gravity-defying abilities.
I have none of these dreams and I'm always late to submit assignments. Coincidence?
Sometimes, daytime events can influence my dreams, but I often go places and do things in my dreams that have nothing to do with my daytime experiences.
For instance, I had the most wonderful dream the other night. I walked through a doorway and was facing a giant wave caught in stop-motion. I could see sunlight shining through the wave and fish caught in the uplift of the wave. The wave wasn't moving. It looked like a sculpture, so I stepped through the door and out onto the wave and walked under its chicane. I noticed that if I stood in one place, my feet would begin to sink into the water — so I had to keep walking along the curve of the wave so I didn't submerge in the water. And I noticed the water droplets on the breaking curve were falling ever so slowly. I voice said, "You're in another universe where time runs slower." I nodded that I understood, and I walked back to the door that I came through, and I crawled back into my bed.
It seems difficult for me to tie this to anything that's been going on in my life recently or tie it to external sensations while I'm asleep. I haven't attended any surfing competitions lately. I went to the shore a month back, but I haven't looked at any photos or videos of waves lately.
Also, my main frustration in dreams is that I can't find my car again after I park it. I need to figure out a way to remember to use the keyfob in my dreams to set off the car alarm so I can find my way back to it.
I never remember dreams much. But when I do it’s never good news, so I assume it’s all some class of nightmare.
Both theories could be true, you know. That is there could be more than one reason you have dreams. The way I explain dreams is that they are sometimes caused by anxiety about things like school (you forgot all about even being in a class and now it's time for finals), sometimes caused by external stimuli (I dreamed I was walking around in my underwear and nobody noticed but me) that's because I sleep in my underwear, not fully clothed, and sometimes caused by earlier horrific experiences (I'd had a recurrent, terrifying nightmare from early childhood until I was 19. Then one night I woke, once again, from that same nightmare and realized it was all about my younger brother getting hit and nearly killed by a car), I never had that dream again.
When I was a child, I once dreamt that aliens were taking over earth and in the dream I was the leader of a team who was tasked with breaking into the mothership to disable it. The first part of the dream was very much a nightmare: my team and I had jetpacked up to the saucer and cut into it, after which the rest of the dream was about navigating through dark corridors where any turned corner could mean discovery and death. I remember the fear growing. It was a loop of the same sensations: we'd walk down a hallway, my mind convinced that the unseen monsters were just around the bend, and then we'd turn the corner and the process would repeat. Every turned corner induced a surge of the same feeling you get when you almost hit the ground in a falling dream. Yet I couldn't wake up, nor did I come out of the dream. Instead, as my team reached the center of the alien vessel we entered into a ringed catwalk around a glass dome and I knew that this was what we'd come here to destroy. I knew that the stakes were existential. I knew that many other people had died to give us this chance and I knew that people were dying in a fight outside the vessel to keep the aliens distracted. I felt very afraid: on this catwalk, we were much more exposed than we were in the corridors. In the dream, I could not think through my fear. But my 'character' knelt by the glass and peered inside the dome. In an instant, I was a different 'character' and I felt perfect bliss. All my anxiety vanished: I was now one of the aliens inside the dome. There was an orderly peace within me. The rest of the dream consisted of a few repetitive tasks. I, as this alien, would receive an infant alien from a tube stem in the center of the dome. I would swaddle it and fuss over it and carry it to a nearby crib. (they were laid out around the dome). These cribs were attached to treadmills, and a platypus would run on the treadmill while the infants lay in the cribs, and the young aliens would rapidly age into mature soldiers who would then exit the vessel to join the fight outside. I repeated this process several times; it was a bliss-loop that was an almost perfect inverse of the terror-loop I had been stuck within for the first part of the dream. I want to get the point across: I felt that I cared deeply for these little babies. And then the dream ended with the room exploding and my world being consumed by a fireball while my alien character tried vainly to rescue one of the infants as we were both flung across the room. I then felt a fleeting moment of my human character's elation at having succeeded in saving the world, and I woke up very confused. Try to explain the processes behind that one! ;)
Not sure how this might help, but apparently it’s very common for people trying to quit cigarettes to dream about smoking and then remember they’re not supposed to and panic: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1757662
I had the same experience when I gave up meat.
It seems possible that this could be related to other guilt/anxiety-style dreams.
I think an underrrated explanation for dreams inolves the interplay between stretches of random stream-of-consciousness intermixed with moments of lucidity. Your brain throws random thoughts into your head, based on the kinds of thoughts you have normally during the day, and then occasionally you become briefly lucid enough to respond to them in a normal way.
Lucidity can just mean you can remember two thoughts at once instead of just one, but it can also be more substantial (the parts of the dream that feel logical, and that you tend to remember), all the way up to lucid dreaming where you're fully lucid.
In particular, you can get through quite a few random, nonsensical ideas without any lucidity at all. Each thought occurs in isolation, and attempts to link them together only occur later when you awake. This is why, for example, you can dream that you're hanging out with Darth Vader but for some reason he's also your mom, like he's both somehow...? You have both thoughts but happen to never examine them together until you're awake and suddenly notice the nonsense.
When some amount of awareness kicks in while still alseep, your brain does its best to "yes, and..." the nonsense. Sometimes that's trivial, sometimes it's so impossible that you realize you're dreaming (until you get distracted by another random thought), and sometimes the idea your sleeping brain constructed is explicable but only by supposing strange and upsetting circumstances that you don't experience in reality
In this case, the explanation is that you dream about having an exam, and then you become lucid enough to try to remember what the test is on, realize that you have no memory of the test being mentioned before (because obviously you don't), and react accordingly.
Or you dream that you're driving, and then you dream that it's Friday evening, and in your brief lucidity you realize that you are clearly not where you should be on Friday evening (because it wasn't Friday until your brain made that up moments ago) and respond accordingly.
Or you dream that you're on stage, and by habit you wonder about your appearance, which is habitually connected with getting dressed in the morning (while naked, obviously). Then you briefly become lucid and have these two thoughts, "I'm on stage" and "I'm naked," and you try to make sense of them. I remember having this dream once and I realized I had no memory of leaving the house naked. Unlike an exam with no class, I couldn't come up with any explanation for the lack of memory, so it ended up triggering a brief lucid dream.
I think the proactive attention loop mentioned in the article is a good explanation for why thoughts like these come up often. They're things you're in the habit of wondering about throughout the day, and when they ping and notice a potential problem you tend to break out of whatever routine you're in and think through the implications. They're also things where the kind of discordance that process will naturally point out to you is something you can process and respond to, because you sometimes really make mistakes like that and have a mental model for response.
This does not match my experience with what kinds of dreams I have.
My standard recurring themes are:
- Awkward/anxiety-provoking social situations and conversations. Often talking to an authority figure, or someone who I really NEED to understand what I'm saying, and feeling frustrated that I can't communicate properly to make them get it (whatever "it" is in the dream).
- Being chased by monsters (much more common as a child, still happens occasionally).
- Fictional scenarios (often scenarios that I know, in-dream, are fictional, though I don't make the leap from there to realizing I'm dreaming) related to media I've been consuming lately.
- Trying to apply domain-inappropriate skills or actions, typically ones I spend a lot of time doing in real life, to some problem, and getting frustrated that it doesn't work/doesn't make sense. E.g., trying to code my way out of a social situation, or trying to solve a work problem by building the right Minecraft thing.
A lot of these feel like the frustration of the sleeping self wondering why the mind or body isn’t working right - that’s how my sleep paralysis dreams feel, and some of the unprepared dreams.
Anecdotal data point: I have had the “unprepared for a class I forgot I was signed up for” for most of my adult life”, roughly once or twice a year. My only other recurring dream STARTED after a traumatic event that split up my family, and the dream is usually (loosely) a failed effort to rejoin the family. Not sure how this fits with your theory but it is a real phenomenon for me.
How frequent, or memorized, does something have to be for it to no longer be prospective memory? I'm asking because there seems to be a spectrum here- on one side, we have the Flying example, which you reject (although, a propsective memory maniac could say it is your prospective memory of walking), while on the other we have the homework assignment, which is unequivocally prospective memory. If prospective memory is truly this wide of a range, then I feel that its frequency in our dreams may be due to its frequency in our life, which just creates a correlation.
Related to "giving speech in your underwear" I have (and also heard other people having it) dreams about being naked. It only happens maybe 4 times in my entire life but it's the only recurring dream I can remember. The contexts are always different, but my reaction was always "well, guess I'm no longer wearing clothes from now on" and keep going.
I have a different theory I haven't seen mentioned yet in the comments. I think that dreams start from very simple templates that are established in childhood. So: the first house I lived in, school, parents, etc. But the initial setup to the scenario is minimal. Maybe it's just a place: you're at school. Then your brain starts winging it and improvising. I'm at school, so what's going on here? Maybe it's the first day!
Some amount of memory is inhibited to allow me to believe I'm somewhere besides my bedroom, but having convinced myself it's the first day of school, next I'm like, okay, so what are my classes? Where do I go? But it consults the real memory for this, not some invented-for-the-scenario scratchpad. My real memory system is like: I don't know anything about this. The same would be true for the "big test today" version: hey, memory, have I studied sufficiently for this test? Answer: what test?
Most people's theories seem to think you start with the anxiety and the brain tries to construct a scenario around the theme, but my theory is that the anxiety arises as an accidental byproduct of conflicts between your real memory and your relatively minimal invented-for-the-scenario memory.
As a side note I am a very non-neurotic person, am not anxious about school, haven't been in school for two decades, and I still have these unprepared-for-school dreams. I don't get super-anxious in them, either, just mildly concerned.
Hmm, that does fit into the whole theory of neural networks being simulators... I like your theory better.
I had a similar thought: the reason we keep dreaming we forgot something important is that our sleeping minds conjure up half-baked scenarios without filling in the details, so we think we must have known the details at some point but forgotten them. I think it's a similar thing with time: I sometimes dream I'm supposed to be somewhere at a certain time, but when I look at a clock it's nonsensical or it disagrees with another clock. Because I'm actually asleep and don't know what time it is. The "I forgot it's almost Shabbat" dreams probably come from a similar place.
Scott referencing theyeshivaworld coffee room (forum) was not on my bingo list.
Yep, I have the "Big test today I forgot to study for", "Enrolled in a class I forgot existed for months and now it’s the end of the year and I’m going to fail it", "Trying to get somewhere but forget to get on or off the train or got the wrong one" nightmares several times a week.
And these were common events throughout my childhood. I was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult, as I am sure were half your audience, and never build up my executive functions to create todo lists and check my calendar regularly, and am constantly inattentive, so get mixed up on public transport far more than any adult should. I am hardly surprised I have these nightmares, but they are extremely annoying as they severely impact my sleep quality, and it is awful to wake up most morning my stress levels through the roof before I even get out of bed.
Scott is being too literal. Many dreams are symbolic. Being naked in public is not literal. It's a symbolic version of being unprepared.
Yesterday I got my pinky bit by a small stray dog. The dog's tooth broke my skin a little but it didn't go through the gardening glove I was wearing and the dog was acting pretty normally other than being scared so I decided that I don't need rabies vaccine. Given that after developing rabies symptoms there is no cure possible and the only outcome is a painful death it was a pretty scary decision to make but I felt ok with my decision.
My subconscious was not happy though with my attempts at logic and I kept repeatedly dreaming that my finger is infected and I kept waking up to check on the small cut of which I was very aware even in my dreams. I barely got any sleep.
It's eerie reading about how similar your dreams are to some of mine. I mean, I know that certain themes seem common, but these somehow seemed more specific than I expected.
I also have recurring dreams where I can't quite fly, but I can jump and glide in ways that are almost flying (I love these dreams, BTW). And I also have dreams about forgetting about a class that I was in until the end of the semester only to worry that I'm going to fail (although those happen less frequently than they once did, maybe because I'm almost 20 years removed from undergraduate college). These resolve themselves once I remember that I already have a degree and a job, so I guess I was just auditing this class, and failing won't be a big deal.
I don't have dreams about being in my underwear, I have dreams about being completely naked. In my dreams, it's not that I forget to get dressed, it's that I start off thinking that being naked is no big deal but then find myself in situations where it is actually a very big deal (like church), and then I need to somehow get dressed or just play it off like it's nothing.
I'm not disabled in my dreams. My legs and feet work like they used to when I was a kid. I can walk and run without my cane. My body doesn't hurt either. In fact I've never once dreamed about being in pain, or my cane or other mobility aids, even though they have been a constant presence in my life for the last 15 years.
I've never had a dream about my teeth falling out, thats odd.
Part of the reason I've gotten into lucid dreaming is that I'm healthy in my dreams, so I try to make the most of them. I already spend so much time in bed I try not to waste it if I can. I also dream a lot about long dead family and pets. Its nice to see them again. I've gotten good enough at lucid dreaming that I know I'm in a dream most of the time, I know its not real. I know they're dead. I don't care.
Downthread someone mentions the effects of drugs and medication on our dreams. I actually quit drinking because it interfered with my dreaming.
My interpretation of "unprepared" or "being out of place" dreams is that they're just a result of us stringing together thoughts more haphazardly than when awake, and then trying to make sense of them. In most dream scenarios that our minds cook up, we just go along with the madness, but if it happens to be a situation that requires preparation, in comes the (true) realization that we have not been preparing. And scenarios that our dreaming minds cook up are often based on our memories, hence the exam scenario being so common. Same with the class you haven't been showing up for: the scenario was just you being in class, then you correctly remember you haven't been attending that class, and you try to make it make sense. And being underdressed: you have a thought "I'm giving a speech", and another thought, "I'm in my underwear", and then you realize there's a conflict and turn it into a story.
This doesn't seem to explain my recurring dream theme of "I have to do the entire university thing (sometimes even the entire school thing) all over again".
Any ideas why, despite "using phones and computers" being at this point perhaps a majority of my waking time, I'm basically never doing either in my dreams? Sometimes I lose my phone or laptop, or they're broken, sometimes I make or receive phone calls? But I'm never looking at social media or email or doing work or YouTube or anything like that. Why?
Text in general is rare in dreams!
Though now I’m wondering how often anyone dreams of watching TV or movies or TikTok.
I've dreamt twice of a colleague who I suspect is not competent for the position she has been promoted to. I'm taking her to a meeting and I'm using back roads because I hate traffic. We can't quite get there but I feel like it will work out and she is getting quietly impatient (but she can't quite say anything because I'm senior to her). I keep saying, "it's fine. We'll get there.....so what if we are late", and I don't care that it is bugging her.
This is a new dream and totally unlike the "wtf, why didn't I go to class because now I am going to fail the test" dreams I've had in the past.
I have a lot of dreams where driving, riding are a metaphor of live and in particular control over it. For example breaks failing in my car, or being in cramped bud taking me somewhere
I was hoping for another section where Carl Jung swoops in to the rescue. None of these theories explain why people have *themes* that recur often in dreams, even if the particulars change. I, for example, seem especially prone to weathering storms on large bodies of water in a small boat. The particulars change--lake, river, ocean, canoe, sailboat, motorboat, lightning, wind, tornado--but always those themes.
It also doesn't explain why certain people seem to show up much more often in dreams than others, and it does not seem to be correlated with how well I know the person. Some friends I see almost every day virtually never show up in my dreams, while a few people I've met only once or twice show up all the time. I think Jung would have a field day with all that.
My most common reoccurring dream by far is trying to get somewhere and not being able to find my way. It’s very confusing and frustrating.
For many years, my worst recurring dream was my cat dying.
I used to wake up and rush to check that she was fine.
I was horrible when she really died.
There’s the one I keep having where I’m in bed with Nicole Kidman but I’ve read enough Freud to know that’s really about being in a long train in the Alps and plunging into a deep mountainside tunnel. Or maybe smoking a big cigar or something.
This may be some interesting data: I have dreams like this, but often some logic center on my brain is still strong enough to counteract the example by shifting the agency to somewhere else.
For example: I haven't been in a play since high school but I still regularly have dreams about having to go on stage and realizing I don't know any of the dialogue. These used to stress me out, but at some point, I started going "wait, I've never forgotten dialogue in my life, if I don't know my lines, its because I wasn't given enough time to prepare for them, probably because I wasn't supposed to be in this play originally, this is all someone else's bureaucratic mix-up."
Similarly, I have a recurring dream where I'm trapped in a giant high school and can't remember which class I have next or how to find the room. But then I go "I got straight A's in high school, which means I should be able to find my next class, I got pretty good grades in college too actually...wait, I graduated college? Why am I in high school right now? Clearly someone has got their wires crossed here."
The end result of this process is always either that I wake up (which could mean that the logical interrupt is a sign of not really being deeply asleep enough), or that I keep dreaming the same dream, but it ceases to produce any form of anxiety.
Flying is really fun so I want to have those dreams. I turn normal dreams into flying dreams any time I’m lucid. So maybe we fly in dreams because what little control we have directs us that way.
My recurring dream is that I'm in a confusing situation and it turns out that what happened is I'm still married to my former wife. I find this to be quite un pleasant
I have a terrible (barely-existent?) prospective memory. The only bad dreams I have are various peculiar situations where I’m being wrestled/restrained; when I wake up, some part of the sheets will be wrapped around me that explains this perfectly.
I’d assume with all of these, the causation is that there’s a sensation (eg. can’t move left leg; fear of forgetting), and then the brain invents a story to justify the sensation. It may not have to be that specific a fear of forgetting, just whatever leaps to mind as something you might forget.
I feel like identities are like big self-constructed narratives. Narratives need sophisticated plots, intricate character motivations, and tension. However, they also need bigger picture themes. When writing stories, there is always a tension between these two extremes: you want to construct the story, write the characters as they would behave, and make the plot entertaining, while also having all of the action connect to whatever theme, set of themes, or broader feeling you want the reader to take out of the story. I feel like being awake makes us calibrate 'too far' in the story-construction direction at expense of the theme-construction direction.
Reminds me of Nietzsche's philosophy about Apollonian and Dionysian aspects of fiction. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollonian_and_Dionysian
To share for fun: my reoccurring dream is that there is an emergency and I have to act, but actually I'm only 14 years old and don't know how to drive and have no agency.
Not sure that fits into prospective brain cells, but there it is.
I don’t subscribe to the “perspective memory “ theory. I’m old, but I still have dreams about terrible situations involving my daughter as a young child (her being lost or hurt, somehow forgotten, etc.) I think they are tied to fear of failing to carry out a responsibility. They are a metaphor, my mind using a powerful example to worry about an existing concern. Likewise forgetting to go to class or to get dressed, I think, is a response to concern about being unprepared.
Maybe it’s because memory is usually impaired in dreams, so we’re dimly aware we’re forgetting something, but seriously mistaken as to what it is that we’re forgetting.
I have a recurring nightmare about changing plans at LAX.
Sometimes, when I’m actually, for real, changing planes at LAX, I’m thinking to myself, “that recurring nightmare is pretty accurate, actually”.
Especially if you’re flying United *s*.
My airport dreams are often about trying to get to a plane that is supposed to go to LAX but for some reason is going to another airport instead (and I’m not even on the plane yet).
The brain actively goes looking for somatic signals in order to make sense of them, it does not just passively receive.
MAYBE it would rather not give up on having a body to get a response from, and goes into a loop not unlike the loop of perspective memory. Looping not as a vrain cell but as a neural oscillation, as a recursive reflection, that goes conscious and dreams.
Sometime my lucid dreams are very nightmareish…
A) the nightmare leads me to realise that the dream isn’t real; or
B) becoming lucid and trying to control the dream sometimes goes really out hand
… but, like most lucid dreamers, I have a really high tolerance for nghtmares.
You get this effect where someone who thinks they might like to try lucid dreaming reads the dream diaries of frequent lucid dreamers, and is like”oh my god, I never want to experience that” and that’s before they get to reading the sleep paralysis ones.
Re. Heart attacks.
Scott probably hasn’t xperincedcthus one, but as someone with Graves’s disease, I have once experienced the thyrotoxicosis -> tachycardia -> hypoxia during sleep to the point where it intrudes into the dream and woke me up.
I used to have dreams where the car I was driving would suddenly start floating and then careen off into space. Then I would wake up.
I assumed the dream was just the product of some kind of latent anxiety related to driving. Then in college I read Kafka’s short story “The Bucket Rider” (https://www.nytimes.com/1974/02/09/archives/the-bucket-rider-a-short-story-by-franz-kafka.html), which seems to describe the same sensation but with a totally different vehicle. Now I wonder if these dreams are related to something more fundamental in the architecture of the mind.
My most memorable dream – though not recurring – happened when there was an event I had to host in a month with about 50 people. In the dream, of course, I showed up to the event completely unprepared, and the audience was actually a stadium of thousands.
Really interesting post. I never realized it, but a lot of my dreams do fit into the general idea of having to do something at a specific time and being unprepared. I've had the ones you describe as well as having to give a musical or dance performance that I haven't practiced enough.
Several of my dreams do not fit into that paradigm though. A very common recurring one is trying to find my way back home, often by train - and very often right before waking up. And another is losing control of a car (breaks don't work properly, or my driving skills suck), although I guess you could argue this is part of the theme of being unprepared (just not tied to a single event like a test or flight).
You forgot the most common dream of all: snakes.
https://cdn.digg.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/04200235/4sZg72nw.png
My mental model of dreams was always the same as something you said in an old post
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/05/book-review-surfing-uncertainty/
The brain is a prediction machine, using its own stored info about the world plus external sensory perception to predict what is happening/will happen. Classic example is turning the raw sensory input from your eyeballs into the stuff you actually think you're seeing (e.g. without a blind spot, without a super obvious (unless you're looking for it) dropoff in acuity away from the center of your vision, etc).
Dreams are the same prediction machine stuff, unconstrained by external sensory input.
Like what you say I think this explains some things but not others. But another point I'd make is that there's (potentially) a difference between what recurring dreams you *have*, and what recurring dreams you *later remember* that you have. Maybe there's an element of selective remembering/forgetting.
My recurring dream is having to go back to retake a class. Don’t know what this reflects other than maybe an adolescent tendency of feeling the need to “just get through it” or something.
I never have the dream about being in a class I forgot I enrolled in, but I have several times had the dream about discovering 2/3 of the way through the term there’s a class I was *teaching* that I had forgotten about.
It does feel thematically similar to the dream I sometimes have about going to the airport but having the wrong luggage, or realizing my flight is in a different airport, and the dream I’ve only had once or twice but others say is common, where one is in the back seat of a car but needs to be steering or driving it.
All of these seem related to me in some way to the fact that while you’re asleep, your agency is somehow farther away. It’s related to sleep paralysis, and the dreams where I’ve wanted to say something to someone but can only barely whisper something (which might actually result in sleep talking - I’m not sure).
The naked dreams and teeth falling out though all seems quite psychologically distinct from this extended family.
I have really weird dreams very often but none of them have ever recurred. Is this common?
Give it a bit of time. You just became old enough to buy your own beer young fella!
I have been recording my dreams since 2016 though and no two entries have been alike. So I think it's *really* unlikely that my dreamscape will change in the near or medium term, even though I probably will.
Thinking of the "dreams as threat assessment/preparedness" model, a weird example of recurring dream for me are invisible threats. These invisible threats are sources of true terror, unlike fear I've encountered in waking life but for maybe some heights (where I experience vertigo and physical unsteadiness on top of extreme aversion). I also deal with anxiety and have had terrible anxiety attacks through my teens and adulthood.
In one example, I was in a house I used to live in, but it was entirely empty and without furniture as I suppose in the dream I hadn't yet moved into this place, and when I walked upstairs and into what was my bedroom I was struck with a sense of pressure in my chest and a debilitating terror, so bad that I first doubled over before I could bring myself to run out of the room. Once out of there the feeling lifted. I believe I talked to my parents about this inexplicable feeling in the room, and eventually went back to try to figure out what was happening. Again, the space itself seemed to bear down on me with sheer terror. I finally returned a third time, this time without the terror, and began asking questions from whatever entity was occupying the room. Eventually, the terror hit again and I understood it wanted me out.
In another example, I was moving with my parents into a single story home I've never seen before, with many rooms stacked high with boxes. Again, one particular room was a source of terror.
In an example from childhood, I was being chased by some invisible monster that I thought of as a crocodile? I ran and hid in the bathroom and locked the door, until the light switch in the bathroom flipped off.
A number of other dreams involving either a space itself seemingly being a source of terror, or a moving invisible entity, in which it's usually something like an opening door or a flipped light switch that triggers the terror for me.
As an adult, I don't have a lot of nightmares (even somewhat scary or disturbing dreams are usually managed fine by me, usually feel more thrilling or weird or cool, and I sleep through them without trouble), but those (and spiders!) have been recurring nightmares. Routinely, it's threatening scenarios in which I can't see the threat that cause me to wake up feeling shaken.
I had dreams about irrationally scary room and after I mentioned this to my therapist we had some pretty pointed conversations about whether I was abused as a child. I thought it quite overblown at the time but reading your accounts I can see how the thought just springs to mind.
Is anyone else confused about the bar graph limits? If the scale is from 1-5, surely it should start at 1 to make any sense?
Scott, what about prophetic dreams and their connection to Jung’s synchronicity as a topic? I’m curious to know how common it is have had one or more prophetic dreams in one’s up to now lifetime. The criteria would be that you have a dream before whatever dreamt happened and then it happened.
I don't think this pattern of recurring dream has been mentioned yet, but my friends and I often go to concerts and have all reported "forgot about concert that you bought expensive tickets for" dreams.
Teeth falling out dreams are universal since everyone had their baby teeth fall out.
Several years into retirement, I was surprised to start having dreams about being employed. It wasn't "oh no, I'm up against a deadline", but more often that I hadn't been to the office in a long time and I really should get around to quitting officially. (Which is weird because at my last job they even threw me a retirement party even though I'd been there only two years.)
More recently it's been that I knew I was still employed but that the understanding had been that they were happy having me on the books in case they ever needed me -- but times change and they were going to have to let me go, which was fine with me.
I'm not sure whether this fits in your theory, but have at it.
>Most people attribute recurring nightmares to “fear”. My friend is “afraid” of violating Shabbat; childhood me was “afraid” of having the assignment due the next day. This seems wrong to me. Childhood me was afraid of monsters in the closet; adult me is afraid of heart attacks, AI, and something happening to my family. But I don’t have nightmares about any of these things, just homework assignments and plane flights.
>So maybe the “unprepared” aspect is more important.
I think maybe when people say "recurring nightmares" they mean, well, the PTSD sort, which clearly have nothing to do with forgetting to do something. I'm not even sure I'd consider your recurring dreams to be "nightmares", just bad dreams.
Given the results we have to date from people's personal and data-light musings on the causes of dreams, I think Rule A here would be: "Reject personal and data-light musings". Rule B would be: "Set up a truly rigorous investigative process that gathers useful amounts of data".
Exhibit 1 here is, of course, Freud's "The Interpretation of Dreams", where Freud argued that dreams express hidden desires. (It helped make him famous, even though he wasn't the first to have the thought.)
"The Interpretation of Dreams" well illustrates just how personal and data-light thinking can go wrong: Freud had to invent a bunch of bunkum ideas, all the way up to penis envy, to justify the initial bad idea that he had fixed on.
There is now some useful neurological and psychological research on how dreams work and what function they perform (see e.g. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3220269/). It is not yet all that impressive.
So people keep on musing about dreams. They seem to be regularly on our minds.
My most recurrent dreams involved my high school crush. Back then she hated me but in my dreams we are friends most of the time. The last involved like some kind of boarding schoo/museum with random people but it switched to me finding out a photo of her in a wedding dress in a sort of FamilySearch like site, despite me not knowing if she is in that sort of relationship.
The second recurrent theme is me coming out as trans, either me confessing, they already knowing or someone slipping. These have involved many people but it tend to be my father who doesn't know.
I have never had any dreams about my teeth until now. This night, after reading this post directly before going to bed, I had a nightmare about a dentist having to remove three of my front teeth.
This is interesting because I never had any anxiety or fears regarding teeth. My dentist is a family friend I've known since earliest childhood and all my memories regarding dental hygiene/going to the dentist are positive.
I dream a lot but nightmares are very rare for me.
My two recurring nightmares (less than once a month) are being in school and unprepared for a test or having a mild car accident.
The school dream usually ends with me complaining about not needind to be there since I have already graduated university. The driving dream is much more annoying. Im trying to park or am in very slow traffic. Then I try to use the brakes, but the car won't stop and hits the car in front of me with glacial pace. There is never any damage to the cars but I'm always forced to discuss insurance information with the other cars owner and the police.
Weirdly, I have the being naked in school variety more often than the being unprepared variety even though I was the type of person to genuinely not study math for an entire semester untill I was hopelessly far behind by the time of the exam. If you asked me to explain why that is before reading this post, I'd have said that being socially ridiculed is a deeper (not necessarily bigger) fear of mine than failing exams. If you asked me how confident I was about this theory though I'd have said not at all.
My top five recurring themes/nightmares, other than the teeth and forgot to go to class all semester one (which I get all the time):
Going into a public restroom to use it and every toilet is clogged, the whole restroom is disgusting, covered and smeared with feces everywhere, used toilet paper everywhere. It's huge and I'm trying to tiptoe through without touching anything, to find one clean stall. Inevitably, I realize I'm barefoot in this filthy disgusting room and revolted at the thought of my bare skin touching the filth.
Chased and attacked by bears. Across the rooftops, up scaffolding, up trees, trying to break down doors and get inside. Most of the time they are trying to kill my dogs who I'm trying to rescue, but sometimes they're chasing me.
Brakes in car don't work and it won't stop accelerating.
Betrayal by friends or lovers, and they don't care when I find out, and ignore and have no reaction to my crying and anguish. I ramp up trying to make them care and they still dont. It turns into a fight where I end up ripping off pieces of their face to try to get them to care, but they still don't care.
I realize I have a baby for some reason, but keep forgetting it exists and leaving it in dangerous placesvor forgetting where it is because I can't remember that I have it.
Please tell me I'm not the only one with these. Especially the filthy bathroom one, I hate that one the most.
You are definitely not the one with the filthy public restroom dream, it’s a recurring staple of mine. I don’t perceive mine as a nightmare though, more like my brain is trying to wake me up so I can go use the restroom.
“For the whole semester, I half-forgot that I was taking a math class, and now I’m finally being forced to confront it, and all the other students are so far ahead of me that I can never catch up”
I have this exact dream often! So weird that we're dreaming the exact same thing. Even weirder because in real life I had an easy time in school and I was never worried about tests or falling behind, but in the dream it's a nightmare for some reason.
I'm skeptical of the 'brain cell loop' part of the theory. It seems much more likely that we have a dormant pathway that is triggered by anything tangentially related that has for a long time not been triggered. So, for example, in college you may have felt anxiety for any number of reasons at which point your brain goes "huh, what's causing this?" And it reaches for the checks that, at that time, most commonly give a reasonable answer. It fires the "did I do my homework" path and the "am I late to something" path and so on until some path comes back and gives a "yes! You should be anxious about that because you forgot XYZ!" At which point the path ends up promoted higher on the list for next time. This is way more efficient than dedicating thinking power to run a CRON type of job regularly in perpetuity.
So - how does this translate into dreams? Well, suppose that you feel anxious in the middle of the night and your brain starts running through the anxiety pathway checks. It checks the ones that are currently top ranked - AI, family, health, etc. For all of those, though, your brain has already been devoting brainpower regularly to thinking about them during the day time. The all have, if not an answer, at least a resolution. As you go farther down the list though eventually your brain hits a long dormant "is my homework due" pathway. Not only do you not have a "cached" answer from daytime thinking but you actually, while asleep, may not have any way to resolve the loop. It hasn't been fired really since the days when it was reasonable to wonder if you have homework due so your subconscious is in a state of A.) checking if homework should be due B.) believing that's a reasonable thing to wonder C.) having no ready answer. So, you dream about it to try to resolve the worry.
I never learned to drive a car, but I often get recurring dreams about being somewhere in the middle of nowhere and needing to drive a car to get home, often in weird road conditions such as crazy inclines. That sounds *very* much like your friend's shabbat dreams, but of course I've never driven a car, never had to be prepared to drive one, never been in the position of seriously considering driving one. I won't quite say it contradicts your theory because there definitely still is an element of "preparedness" there, and a feeling of having missed some important detail and being caught with your pants down, but I doubt my brain ever developed "remember that you can't drive!" circuitry in the same way I definitely have homework assignment circuitry.
No one ever mentions a strange female recurring dream type that I know to be somewhat common (at least 3 people have seen them, does that count as common?). The dream goes like this: you have newborn children, either one or several, and forget to feed them. The children grow smaller and smaller and finally die. You are overwhelmed by shame: what if people find out what you've done? This fits with the remembering brain cell theory - the cell is preparing to remember to feed the child, right?
I had this dream several times some years before actually having kids; learned that a female friend with no kids also had these, and noticed a pregnant lady on social media describing the same. The one on social media was a simple soul and got herself very anxious about what disaster such a dream might predict. After I got the first real newborn, I realized that children are in fact highly effective in reminding us to feed them; those dreams stopped entirely and were replaced by the ones in which I leave a kid behind and cannot find him.
1. Erik Hoel got famous(er) for his dream theory https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/exit-the-supersensorium https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRNb5_m8hh0 TLDR: Dreams keep the brain from over-generalising experiences. Maybe. As always well written.
2. In my dreams it is not teeth, but my meat falling of the bones, in the form of ... peels ... like my leg is wrapped in a thick meat-sheet, 3 times round the bones and then the sheets fall of. A few times per year. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9f/Lady_Gaga_meat_dress.jpg School nightmares became rarer over the years, at over 50 they hardly happen anymore. I sure had this "homework forgotten" dream at school - usu. waking me up at 4 am, which was fine, as I *always* had assignments not done! Nowadays, more often intense travel dreams (I did some long trips in Russia in the nineties).
I write everything I must to do, to don't think about it, and I have like few dreams per year.
I think this is quite a poor thesis.
The weak form is "dreams are informed by existing mechanisms in the brain", which they obviously are, but is not very informative.
The strong form is some attempt to find a SINGLE mechanism from which dreams springs, which seems a weird assumption. Why can't dreams simply draw from all sorts of wellsprings? There are definitely dreams about fears that have been deeply ingrained into us by habit (just today my wife was telling me that she had a nightmare about finding out tons of typos in her book that she spent so long editing). There also are dreams that seem connected to physical sensations, like the flying thing, or dreaming of running water when needing to pee, or sex dreams. There are dreams obviously connected to fairly short term memories, like when you watch a movie that impresses you with some imagery and then remix it in some way in your nightmares.
I'm not sure, basically, why would a search for a common, single origin make sense? There could very well be different types of dreams drawing from different origins.
I wonder if part of what's happening here is that prospective memory actually HAS to be weakly active during sleep, to wake us up at the correct time. We of course have alarm clocks now, but we evolved without them, and if I have an early flight I usually wake up before my alarm, even many hours before my normal wake-up time.
Maybe that prospective-memory/time-to-wake-up-for-my-flight brain function stays more "on" during sleep, compared to other functions, leading it to be disproportionately represented in dreams.
Counter/synthesis: recurring dreams come from corrections we are routinely forced to make against our habitual processes of thought and behaviour.
By “habitual processes” I mean our instincts, intuitions, and sensorimotor conditioning. Instincts, by definition, are inborn (or at least strongly pre-determined whenever they emerge in development); intuitions are formed in early development and very difficult to change; sensorimotor conditioning is stubborn but still highly adaptable. Overall there’s a set of processes in our brains that, once formed, have powerful sway over our minds by way of cognitive inertia.
Language and reasoning emerge later in development. Language and reasoning can dictate our behaviour through in-the-moment interventions, but with considerable lag time; and, when their input is not available, such as when making a split-second decision, we quickly revert to habit.
Example: even when I know the power is out in my apartment, I keep trying the light switch when I enter a new room. This tendency persists even if the blackout lasts for days.
There are some things about life that, no matter how well we might grasp them intellectually, we struggle to grasp them intuitively. Some subset of these struggles are strongly linked to things we do care about, like social approval and comfort. To close this gap, we are forced to build a habit of consistently making conscious interventions into our own habitual behaviour.
Making time to do boring work is the ur-example. Most of us hate to do it. Most of us underwent terrible stress at least once during our schooling years because we failed to do it. We learned this intervention the hard way. When we have dreams about missing homework or a surprise test, it’s because we’re rehearsing the particular thing we have learned to correct against—in this case, the consequences of being unprepared—and it takes the shape of school experiences because that’s the context that anchors the habit’s significance emotionally. I speculate that in dreaming, the emotional anchor is there, but the logical–verbal corrective is not, so the mind conjures the anxiety-provoking scenario. In my own experience, the bad feeling goes away exactly when I wake up enough to form a verbal thought like “Thank goodness I don’t actually have to deal with that.”
This explains dreams about being unprepared at school. It also explains dreams about being naked in school. In that case, the correction is against the consequences of not thinking about how you appear to other people. We aren’t born with the knowledge that our naked bodies have to be hidden. We have to learn it. As children, our naked bodies are unremarkable to us; we only learn their remarkableness from the reactions of others. My guess is that, the more prone a person is to dreams of being naked in the classroom, the more likely it is that “present yourself appropriately in public” was a lesson learned late in development, or accompanied by distress, or just left that person with a lingering sense that they didn’t quite “get it”.
Here’s my recurring dream. I dream I kill someone. The person is different each time, the means, motive, and opportunity all change. Sometimes the killing is based on a sense of injustice, sometimes it’s cold-blooded self-defense, sometimes accidental. What’s consistent is what follows: the fear of being caught, the anxious anticipation of punishment, the sorrow and regret. An interesting variation I’ll include is that in one case I didn’t kill anyone, but my family had been detained while traveling through North Korea in an arrest I’d somehow avoided. They were set to be executed. The feelings were the same: guilt, sorrow, and an awesome sense of irreversibility.
I think the irreversibility is the main thing here. As a kid I tended to daydream and act impulsively. I lost my mother’s pendant by spinning it too fast until the chain broke; I wasn’t punished but I felt the guilt. Another time I was threatened with a spanking for being too rowdy at a restaurant. My dad promised the punishment as we got into the car to drive home; I was terrified, crying and pleading the whole way. He did spank me. Another time, without quite knowing why, I scraped the paint on the roof of my father’s truck to “punish” him. He found about this and threatened to withhold from me the crystal rock candy experiment I was making. He didn’t do it. I guess the through-line here is that punishment was a constant threat, unpredictable but swift and harsh when it did arrive. And the emotional consequences were worse: being left to feel that things would never be the same because of something I did.
I think the correction I learned (mis-learned) was not to express or act on my rage, and not to “act” physically in general. Stay thinking about and interacting with systems; avoid the irreversible consequences of interacting with people.
"Enrolled in a class I forgot existed for months and now it’s the end of the year and I’m going to fail it" - thank you, now I feel less weird for having that repeatedly (even though having it twenty years after leaving university behind me is still weird).
I think the picture for this post is a bit much, I would rather not have seen it. In general I think the recent AI generated header pics are a bit icky, but if you're gonna post AI generated nightmare fuel now I would really ask you to reconsider.
I used to dream of contact lenses, the last thing id do every night ìs remove them, and first thing in the morning is put them in. Then I had laser eye surgery and stopped dreaming of that.
The thing underwear/naked thing is easily explained by theory that you are semi conscious enough to notice that you are not fully clothed while asleep, and it gets pasted into whatever anxiety dream you are akr sdy having.
Random datapoint: I have dreams (or nightmares, really) about unfriendly AI relatively frequently. Here's a recent one I wrote down that featured a friend of mine who works at OAI (name changed for privacy):
"It was happening on Mars. I could see your ship approaching before me, and I was following. When I arrived, I was shocked by the scale and grandeur. Past the airlock were high vaulted ceilings, merely the foyer of a vast space. "When prisoners are released," I thought (for there were prisons, here), "they'll be emerging to an almost unrecognizable place."
Incongruously, I spotted 2x4s in the construction. "Still, just to ship 2x4s here is itself an amazing feat." Then, in a nearby hall, I saw that they weren't truly wood, and were being produced in situ, on matter replicators. Workers took away some finished beams to be installed. "Matter replicators are real?!" I had the wild urge to take my phone out and take a picture of them, but there was the sense this would be looked on unkindly.
Nearby, an artist sculpted a 3D model hanging in the air before him - it looked like a prosthetic arm, perhaps. His work was still valued - he spoke of the delicacy and complexity of his craft.
Beyond lay the Room of the Prodigies, where Its presense was closest. In the sanctum, space seemed warped - distances weren't quite right, and movement was as gliding thought. Acolytes flitted about, carrying out Its will. The air was charged, and vague wonders turned at the edges of vision. In here, anything was possible. A deep amphitheatre held the full congregation, and an electric humming (or was it chanting?) filled the space. It was very close. I left.
Something changed. Darkness descended. No one remained, yet malice leaked from the walls. I ran towards the amphitheatre. On the ground, a dark shape. "Alex? Alex!" I bent, and in the one-third Martian gravity, easily picked you up. "I'm alive... almost," you whispered.
I looked around, and saw an emergency exit.
"Okay Alex, do you want to take the long way, or the short way?" I asked, but you were unconscious. So I pushed the exit open, and emerged into the cool night air. Then I woke up."
> Giving a speech in your underwear
Isn't that the psychology textbook example of an anxiety symptom, which can be cured with some combination of therapy and self-confidence?
Exposure therapy. Start giving speeches with gradually less and less clothing. When you get comfortable giving speeches in your underwear, the dreams will no longer feel scary.
I've generally assumed that dreams (good or bad) are mostly going to be about things you've been thinking about recently, as your brain finds it easier to go there. Like you, I had a lot of nightmares about being chased by monsters, or being in a monster-attracting situation (like being outside at night on your own) a lot as a prepubescent. Because little kids are scared of the dark, and genuinely fear monsters might get them even when they're awake.
Once I got into my teens (again like you), the nightmares gave way to stress dreams about missed deadlines, forgetting I had an exam that day, and after a few more years, guilt dreams in which you've done something terrible and can't undo it. Because adults spend a lot of time worrying about screwing up day-to-day life, and at least sometimes worry that they've done the wrong thing.
Of course, these dreams can be symbolic, but in a really, like, blatant way. So if you've been worrying for a while about having to do a presentation at work, and then you have that dream where you're in a play but nobody's told you your lines, I think the connection is pretty obvious.
This theory would actually explain a series of dreams I had a couple years ago.
I had a dream that I'd forgotten to feed my bunny, and she was really really hungry because it had been a long time. When I woke up I remembered she had died 10 years earlier and that's why I no longer feed her every day. Then about two months later I had the same dream again, except she'd been fed recently so she was doing better. Then maybe a month later I dreamed about her again, but she mostly just wanted treats since she was being properly cared for again. After that the dreams stopped.
I suppose ghosts would also explain it, but I prefer the prospective memory one.
Most other dreams I have seem to be related to sensing things in my sleep or to experiences I had recently. For instance, I tend to have dreams about flying if I play with Minecraft creative mode a lot, and the night after I went skiing I had dreams about going down snowy hills really fast. This only happens for new things, not things I do every day.
What happened to the "Dreams help process the day's emotional experiences" theory? In 1987, the Max Planck Institute carried out a series of experiments where people that were to sleep in the lab viewed emotionally neutral or emotionally negative movies. Later that night they were waked during their REM stage and reported the overall emotional tone of any dreams they were having. Those that had seen the negative movie reported more anxious content than those that had seen the neutral movie. Many of them reported images taken from the movie.
Seems to me that dreams about being late to something or being embarrassed in public have more to do with self-image than anything else. Something recent may have triggered your self doubts and anxieties, and the most common life experience one has with that emotional tone is letting other people down. Somehow, the brain is processing the emotional content.
FWIW, I think a lot of these dreams boil down to insecurity, subconscious or otherwise. The only recurring dream I remember having, at varying fairly long intervals, was that I owned a second property but couldn't remember where! That started when I did own and rent out a second apartment, which was a source of occasional insecurity when awake (would the tenant keep paying the rent, and not trash the place, etc), but continued for quite a while after I had sold it. Most of my dreams are vaguely reminiscent of events, or films watched on TV, the previous day, although the associations aren't always obvious.
I still maintain that dreams generally first evolved in early amphibians as a crude "record and playback" mental facility to help them find their way back to water although, like quite a few adaptions, they may have been repurposed since. Aren't dreams by far the most vivid if the sleeper is thirsty, perhaps after drinking a skin full the previous evening?
I once worked with a guy who claimed never to have had a dream, or none that he remembered. That was amazing, although nothing in his character seemed out of the ordinary except that he drove cars like a thing possessed! (One of his hobbies was race track driving, although he treated public highways like one big race track as well and has probably been killed by now in a massive prang!)
One tentative hypothesis I have about dreams and their vividness is that the less deep your sleep the more vivid it is; and the less deep and the more intermittent your sleep, the more vivid and varied your dream. Lastly, the less deep, the more intermittent your sleep the more likely you're to recall your dreams. I suspect that serial and vivid dreamers are also shallow and sensitive sleepers. People who tend to sleep deeply quickly, and with total abandon and ease are less likely to remember their dreams if they dreamed at all.
For me, I think most of the fear/anxiety dreams have to do with sleep paralysis. When I’m deep in a dream, I’m probably experiencing something mentally but I never remember this part. But then my sleep gets a little bit lighter and at some point l try to do or say something in my dream, and because my body is paralyzed I can’t actually do the thing, and this manifests as anxiety, fear, feelings of worthlessness and incompetence, and shame. And yeah, the anxiety is often that “I’m late” to do the thing. But it’s literally just sleep paralysis, eventually I can wrench myself awake and move/speak! It sucks that this happens to me often, between most every sleep cycle, though.
Do others’ dreams manifest this way? I feel like probably, even though we may describe it differently.
I think giving a speech in your underwear could fit the prospective memory task theory without too much of a stretch. When giving a speech, there’s a bunch that has to be done simultaneously (being expressive, not saying um, etc.), but a lot of it is really specific to the individual speech.
Maybe a common or more generic brain loop left behind could be “Remember what you rehearsed for your presentation, don’t forget anything important.” Clothes are very important and generalize to even a low stakes presentation. This might cause someone to check for it when having a presentation dream (and proceed to realize they’re missing them), even though very few are at risk for forgetting their clothes in real life.
My repeated dreams are not always about being prepared to something. Some of them about my desires. For example, visiting a Japanese book store was a recurring theme in my dreams until I went to Korea, actually visited a book store and bought some books. Although, other recurring themes are playing an endless tag in an urban parkour, infinite stairs in an apartment, having trouble in elevators, having a fight with a stranger in a pitch-dark room (primitive survival related stuff). Also, some dreams have a sequel. Same setting but different related events. They are at max three episodes though.
One repeated theme in my dreams is that guns don't work right. I regularly get involved in firefights, but when I shoot someone, I have to explain to them (childhood game style) that "I shot you, so you need to be dead" before anything happens.
I also have dreams that alternate between being in a game/novel/movie and playing/reading/watching it. Sometimes with the knowledge that I'm inside the fiction with attendant attempts to speed run or sequence break out of boredom. Often it's the second or third time through the story.
Specifically for the "forgot about a test or a course" dreams, for me, it feels a little different - more related to the way dream logic works. Basically, I have a normal dream, which at some point is about me attending a course.
Brain: You are now studying!
Me: This does not seem like my calculus class. What am I studying?
Brain: Ummm... biology!
Me: Odd, I don't recall enrolling in a biology course.
Brain: Oh no, I guess you must have forgotten all about it up until now!
Me: Oh no!
So. I just had a theory about the cause of the “doing stuff in your underwear” dreams.
Most people I know sleep in their underwear. What I think is actually happening is that sometimes the body is correctly noticing that it is only wearing undies, and it’s passing along that sensation to your dream self.
The implication of this is that people who sleep in proper pajamas will have the underwear dream less often.
Most women I know sleep in nightgowns, so we can test this by using gender as a proxy for pyjama sleeping and asking men and women how often they have the underwear dream and seeing if there is a male bias.
My recurring dream theme is running away from something, not terribly scary but somewhat, and not being able to run fast enough because my feet don't gain traction on the ground, like I'm half levitating in low gravity. This has to be common. I wonder what the source is.
I have the "I forgot about this class" anxiety dream, but when I have a high fever I have a more exotic version. I am responsible for keeping the world held together. Unlike Archangel Uriel, I am not using celestial kabbalah. I am using something more like legos. But like the Archangel's its a dynamic task that requires counterbalancing evolving forces. At some point I realize there was some part of the problem I was completely neglecting, its too late to fix, the world is ending, sorry. I wish I could say I did my best, but really I know I was just being lazy. That's actually an important part of it. I remember choosing to put something off.
Of the two options, I think this lends itself more to the sensory input model. With a high fever it makes sense that I am getting different, possibly more intense inputs. As the task I am doing is not rooted in any actual experience, it doesnt seem like I could have a left over prospective memory cell looping on this, but perhaps the fever corrupts its intended job.
I'm blaming this post for having dreamt last night that my teeth fell out - which I have never dreamt before (that I can recall) in my 51 years of life.
I get a few different recurring dream themes, including some of the classics, but the most unusual are probably the dreams where I'm trying to find my way around a large, indoor complex of some kind. Sometimes the setting is relatively realistic, like a school, or a performing arts center, or a hotel and conference center; other times it's more fantastical, like a space station, or an arcology, or an ewok-style treetop village. Either way, the space is always unfamiliar, complicated in three dimensions, contains a variety of large, open spaces and narrow passageways. These dreams aren't nightmares, but they typically involve some mild anxiety about trying to find my way from one part of the structure to another.
I used to have 'teeth falling out' dreams but that was when I was young and didn't have very good dental habits. I've also had the 'missing almost a whole semester of a math class' dreams more recently - I'm Gen X and long out of school - so I'd love to know more about those types of dreams. Lastly, I remember many dreams and had THE BEST lucid dream last night which included flying, but then I met a woman (with Blue Eye sockets, the whole eye and surrounding area, not iris) who told me that if I flew too long, I'd let the evil in. There were clouds and sun but a dark area, with some red in it, kept trying to come through. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
I've always had unusual dreams
My dreams are like movies, but I don't really watch movies or daydream. I can't think of where my subconscious is getting these ideas from.
I've had dreams where I:
Was a sci-fi hero in a sci-fi city slum.
Lived in a haunted town with human-like monsters.
Attended an all girls Catholic boarding school where I discovered the priest's dark secret.
Was a princess who took the throne by force with the help of a ghost.
Does anyone see a pattern?
I suspect that some themes happen because of your theory while others are a natural consequence of the weird dream state.
For instance, there doesn't seem to be a strong coherence pressure in dreams so you probably just sometimes dream yourself into a situation and also dream that you are naked (perhaps especially if you sleep naked and partly wake up). That then gets noticed.
This agrees w/ my experience where the naked dreams usually involve me suddenly realizing I'm naked partway through and I suggest taking that at face value.
I figured dreams were just what we think about the most during the day. So recurring dreams are due to thinking about the dream during the day which causes you to have the dream more which causes you to think about it more, etc.
After about 8 years of smoking weed daily, I quit due to the associated anxiety modulation upregulating anxiety more than I could handle. The first two weeks entailed extreme stress while trying to sleep, and then conspicuously high confidence days akin to a rubber banding effect. Those weren't like dreams, but like sleep-thinking that I couldn't stop. After the first few weeks, I then had a repeat of a dream I had once as a teenager, but with considerable cinematic updates and a new scene at the end. It was an airbnb type situation where the host exited their room in the night with a knife and attacked me. The added scene revealed the character I was in the dream as having been complicit in horror dream simulations as a thing the host and they did for entertainment. There were other dreams that fit that same pattern: dream I had once decades ago, new added scenes, more obviously relevant to coherent AI and simulations problems with a component that felt like I had something important to learn from them, awful to experience in the moment but which I wouldn't have chosen to not have after the fact due to the utility of the awareness. There were no temporolocal repeats, each rehashed sometime from long ago with symbolism updated to be about things I reason about (previously via anxiety induced by weed).
Some of these dreams had content I won't relate due to preferences you've expressed, but one had a curious quality: not a repeat of another. I was in some small village in Maine in the winter, looking around at the neighbor's houses looking for anything that needed doing, like shoveling or anything like that. A friendly police officer who knew who I was showed up, having been called by a concerned resident that didn't. He asked some obvious questions and there was no associated stress, essentially a possible scene from real life. It was by far the least cinematic, and had only the one 'scene'. There was also one that wasn't a repeat, but was based on a very unpleasant thought experiment from Jessica Taylor.
My recurring dreams
Teeth Falling Out - I agree this could be related to a sensation experienced in the mouth during sleep. In these dreams I bring my hands inside my mouth and the slightest touch of my teeth makes them come away in my hands. During the dream, which recurs very often, I have no doubt that my teeth have been permanently removed from my mouth and I feel shame about how my mouth must look to others, even though it's usually just the molars I lose.
Need to Pee - in these dreams I usually find a bathroom and pee an enormous amount compared to real life. Thank heavens nothing happens outside the dream.
Topless in Public - recurs so much that even in the dream, I'm like "not again". I guess it's about being afraid of being humiliated, but in real life I never have to confront any similar situations.
Enrolled in a class I forgot existed for months and now it’s the end of the year and I’m going to fail it - this is the most stressful of them all, because I can't remember which class it was or where I can the classwork to catch up. I started having this dream at the end of my law degree when we had to enrol in a bunch of online subjects that I left till near the end of term to complete.
Tidal Waves - these dreams have been happening for over 20 years. They take place in difference locations, but always involve an enormous tide that smashes into the windows of the house I'm inside, or over a high sea wall I'm behind. These dreams usually wake me up as I am experiencing so much fear.