March 12, 2008
Recurring Dreams
There was a bit on NPR the other day about recurring dreams. What are yours?
comments
27 Responses to “Recurring Dreams”
Leave a Reply
There was a bit on NPR the other day about recurring dreams. What are yours?
27 Responses to “Recurring Dreams”
Leave a Reply
I occasionally have dreams in which, as I’m dreaming, I realize that I’ve dreamed the dream before; but I’m never sure if those are really recurring dreams, or if I’m just dreaming that I’m having a recurring dream.
Aside from that, I have some dreams that are very similar—constituting genres, I suppose. The most notable of these is the Packing Dream, whose basic gist is that I am supposed to be catching a plane in, like, half an hour, but I haven’t packed yet. Most recently, I was supposed to be going to China, and not only had I not packed yet, but I was in a car, stuck in traffic.
Travel stresses the hell out of me, obviously.
India’s Packing Dream sounds like a subgenre of the I’m Not Ready! genre (closely related to the Caught with My Pants Down genre). Every now again I dream the variant in which I have to take an exam for a course I’ve forgotten to attend, but in a more frequently recurring dream I walk onstage and into a performance for which I have not rehearsed nor learned my lines.
Tornados, usually not scary, in various forms.
Fire-ball airliner crash. I’m always in the first row, coach and it always ends the same way – with a cataclysmic impact that wakes me.
There are often different folks on the plane with me but they never manage to change the dream.
I have this one for several nights in a row and then it goes away for a few months.
I was having some a few years ago that I always had two or three classes I needed to graduate college and I always forgot where they were or ended up missing them.
There is nothing but darkness and a climbing white noise. The noise gets louder and the treble dampens. Then all the mass in the universe crushes me. I wake up scared as a emmer-effer.
I have a lot of dreams in which I’m driving… and they often have me arriving at (or departing from) apartments/houses, some of which seem familiar (my childhood home, or a college apartment) and some of which don’t, but usually they have in them some either a combination of family members, or else old college friends. As well as, occasionally, strangers.
Sometimes these apartments are bars/clubs, and they remind me a particular haunt of mine back in Champaign in the ’90s…..
But the recurring theme is driving, and leaving/arriving at this domestic-type space….
The only recurring dream I recall is essentially the same as Deron’s. I need to get to class, but I can never find it and always show up 5 minutes before the end, only to realize I don’t have any of the assigned work from the previous class.
Fuck, it stresses me out just thinking about it, and I’m not even in school anymore.
The most common recurring dream I have is the one that woke me in the middle of the night, seemed so profound, but which then I had completely forgotten by morning. So I have a recurring experince of having lost something profound.
Kinda makes me sad.
houses; big old houses that expand esoterically and sprout hidden rooms, and i have to add [sorry Cindy] that there is always a dead squirrel hanging at the front door which comes from discovering an abandoned house in the New Forest beside a lake[though in retrospect it was probably a pond] enclosed by the forest that had a dead squirrel hanging in the doorway which confirmed to us kid explorers that the house was haunted and was ominous enough to hold permanence in my subconscious
Oh, I just recalled the worst of my recurring dreams. It features an encounter with a pathetically weak, emaciated, dying animal — a pet that I realize I have neglected for weeks or months. Sometimes the animal takes the form of an actual pet I owned in waking life; sometimes it is simply a creature assigned the dream-role of my pet.
Just the other day, in a different context, Jon observed, “For one of the ‘good’ people I know, you sure have a guilty conscience.”
It’s usually remembering a class I forgot to attend that I need in order to graduate college, or my flight to Europe is leaving in an hour and I’m not even dressed or packed.
Oh, yeah—Sheila reminded me. Every now and then I have a murder dream (again, more of a genre than a recurrer). For example, I had to beat a man to death, right in front of Russ & Daughters on Houston Street, in the middle of the day, using a big hunk of metal on the end of a chain. I don’t know why. And I had to kill a cat once. And gigantic bugs—like, a cockroach the size of my entire sink—and rats. It always takes a long time; my victims don’t just fall down, the way they do in movies. Murder dreams are pretty upsetting, but fortunately I don’t have them very often.
Less upsetting, oddly, are the dreams in which I’m the one who gets killed—I get shot, I fall off a cliff, etc. But dying in my dreams is never painful, just anticlimactic, so I don’t really mind.
I should also mention, while we’re talking about dreams, that in something of a “fuck you” to my thoroughgoing disbelief in the supernatural, on the morning of September 11, 2001, I woke up from a bad dream around 6 am (that’s insanely early for me; maybe not for everybody) and couldn’t get back to sleep. The dream was that I was in a big office building, and it was on fire, and the friend who was with me said, “Let’s get the hell out of here,” so we did. When I awoke, I got up and paced around the house for a while to clear the dream out of my head. Then I started to feel ill—food poisoning, I assumed, from the Indian place where I’d had dinner the night before—and I kept pacing. As soon as the office was open, I left a message calling in sick. At that time, like Michael Notgrant Smith, I was walking to work every day, so normally I would have been just reaching the pedestrian deck of the Brooklyn Bridge when the first plane hit. This is the view now.
Wow, India, I hardly know where to begin with my praise of this. It’s wonderfully told.
Thank you for Michael Notgrant Smith. That’s exactly what I’ve been looking for.
Whoa, India. No more child-soldier dreams, I pray. Oh, and I echo Cindy in admiring your telling as much as I am sobered by these tales.
Sorry; didn’t mean to get all heavy and shit. But remember—I’m the person who finds sirens comforting.
I don’t find sirens comforting but I find the lack of sirens disconcerting.
I’m suspicious of quiet.
All heavy and shit is not out of place, India. Not here. (But I do hope that your murder dreams just go away all of a sudden.)
Oh, don’t worry, Sheila. I don’t think I’ve had any murder dreams for about a year—only murder daydreams.
That’s the kind Daryl has.
I have the same dreams the others have mentioned, where I’m kicking back thinking ‘thank God I graduated… HOLY SHIT!!!! I never took that required marketing class, so I MUST NOT have really graduated!’ and then shear panic sets in. Then I wake up and giggle and think “phew, that was a close one.”
Also, dreams of multiple, very wide tornados.
And… very unpleasant are the dreams where my teeth are crumbling out of my mouth and there is nothing I can do to stop it.
I think I have some control issues.
oops, *sheer* panic.
I didn’t dream the night before 9/11 but that’s because I slept, oh, an hour or so. No sleep is not unusual for me but on 9/10 I stayed up watching and fretting over homemade videos of Jihadi attacks in Chechnya. I remember falling asleep thinking “Those guys are serious and eventually they’ll get as pissed at the US as they are at Russia.”
Oddly, nothing directly 9/11 that I saw that day has shown up in my dreams. However, several peripheral, rather personal, events from that day show up again and again when I do sleep enough to dream. For example, my neighbor Laura who worked at the WFC and made it back home that afternoon covered in white dust sometimes wanders through my dreams. She’s in white face but she acts like everything is normal. Also, oddly, a very dense crowd I was in at the 2nd Ave. subway stop sometimes shows up. I’ll be in a crowd in my dream and suddenly the crowd becomes exactly that subway crowd and the four friends in the crowd who were waving at me are there waving at me and one of them says, as they said on 9/11, “You are just a blue collar guy getting to work and you don’t need this crowd, you need lunch and a walk home.” That was confusing on 9/11 and it still seems an odd thing to say. I think my friend was just addled.
The worst bit of recurring dream 9/11 business, however, is a fight that I saw in Tompkins Sq. Park around noon. Two tall homeless junkies were circling each other in the middle of a circle of homeless guys from the park. Two cops were standing off to the side, watching but not doing anything. The crowd was silent so all I heard was “Thwack! Splat! Crunch!” as the two guys in the middle punched each other in the face. You know those slow motion scenes in Raging Bull? These guys were moving at that speed, weirdly dream-like for real life, but when their fists connected you could hear crunching flesh and bone and large splurts of blood were flying about. Both guys were covered in blood and there were pools of blood on the concrete. I remember thinking “Fight Club. One man will die.” I also remember thinking “Oh, Jesus, I need to get inside.” I stood frozen for five minutes or so until one of the guys went down on his knees, with blood pouring out of his mouth and ears, and the other guy started doing those slow motion punches to the side of his head. I kinda came to then and thought “I do not need to see someone die.” and I walked off. That fight shows up in my dreams. Bodies falling, the plume of smoke, the collapse, the TV coverage, the guy dressed as Uncle Sam wandering downtown, and the gentle Thuwnk that woke me up that morning are all absent from my dreams.
(Deron, don’t post this to the main page, please.)
great comment, sc.
For real, dude.
Honestly, I’m breathless.
Ah, the scent of Pinky! I must be dreaming.