I have the pet one constantly. Usually it’s hamsters or gerbils, sometimes guinea pigs, birds, or fish. But somehow they’re still alive in some cage I’ve never seen before.
The other one, labyrinthine, generic rooms? Especially tiled, maybe with toilets or showers? Those are the Backrooms. You can look it up, it’s a whole thing. I’ve been having those dreams all my life and it kind of blew my mind that the internet turned it into something… more. They’re similar to “liminal spaces” but those can be real places that are simply empty.
Can’t find the lecture room and forgot my notes anyway. Need a washroom and can’t find one (then I usually wake up and really do need to pee!) I’m 76, long since retired from college teaching, and I still get these dreams. It’s funny, in 30 years of teaching I never actually missed a class, not even once!
The weird thing is (even after defending my dissertation 25 years ago) I have no nightmares about that. The traditional “you forgot you were enrolled in this course and today’s the final” nightmares, at least once a month.
All three here also… but those are much less nightmarish than one that digs into my thalassophobia. In that nightmare (three or four times a year), I’m about to enter the ocean and from a great height (attempting, but failing, to fly above it), and, as I hit the ocean, the terror I experience instantly awakens me… not the impact, but being in the deep water.
It was never exams that popped into my dreams. For a good decade after I graduated high school I had dreams about forgetting my locker combination. Then my anxiety dreams became about being helpless against zombies, resulting in my screaming at them incoherently and screaming myself awake – much to my partner’s disturbance.
Now that I work at a school, I’m curious if my stress will manifest in some new way in my dreams.
Anyone else ever have ED-209 chasing them through the woods? I had that one very regularly as a Michigan youngster (but not from Detroit) after watching Robocop.
The variation on this is that, decades later, I have to go back and finish a class that I was supposed to have completed in high school. My college degree & subsequent career are invalid until I finish this requirement. Whether it’s this dream, or the class I forgot to sign up for, the common theme is that…
&/or I am sitting on a commode with no walls/stall, out in public
Variation: the terlet is completely unusable (mounted 4 feet high, or sitting askew, or the plumbing’s broken etc.)
Another recurring dream is that I’ve resumed smoking cigarettes (& in the dream, I’m thinking “oh I guess I finally did, after dreaming about it so often”). I don’t have that one as often as I used to, but still do occasionally, even though it has been [checks watch] 29 years since I quit smoking.
No, but that may be because I actually once passed a final exam I didn’t study for. Way back in my undergrad days, I misread the finals schedule, and thought my history final was the next day. I was about to start studying for it when I decided to check the schedule again and discovered the test had actually begun about 30 minutes earlier. I rushed across campus to the class, apologized profusely to the professor who kindly allowed me to take the final in another room and gave me the full time. I hadn’t studied at all. I passed. So maybe that actual experience has given me immunity to that dream.
About once a year or so, I’ll have a dream where I get drunk (I got sober years ago). They are horrible, horrible dreams, but the relief I feel on waking up and realizing I didn’t just relapse is massive.
I get dreams about thieves, they pick my pockets and I catch them in the act or soon after. I confront them get my stuff back and then my dream continues in another direction.
Interesting aside at the end of this post about waking up and how the common recommendation to get up until you’re sleepy again may not work for everyone. It certainly doesn’t work for me. Instead the best thing I find is to essentially pretend I’m still asleep (relaxed, in a normal sleep position, eyes closed) while concentrating on my breath in a semi-meditative state.
I guess I’m weird then, because I’ve never had this dream, mind you, I never found exams particularly stressful.
Same here, sort of. I’d finished revising for a thermodynamics (I think) exam late at night, and before I went to bed I checked my bag was already packed, and double-checked that the exam started at 9am the next day.
Except it didn’t. The subject I’d been studying for was a week away, and it was a completely different subject tomorrow.
At this point I did get a bit stressed, but decided to just go to bed anyway, then get up early and do some cramming the next morning, which is what I did. Helpfully, it was a subject I was better at.
I passed the exam (just about), and the extra revision probably helped me with the thermodynamics exam the next week.
I had a variation where I went back to college, but as I am now, which includes a doctorate in my field, so I was basically tied with the professor for “most qualified person in the room”.
Instead of being anxious about the academics, it was all about how unpleasant I find it to be regarded as an authority, plus some flirting from the professor, which is awkward and gross in that context, even if I was otherwise a peer.
My recurring unpleasant dream is being back in the Army, or another job I left, with a “too old for this shit” mentality. Sometimes it’s tied to job insecurity, I guess, having to go back to a position I don’t want to return to.
