In my case, there's some real-life precedent for it. I enrolled in one course in undergrad, and dropped it right away my first week or so for some reason I don't recall. Toward the end of the semester, before finals, I found I was still enrolled, but had never set foot in the classroom or anything.
I was sort of panicked, but went and talked to the professor, and he was fine with it. He basically verified that I never did anything with the class and it was somehow deleted from my record completely.
I still don't know why it wasn't dropped in the first week, although this was before electronic registration systems.
They underlying theme is probably low self-confidence.
There are definitely other themes but these are the most common.
1. I forget to take my mask when I leave my apartment. Apparently the door man doesn't notice.
2. When I try to go back to my apartment to retrieve my mask, the door man doesn't let me in, because you need a mask to enter.
3. I'm not allowed to enter any stores to buy a mask, because you need a mask to enter.
So I'm trapped outside in this catch-22.
Also rare, but in a similar vein, sometimes I wake up into a dream, over and over again. I'll be in bed, relieved I'm finally awake, until I soon realize I'm still asleep and wake up again. When this repeats enough times, it becomes pretty desperate.
Otherwise, I rarely have anxiety-inducing dreams.
Your fear of snakes is likely older than humanity itself, so even if you can have rational control of yourself around a snake in real life they could terrorize your dreams. Snakes used to be a real and present danger in our environment for millions of years of our evolution. They are the unknown environment, the cunning adversary, the unforeseen consequence of carelessness.
In a similar way, you might find that you can manage to present yourself in social situations, there is a very human fear of being found out, cast out, laughed at, and/or rejected socially, since we are social creatures. Even nudists have dreams of finding themselves naked in front of their peers. If you spend your day putting on a facade of some sort, which you probably do if you have a job, then somewhere there is a part of you that you don’t want others to see, and in your dream they all see it big time and you have to deal with it.
I remember having the "naked in public" dream in the past. I've also had a fair amount of body shame for most of my life.
But after getting in better shape and spending time on nude beaches and in the occasional (mixed gender) nude sauna in the last few years, my body shame pretty much disappeared. I now feel almost no self-consciousness from being naked.
I can't recall having a single "naked in public" dream since getting more comfortable with my body.
I guess it's a form of de-conditioning. We've been trained to expect this extremely negative response from others when we take our clothes off. Doing it over and over and receiving no negative response whatsoever seems to eventually alter the expectation.
Example: “waking” up on the last day of a semester, only to discover that I am enrolled in a required class that I never actually attended...woops.
These always involve either bathrooms from my past (such as at schools I once attended or at places I once worked) or bathrooms in places that as far as I can tell are dream places.
I don't recall these dreams ever involving a real bathroom that I currently had or recently had access to.
When I wake up and remember one of these broken bathroom dreams, I inevitably am in fact in need of an urgent trip to the bathroom, so I suspect that the dream is my sleeping mind's way of telling me I need to wake up and go.
When the dream bathrooms are real bathrooms from my past, such as at a school, they are usually exaggerated. If the real bathroom had 3 stalls the dream version might be much bigger with several dozen stalls with the real 3 merely the 3 closest the door.
I'm barefoot and the floor of the public bathroom is too disgusting to walk onto is a common one I get.
And then, yes, I awake to discover I need to go.
Another I've had is being at the top of a very tall skyscraper that starts shaking from an earthquake, and I have to get down somehow. Like everything around me is about to crumble and it's totally out of my control.
In most cases, dreams are the subconscious speaking to itself in an idiolect (a dialect of a single person). While certain themes are somewhat common, exact meaning of a dream is rooted in your own personal experiences and what those images mean to you.
Dreams of being naked in public are fairly common. Being naked is generally seen as a symbol of feeling vulnerable and, also, potentially intensely embarrassed about something (because most people would definitely not be comfortable being naked in public).
Snakes are a common symbol of sin in the Western world, which may or may not be pertinent to what it means to you/your subconscious.
Edit: I will add that sometimes dreams are just gibberish, like if you are feverish. "You're drunk, go home" type nonsense.
She's been visiting for a couple decades, but she just stares, so you get used to her. I figured it was one of those common ones like you have a surprise exam and you forgot your pencils or you have a candy bar for a head.
... go on?
The only recurring dream theme I have is this: You try to walk somewhere and it's slow, like moving in tar. It's exhausting and takes ages to e.g. walk down the street to your neighbor. Sometimes I'm even crawling trying to pull myself forward. I've heard similar variations from others too, so seems to be common.
Oh and my late grandmother had the same dream ever night for most of her adult life. Trauma in childhood due to war. I don't want to know how this feels.
At this point I can identify a few areas like "old town" or "business district" or "very large square with an enormous roundabout".
[0] Mostly various types of Ganz UVs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganz_UV which is interesting, because I've only been to Budapest once in my life.
Between my 20s and 30s I did a lot of selfdefense training. I would dream a lot about conflict situations where I would have to fight (or run). In real life I might have had 3 conflics in those 10 years. Anyhow, fighting in a dream was like being submerged in molasse: every movement had resistence and was painfully slow, while opponents moved normally. This was freaking me out.
I don't know if it's related, but sometimes in my dreams I fly by taking advantage of this oddly sluggish momentum. All it takes is to launch myself into a spinning motion like a frisbee, and I'll fly a good distance.
They really were weird. Maybe testosterone? Maybe Freudian? Maybe it was due to a stint job I had at the Coroner’s Office in high school? Maybe nothing?
Those dreams ended in my thirties, after a breakdown in grad school.
I pop a gasket (just really bad anxiety), and all those dreams subsided? Crazy?
Life became the nightmare after the breakdown though.
After having mostly fixed those problems I found that I was still anxious and unwilling to live in the now, always fearing the future or regretting the past. My dreams were nowhere to be found. For the longest time I felt like I was living in a nightmare.
These days, to some degree, I have returned to being somewhat calm and rational. Last week I've been waking up every morning, either in the middle of a vivid dream or at least with some recollection of what my dreams were that night. It's so soothing to have my dreams return. It makes me feel even more calm and rational (my favorite state of mind).
Cognitive therapy for a short while plus meditation helped me, it seems.
Forgive yourself. Love thyself. Take care.
One time though, I had a dream where I was successfully running so fast and so smoothly, it felt amazing, better than flying.
I don't usually remember my dreams, but when I do there's a great probability that it falls into these 2 categories -
1. I suddenly find myself naked in public, the rest of dream usually involves me trying to remedy the situation. This is the stage where I usually wake up (in a panic with elevated heart rate).
2. Snakes. Not even sure what is up with this one. I am pretty afraid of snakes in real life, more so than normal people. But then there's a bunch of other things I am equally scared of, but I don't dream about them at all.