For some reason in the last six months to a year it has shifted to the idea that I signed up for a full semester's worth of courses, while still trying to work my full time job, and I'm flunking all of them because I keep going to work and never attending the classes or doing the homework.
Either way, coming up on nearly 20 years since I've been in any kind of school and my subconscious is still freaked out about it, one way or another.
By contrast, my subconscious appears to not give a flip about whether I'm doing my paying job correctly. Don't tell my boss.
Another theme for me is not able to board on plane. More than missing flight it is about being stuck to places where I do not want to be.
edit: typo.
I still regularly have the dream where I realized after graduation that I had missed an entire college class or test (often varies depending on the specific dream), but this then nullifies my graduation and all my subsequent work.
Also over 20 years ago, but still a regular visitor to my dreamscape.
Taking very liberal inspiration from the idea of something like Jungian archetypes, more along the lines of there being attractors in the informational dream-space that create narrative clusters linked to common emotions (such as anxiety), I can imagine of set of emotion-to-dream-narrative mappings that would lead to some of the regularities often seen in distributed recurring dreams:
- losing one's teeth - riding naked in the subway - being late to a class or missing a class/test entirely etc.
Just wondering if there has been any research on this that doesn't try to fall on the old standbys of Jungian archetypes, collective unconscious, and other similar handwaving
The wave of relief and euphoria that overcomes me when I wake up is literally spiritual.
I used to have this exact same dream for years after graduating from college.
The most intellectual nightmares my brain comes up with just involve demons chasing me. I've never had these intellectual dreams where there are exams, and deadlines, and being late.
I used to keep a dream diary and half of the entries were "Demons are chasing me. It is dark. I think maybe it's the xenomorph from Alien. I hear it breathing." so I stopped. Not remembering that stuff is much better it turns out haha.
Sometimes they are funny. I had a walk in my former school district (actually I was able to jump very high and jumped around instead) and knew there are 6 humanoid monsters. But my revolver only had 5 bullets, so I had to find the armed one to take a bullet from him first.
I often have offense/defense dreams, like when I was in a room full of people, but one of them grinned at me holding a knife. I disarmed him, pushed to the pretty high window sill and carved crosses on his knees. Everyone pretended not to notice us. I hate dreams of punching someone, because my arms feel weak and slow, but when I have a gun or a "fingersniper", all enemy men become dead quickly.
I also was beaten, burning, shot, drowning, bitten, falling, stabbed. Often it's not as terrific as it sounds. Bites usually come from my recurring friend, a dog with no body, instead it's all a large mouth on legs, which can contain your entire arm. It is ~friendly.
But the worst nightmare is sort of a poltergeist. Things subtly move on their own, body gravity changes in an "intentional" way, and space becomes filled with some sort of unpleasant numbing sound. Sometimes doors don't want you to come out of them by catching my feet, I fall down and then "fall" back up paralyzed. This one is recurring from my childhood, and I (falsely) remember to experience it awake few times.
Also, lucid dreaming techniques help with detecting nightmares and turning them into something funny, or simply moving the scene far enough.