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Recurring Dreams and Dreams that Cease
Over on DocJay’s post discussing magical thinking, the topic of dreams came up. Member K of MT described a dream that allowed her to prevent an car accident; she ended her comment with ” Hopefully this will be the end of that darn recurring dream.”
As a psychologist, I never used the information clinically and I don’t know the symbolism of what different dreams represent. I just assumed that they represented stress, misfiring, ways of processing a days event or emotions, but, to be honest, I just did not think about them that much.
But something happened a few years ago that is quirky and made me a little more intrigued by dreams.
For most of my adult life, I had a recurring dream whenever I was stressed or had too much going on. I would dream that I was looking for my glasses and couldn’t find them. Just for context, I had 20/2400 vision with a mild astigmatism so I always had either my glassed on or contacts in if I was awake. And when I didn’t have them on, I couldn’t see much besides colors and movement. In the stress dreams, that’s what I saw; colors, movement, sometimes other people, sometimes not. Then I would finally find my glasses (usually by feeling around with my hands), as I went to put them on, just before my vision was cleared, I would wake up. No big insights… just awake.
The dream promptly stopped recurring when I had Lasik surgery seven years ago. Not had the dream since, or any replacement version of it. And trust me, it’s not because my stressors went away.
So, do you have recurring dreams? Can you predict them? Have they stopped?
Published in General
Recurring dreams, no. Dreams with people whom I only later meet in real life. Yes.
The only recurring dream I have is being in school and realizing that I have to take a test I forgot to study for. I have had that dream for 50 years. When I had a beard I would dream about trimming it and screwing up so that I had to shave it. There may be Freudian undertones to those dreams but I doubt it. I don’t think dreams have essential meaning but one of the greatest blessings of my life began when I was a sleep deprived medical student learning how to sleep in intervals that varied from 10 minutes to an hour or two. I had dabbled with transcendental meditation, self hypnosis and many techniques of relaxation. I learned how to remember my dreams, not the specifics but enough of the specifics and the mood, that I could reenter that dream whenever I had the chance to sleep again even if it was not until the next night. I have found that if I awake at night and have trouble getting back to sleep because of daytime concerns that there is always a place in my recall of prior dreams that I can tap into to add to that reservoir of dream experience. Dreamful sleep is one of the three great pleasures in life.
Precognitive dreams: check
Lucid dreams: check
Dreams with people I know, but in some different appearance: check
Dreams with people I know, exactly as they actually appear: check
Dreams so fraught with symbolism and so intense at the time I recall them like a favorite movie decades later: check
Clues what any of it means: nada.
I have two recurring dreams. The first is that after many years my college degree is revoked because I didn’t attend library science class a no credit class. The other dream is that I am drafted by the military again. I keep telling them that I am way to old for them. They always answer that they will make a special exception for me.
Interesting. I have recurring dreams in which I’m looking through houses which are sometimes belonging to me and sometimes belonging to people I know. What totally blows me away is how amazed I am in the dream at how palatial and beautiful these homes are. One home was so big that there was a beautiful full-sized house inside it. For context, I live in a very nice four-bedroom home that is just regular and ordinary in a Usonian-sort-of-way. So anyway, when I wake up it’s like, “Wow, Honey! You should have seen this place!” How does the brain DO that?
That’s a popular one – with a lot of variations. For some of us it’s a memory.
I have a theory–ahem–about these dreams, both recurring and not. I hate to deprive all of you, but I’ll have to wait until I get this work project done.
I think it’s plausible.
One of my multi-decade recalled dreams is like that: literally having me wishing it were possible to transfer from my brain to video somehow. Because, unfortunately, I know of no other way to possibly share its heartbreaking beauty with anyone else.
The bad news is that my nightmares are the same: shriekingly horrible mashups of Hieronymus Bosch, Stephen King, and Clive Barker. Utterly persuasive of the notion that there are a variety of “fates worse than death.”
I’ve never actually dreamed that…it’s too close to real life for me. My older son forgot his first test at age 9….He was devastated…and got an A. I told him to enjoy it while it lasted!
Pardon my goofiness, but that is just cool.
I have a recurring dream where the comment function on Ricochet never works…
Oh, wait…that’s not a dream.
http://ricochet.com/archives/the-places-that-haunt-us/
Frequent revisiting of a childhood residence.
Have also had dreams of future events (always mundane) and conversations that later happen verbatim.
Once I was in a nightmare, when I heard a calm, unemotional me say “it’s just a dream”. My in-the-nightmare self replied “ok, but I’ll be glad when its over.”
Lucid dreams, re-entering dreams of choice. I’m envious.
There are dreamworlds I return to, but not necessarily pleasant ones. Even if I believe I’m dreaming during a dream, the other people in the dream typically do not, and they outvote me.
Never let yourself be outvoted by dreams, Midge.
But the people in my dreams can be very persuasive – incredibly deft with the guilt-trips. If I tell them it’s all just a bad dream, they come right back at me with, “Aha! You just want to get out of your responsibilities. Well you can’t. No one can get out of their responsibilities by pretending it’s all a bad dream. You can’t pretend this isn’t real just because you don’t like it!”
As I said, very persuasive.
Lucid dreams, re-entering dreams of choice. I’m envious.
There are dreamworlds I return to, but not necessarily pleasant ones. Even if I believe I’m dreaming during a dream, the other people in the dream typically do not, and they outvote me.
Sometimes that happens to me too. I call those nightmares but they are blessedly rare. I do think there is value in holding on to the last vestiges of a dream and making something out of it. Combine that with ay sort of self relaxation technique and you might develop power over sleep. Or at least sleep deprivation.
At my age, the ability to awaken, stumble to the bathroom and return to bed with no noticeable loss of sleep, surpasses some aspects of the other two pleasures in life.
I envy you, I can never get back to sleep. No matter the time, 2 am, 3 am, I’m awake for the duration.
I envy you, I can never get back to sleep. No matter the time, 2 am, 3 am, I’m awake for the duration.
That is what I am trying to tell you about the power of dreams. When you become aware of not being asleep, hold on to any vestige of your dream even if it is just a mood or a strange combination of phrases or a sense of a memory of place or time. Relish your dreams and they can take you where ever you want to go, or at least back to sleep.
Well, doesn’t that depend on having dreams that are actually relishable?
MFR – I heard it explained this way: it is your brain so therefore you can make executive-level decisions. Grab the part of the dream you like and go back to it, like turning on a tv. What do you think? Maybe?
Has anyone had reality intrude on a dream? The most obvious is needing to use the bathroom. I once had a dream I was being attacked in my home. It was four in the morning and someone was actually pounding on my door.
I forgot that I have a reoccurring dream that I can fly. It is so much fun.
Meh.
The one I remember: I was walking along a sidewalk in my Indiana hometown, next to the apartment building of my childhood… which hasn’t been there in years. So I realized, “I’m dreaming.” And I didn’t wake up.
So, being a guy, I thought, “OK, I should be able to add a beautiful woman to this sidewalk,” and sure enough, I could and did.
Which bored me to death. Turns out being able to visualize a beautiful woman who doesn’t exist in a lot more detail than I can while awake isn’t all that interesting.
Oh, I forgot:
Dreams within dreams: check.
I may have forgotten because I find them even more disturbing than outright nightmares.
When I started reading your post, I thought, I haven’t had that lost glasses dream in a long time.
What you describe is me, exactly, right down to the not even seeing the Big E on the chart!
Same dream for me. more like a horror flick.
I’ll go back and read the rest of your post.
Has anyone had reality intrude on a dream? The most obvious is needing to use the bathroom. I once had a dream I was being attacked in my home. It was four in the morning and someone was actually pounding on my door.
I think there was a scene in The Big Chill where the neurotic Jeff Bloomberg character responded after he was asked how he had slept with something like “I slept like a baby. I woke up and cried several times and then wet the bed.”
That is my other recurring dream, flying, besides the one with the lost glasses, which is pure anxiety and fear.
In the flying dream, I fly, either like a super hero, with hands forward, or to the side like wings, but no flapping, or in a trampoline sort of way, up and down, from ground to sky. (maybe more aptly describe like a flea?) This dream is one that I have been able to be aware of while it goes on to the point that I sense I don’t want to wake up because it is exhilarating.
I can’t remember when the last time I had either of these dreams. Maybe I’ll go flying tonight?
— Charles Dickens, “A Christmas Carol”
Quite possibly my favorite line in all of English literature.
I think there was a scene in The Big Chill where the neurotic Jeff Bloomberg character responded after he was asked how he had slept with something like “I slept like a baby. I woke up and cried several times and then wet the bed.”
Goldberg, Bloomberg, Goldblum. My memory is getting as bad as Brian Williams.