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Anxiety dreams

13:21 / 17.09.04

This is an oft-discussed subject, but I'm not sure if we've ever talked about those dreams specific to anxiety states - the symbols and tropes that creep into one's sleeping head at times of stress or decision.

I'm thinking about this again because I'm at something of a 'career node' (sorry, I just like the word 'node') with interviews looming - and I do not like interviews. Last night, I had a recurrence of what is, for me, a common anxiety dream-motif: driving.

It's usually night, or poor visibility. I'm somehow in the situation of having to drive a car, often a borrowed or otherwise unfamiliar one (last night, it was a Mercedes belonging to my father - my father having never owned a Mercedes). I'm driving fast, but barely holding the vehicle together; it's out of control, and difficult to keep on the road - but slowing down seems an impossibility. I veer over to the wrong side of the road, around other vehicles, spin around... it's all quite terrifying, but my biggest fear, within the dream, is that other road-users are going to recognise that, basically, I cannot drive.

The symbolism's not exactly hard to untangle. Career insecurity, the fear of losing control, of being discovered and shamefully 'unmasked' as someone who isn't fully in control.

I have another, creepier variant wherein I've killed someone and disposed of the body - but the Police are closing in on me...

*shivers*

I seem to have grown out of nakedness dreams, having not had one of those for five or six years. These days, my unconscious anxieties are presumably more about maintaining control/professionalism than about honesty or self-revelation.

What are your anxiety dreams?

13:35 / 17.09.04

It's always the damned tide coming in, and everything washing away. It's a little different every time- last night people were ice fishing in the arctic, and the ice everyone was standing on was breaking up. Sometimes it's a storm, sometimes I'm caught between the ocean and a wall, there's the occasional riptide.

I checked it out on the web, and the ultracondensed version I got from Jungians was that I was dreaming about being immersed in the collective unconscious, and the Freudians said it was about bedwetting. Jerks.

13:39 / 17.09.04

Execution dreams. Since I was a child, I've often dreamt about being executed - the feeling of helplessness in the face of the authority that has sentenced me, the sense of impending doom, the crescendo of notable lasts...

At least I *think* these are anxiety dreams. I'm not sure how I'd know for sure, as they could be guilt dreams, or (given that the method of execution is often stabbing) penetration dreams...

13:50 / 17.09.04

Actually, I have driving dreams too - less so than I used to when I was younger. (I don't drive, which might be significant.) For some reason I have to use a car and pretend to have a licence, and I mostly get it right, but then I start to do things wrong, take the wrong turning, pull out into the wrong lane, nearly hit someone else, and it builds up.

Fairly typical guilt/shame/inadequacy stuff I think; I feel like I'm a fake from the moment I get into the car (because I am, I know I don't have a licence) and gradually it starts to come out. I think at times I may even have forgotten to put on my pants in the car as well.

13:57 / 17.09.04

Wow, I have almost the exact same anxiety dreams at Ganesh. In the "car" ones, I'm usually trying to drive from the backseat, sometimes trying to steer using my legs. Most of the time, there's another passenger in the car with me.

In the "killing" dreams, usually I kill the person unexpectly, like I lightly punch them and they die, and then I can't take it back.

14:04 / 17.09.04

I can't drive, though I do sometimes have dreams of illicit driving.

The one I always used to have, but haven't for some time, was running a long-distance race and being utterly exhausted and still having to keep running, even on my knees. A minor variation I had once was walking across the street and finding myself midway and paralysed.

Scrambled Password Bogus Email

14:16 / 17.09.04

Faskinating. I once had such a convincing "killing" dream, that for some time after I woke up I was fretting about how I could have done such a thing, and how, really, I should turn myself in.

It was really freaky, I tells ya. Never quite put it together that it was an anxiety thang, and I can't really remeber what was goign on at the time to make sense of it now. A whole lot of drugs, for sure, but apart from that uber-context, its all foggy, maaaaan.

Interesting that it crops up all over the place.

14:41 / 17.09.04

Oh yeah, and there's the 'teeth falling out' one. This is apparently commonplace, and usually represents a literalised fear of one's psychic defences (those things that guard and protect the portal to one's soft, squishy, vulnerable innards) breaking down. Usually, one tooth will break into several pieces, I'll put my hand to my mouth and realise all my teeth are crumbling...

Tryphena Absent

15:05 / 17.09.04

Mine always feature water- generally a lot of rain but it tends to be the thing that causes the least anxiety. I'm usually more worried about the other people around me drowning or being washed away. I tend to be detached with only a little anxiety gnawing away at me. It probably is about the collective unconscious but I suspect women are more prone to dreams featuring water and it's probably connected to our lovely, tidal bodies. Perhaps we should do an experiment to see if our dreams have any connection to ovulating?

When I was a child I used to have this anxiety dream about a bald man chasing me in a wheelchair. I would reach a pair of locked glass doors and get really hysterical and then my grandmother would jump out and just scream at this man to leave me alone and I'd be calm again. I'm sure it was something to do with the daleks.

15:32 / 17.09.04

I had the teeth one the other night but I think it more my brain trying to tell me that I was dreaming, at least I think it was...

I have similar dreams to the driving but mine are usually in an aircraft of some kind and I'm told it's up to me to land it...

I don't think I've ever killed anyone in a dream but I have been killed a number of times.

It was weird when someone mentioned work dreams before, I've never had a dream where I'm at work in fact I can't think of any dreams actually set in London, their usually either back in Scotland or some random city.

Something I'm curious about is language in dreams, if you are fluent in more than one language which do you dream in? Does it change during the dream?

Scrambled Password Bogus Email

15:39 / 17.09.04

No Way. This is getting creepy. Creepy I tells ya. Ganesh IS Morpheus (No not the bald twat from the Matrix.) Dude, what other dreams of mine are you, like, plugged into?

Not the one about the camel and the hose, pleeeeease?

16:13 / 17.09.04

I'm sure I've talked about this here before, but my anxiety dreams almost always take the form of attempting to escape or survive an apocalypse of some description. It's very tiresome. It usually takes place in a grey, colour leeched landscape, occasionally moving to my old primary school with it's distinctive dark red parquet floors and bright yellow swing doors.

16:36 / 17.09.04

mine are always the same three themes and very definitely anxiety dreams:

1. someone doing something deliberately cruel to me (emotionally rather than physically), usually someone in a position to do so in real life, usually someone new(ish) like a boyfriend or a less familiar friend. the bad feelings from these often linger long after I've woken.

2. something bad happening to someone else, and I'm unable to stop it or fix it. often the victim is my daughter, and often these dreams occur when there's something going on in my life that feels out of control. like the first, these leave residual emotions, and are the very worst. once when I had a dream about my daughter I was on edge worrying about her for somewhere around a week, it was that vivid and awful.

3. the most common ones, I will repeatedly throughout the night relive something I've done recently...for example, I will be toiling over a spreadsheet in dream after dream after dream, the problem at hand waking me frequently all night, and when I sleep again it will come back. though the entire night will be fraught with frustration and wakefulness, the only lingering effect is exhaustion.

I also frequently have lost teeth dreams, but those aren't so worrisome.

18:54 / 17.09.04

I've had it a few times, and run into it a lot in novels and so on, ( particularly Dead Babies by Martin Amis, ) but I've never been sure what the loss-of-teeth dream was supposed to imply in analytical terms, so cheers, Ganesh, for your explication.

Anxiety-wise, I seem to have this thing about my sideburns in dreams - my oneiric self has a bad time at the barbers, or it's hand slips while shaving, or something similar, but whichever way it happens they're removed in the dream, which seems like a traumatic episode that's way out of proportion to what's actually involved, in the cold light of day. So it's either something to do with much the same stuff as the tooth thing really, or I'm overinvested in what is, after all, not a particularly great haircut in the first place, but whatever the reasons, I seem to get that quite often.

Apart from that, there are the recurring horrors to do with demons, hellfire, and related issues, how they're going to apply and how they do at the moment, which I've been having on and off since the age of about Five, and which whatever else happens, mean I'm never going anywhere near a psychoanalysts couch, just because I'm not sure I could really afford it, in any sense of the word.

But if I was going to try it, I dare say I'd go for Jungian analysis - it's a bit off-topic, but has anyone done that ? And if so what what was it like ?

21:07 / 17.09.04

Last night (and almost all of my dreams are anxiety dreams these days) I dreamt I was a lesbian. What does that mean?

21:54 / 17.09.04

That you should cancel the subscriptions to FHM, Nuts and Zoo magazine ?

22:03 / 17.09.04

No, no, not a fake lesbian. I was breaking up with someone over cheating on them over New Year, it was all very unhappy and not worthy of any sort of photoshoot. Only we were both gay women. I'm a bit confused really.

Whisky Priestess

22:32 / 17.09.04

As I think I've "shared" before, most of my non-specific anxiety dreams are about gerbils. No, wait! They really are.

This is because I kept gerbils when I was a kid. Gerbils have two major characteristics:
1) they breed like rabbits
2) no cage can hold them

Imagine, if you will, my childhood weekends being almost completely taken up for several years with trying to contain an ever-growing gerbil population within an ever-more-bizarre range of makeshift cages (I'm sure I used a breadbin at one point).

Imagine, when the gerbils inevitably escaped, tiny Whisky having to spend hours on her knees in the garage with a wellington boot in one hand and a packet of sunflower seeds in the other and keep. Very. Still.

(Whoa. What a very unfortunate mental image. Sorry.)

Thing about gerbils is, like Pokemon, you've got to catch them and then contain them. And you mustn't hurt them (I squashed one in real life once and it was awful). Which is a perfect analogy for trying to keep all the balls in the air while slowly losing your mind ... or so my subconscious thinks, anyhow.