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Comment by as1mov | Hacker News Reader

Just curious, does anyone here have dreams with some recurring themes? I've tried googling for this but sadly most of the content seems to be related to spiritual/mystical "explanations" of it. And I don't bring it up with anyone in real life so as to not appear like a kook.

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.

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Only recurring dream I have is I'm back in college and it's the end of a semester, suddenly I realize there's some math class I haven't been attending and I have just a few days to cram everything I've missed in time for the final.

I have this dream constantly. Always that I forgot to ever go to the class, never that I'm struggling in a class or that I'm going to fail I class I've been attending. I wonder, did you skip a lot of classes in College?

I’m not the person you are asking but I got the same type of dreams, and yes I practically didn’t attend to at least a quarter of the classes in college. I didn’t like some lecturers, so I would study through textbooks and ask my friends about important exam dates and would generally have fears about missing these exams but somehow I still have these type of dreams.

Hah, I don't think it depends on that really. I've never really missed classes in college (mandatory attendance yay!) but I still get those dreams occasionally.

I've had that a lot for years after College. During College, I skipped a lot of classes and instead studied by borrowing books from the library, it worked well in terms of learning but it meant that if I failed my exams, my teachers would probably not hesitate to expel me. That added a lot of pressure and is most likely why I've been having that dream regularly since even 15 years later.

It's funny to know this is a dream theme that others have. It's not the only recurring nightmare theme I have but it's a major one. You're right that it's just that I forgot to attend or something, like I just totally forgot I was enrolled for the course.

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.

Wow I have this dream constantly as well

https://xkcd.com/557/

Me too. This is creepy. I mean, being naked, chased by monsters, flying, or talking to people who are dead... okay, those are some ancient archetypes or whatever. But the missed math class in college is just too modern and too specific.

I have both the naked in public dream (or sometimes, in underwear) and the missing class dream. Also a similar dream where I have a work schedule that I should know but I didn't write it down (used to work a job with irregular shifts).

They underlying theme is probably low self-confidence.

Same. And the math is always in-intelligible gobbledygook. Probably my subconscious shaming me for managing to get my M.Sc. without taking Differential Equations and Transforms

I have the exact same dream but the class varies.

I have this dream too, except it is the English language class and there was a book to be read on our own (Hound of Baskervilles) that I forgot to read.

I have exactly that. It can be from highschool or university but the setting is always the same - there was some class that seemed easy, I took it for granted, didn't attend, and now only a few classes left before the end of semester and I am facing a dilemma: I haven't done anything, I am afraid of confronting the teacher who might not even know me, and I am uncertain if I can still make it or if it's already too late and I failed the class.

Yes. Some common ones: 1) Being back in school, missing an exam or test. 2) My car is out of control: won't stop going backwards, accelerates uncontrollably, etc. 3) Finding secret / "extra" rooms in my house. 4) Most recently with covid: being in a store, and realized I've forgotten my mask.

There are definitely other themes but these are the most common.

I had a variation of the mask dream. Note that I live in Manhattan:

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.

Witnessed a rejected mask purchase because of a recent mask mandate. He resigned to stealing it instead

I don't know if I'd call it recurring, since it's pretty rare, but: Sometimes I lose my mind in my dreams. I can feel myself losing my grip on my faculties, as if something were ripping my mind apart. It's hard to describe, visuals become distorted, things split apart into colours, my grip on reality feels slippery. I imagine having a stroke might feel that way, although I hope it's less dramatic. This is just sheer terror.

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.

These sound quite hardcore. I had the "wake up twice" dream once back in middle school, and it has stuck with me ever since. I remember it whenever someone mentions the topic of dreaming. I can only imagine how much of an impact a dream where you wake up more than 2 times would have.

Don’t so quickly discount mystical descriptions of dreams, even if you aren’t a religious person yourself. The thing that is special about dreams is that unlike our conscious waking experience you have no control over how they manifest themselves. They aren’t scientific or rational at all; they are human. Dogs have dreams, and we wouldn’t expect them to have a rational, non-mystical explanation for them. In a sense your dreams are the only way your body can communicate unconscious (and therefore irrational) fears or desires, short of a panic attack or mental breakdown.

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.

"Mystical" and "unconscious" aren't interchangeable.

For me I have found if I really think hard about the situations I find myself in dreams they are correlated to thoughts or things I've heard/seen or experienced throughout the day. Suppression of thoughts would manifest itself certainly in a dream but for me specifically it's garbage collection. I've also found that it's fairly easy to recollect what prompted that dream scenario since presumably it's still at the forefront of the my memory circulating around my brain if you will. While this is my own judgement, if accurate for other people, I'm not sure your assertion that "They aren’t scientific or rational at all" would be correct.

I wonder how these kinds of dreams are affected by dealing with the underlying anxieties.

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 this does make some sense in my case. Unfortunately my issues can't really be fixed by getting in better shape.

Getting in better shape did make it easier, but I think just being naked around others and seeing that no one really cares that much what your body looks like is the more important ingredient.

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.

Oh yes, and specifically about anxieties like you describe. It makes intuitive sense to me that your brain would simulate anxiety-inducing situations in order to exercise those high-stakes decision-making pathways (or similar). Escape sequences are very common for me.

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.

A theme that comes a lot for me is getting bitten by a spider in the dream. The catalyst I've noticed is heart burn/acid reflux. I think recurring themes in dreams are linked to recurring/similar events during the day. The same neuronal pathways are followed so you get similar dreams that link up with those events. Or maybe not! Who really knows?

I believe the actual nature of dreams are not as we remember them. When we recall a dream and makes it a conscious thing we interpret it as we interpret other recollections by making a coherent story of the basic memory. So I dont’t think we can know what the brain process actually were when dreaming. Different things may coalesce into a dream process. And when it is recalled and interpreted it is formed into a meaningful but relatively arbitrary direction.

One I sometimes have is needing to go the bathroom but all the bathrooms I can find have disgusting problems that send me looking for another bathroom instead of relieving myself there.

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 get this too!

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.

I've had the naked dream a LOT, usually taking place at work. It's the place where I'm most anxious and insecure.

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.

I did a fair amount of reading about dreams in my youth and kept a dream journal for years.

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.

Oh yeah, I just assumed everyone saw the green lady. You know, green skin, bald, tusks, too many eyes.

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.

> you have a candy bar for a head

... go on?

There are some themes that are way more common than others. Falling into a void is a very notable one.

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.

There's a city I have been visiting in my dreams for years now. It's a very different experience each time, but the streetcars are always the same[0], as well as the general impression of the place.

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.

Fear of being somewhere specifically without clothes is something deeply ingrained within us but not really typical among animals. I wonder if these "man-made" fears are more likely to appear in dream scenarios.

As a kid, age 6-8 probably I had many dreams about owls. I never figured out why or what would have triggered it.

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 think that's your body's way of making sure you don't hurt yourself - kinda like why I can never run in dreams - body has a sleep paralysis

That slowness is very common, AFAIK. I have it, too, specifically if I try to punch things. Good thing, too - a couple of times that has failed to work and I've woken up just in time to see my first punch a wall or my elbow smash into the radiator next to my bed. Hurts.

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.

yes punches especially. But it is really good it is slow. I punched my little daughter that slept in our bed one night. But no harm was done... phew

In my twenties I had recurring dreams about being in a field of golden wheat during the summer, with a guilty feeling I hurt someone.

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.

I used to dream vividly at night and while awake I was always the most calm and rational person in the room until a couple of years ago when I ran into financial (and love-related) problems and then struggled for years with extreme anxiety. I lost my capability to dream/remember my dreams.

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.

Things will improve quickly now.

My dreams are always of the sense that I'll get physically lost and die for it -- as in, I'm driving up a winding road, and I take a wrong turn, and that turn causes me to skid off past a guardrail and plummet to the ground, infinitely below. Or walking back from buying groceries, and all the signs are blank, then turning out into the woods and falling down in a pit in the sidewalk.

For years, I’ve had a recurring dream where I’ve returned to a location of many fond childhood memories, my grandparents’ home. More recently, the dreams focus on the impossibility of my being there again after all these years, the paradox resolved by some handwaving of my subconscious.

Hey. Same - I have recurring dreams (across years) on the themes you mention + a few more (inventing "flying", cosmic apocalpypse). Shall we connect to see if we can solve this mystery? - see its connected to personality or life experiences?

Yea, every time I try to run in a dream it’s a fuckup, I start slipping and sliding and make little to no progress.

One time though, I had a dream where I was successfully running so fast and so smoothly, it felt amazing, better than flying.

Since I was younger, whenever I am ill - like a fever or something - I have a recurring dream about boulders at the top of a mountain with changing numbers on them. It just kinda loops ... very strange

I dreamed myself a sci-fi miniseries and it was extremely weird so it's not just you. I work in games/entertainment so I assume it's just how my brain organizes stuff.

Absolutely same as first one. Naked, in social settings, people around me not even noticing my that state, i am trying to act normal as well as find my clothes.

Yes fuckin xenomorph dog monster I'll get you one day.

Some dream themes seem to be fairly universal:

https://xkcd.com/557/

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