What I don’t know about dreams
August 6th, 2010
Following up on yesterday’s post about dreams and Paxil — I learned a fair amount about dreams during my work with Alan Hobson. One thing I still don’t know, however, is why certain dream plots are so common: performance-anxiety dreams like the Actor’s Nightmare, having one’s teeth fall out, missing a train. And I don’t know to what extent these “common” dreams are culturally determined. If anyone has good resources on this — empirical, not mystical — I’d be interested to know about them.
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I do lots of wandering up and down stairways and through long, crooked hallways with dozens of doors on each side. How common is that?
And is it a by-product of too many childhood Scooby-Doo cartoons?
Dreams and the power of suggestion: last night, I had the Actor’s Nightmare. I had to reprise my role of Elizabeth Proctor in my high school production of The Crucible from 9 years ago…and some Dream Me retained some of the blocking. What the hammer?!
Oh Lord, the teeth dream. It’s never as simple as my teeth falling out though; it always involves my mouth becoming completely full of stuff (including, but not limited to, broken teeth) that I cannot spit out fast enough not to feel like I’m suffocating.
I think a great deal of that dream has to do with the fact that I actually do have breaky teeth, but oy.
I have some of the common ones — being lost in a maze of hallways, being chased while apparently only being able to run in slow-motion, looking for things that I can’t find — but what I’ve noticed lately is that when I am having a particularly gnarly dream, I tell myself (inside the dream), “You know, you’re just dreaming.” Does that happen to anyone else?
Since I’ve recently stopped taking sleep meds, this seems to be happening more often — or at least, I remember it when awake more than I did before.
This is just fascinating. Thanks to my parents, I’ve always had excellent teeth, and so have never had “teeth nightmares.”
My skin, OTOH, is generally a mess, so I’ve had any number of “disgusting skin problem” dreams–when I realize I’m stricken with some horrific ailment that is doing gross things to my skin, and I’m on the phone struggling to get a doctor’s appointment (a nightmare in and of itself) and wondering if I should just go shell out $50 for an emergency room visit. By then, I usually wake up.