My most frequently recurring nightmares are of: tornadoes, my high school tennis coach, bombs, brakeless cars, and being chased.

My most frequently recurring stress dreams are of: signing up for a college course I forgot about and never showed up to, not knowing my class schedule (high school or college), signing up for too many classes or the wrong classes, missing a test, just generally a lot of dreams about scheduling in an academic context. I think this means I live a constantly overbooked life and also assign too much value to my schooling years.

I wrote an essay about my recurring dreams of high school. Those continue. I’m always running late to class in my sleep despite not having had class in many years.

This is going to get sad, but bear with me. I also often have dreams where my family tells me they don’t love me. And then I sob and sob and sob or yell at them and then I wake up miserable. For what it’s worth, I can’t imagine anyone in my family saying that to me IRL though.

Probably 2-4 times a week I dream that I am suddenly being told that I have to leave immediately for a trip or a move, but I have none of my stuff with me or don’t have time to pack, like I go to lunch and then suddenly we are at the airport. I’ll be about to get on a flight to Australia, or moving to a camp/school complex with friends I haven’t seen since the mid-nineties, or going with my Mom and my Aunt to live on a boat, and I’ll be like I need to pack!!! And they’ll be like, it’s fine everything will be there! And I’ll be like, but I take medication and i need my medication. Also this is like, embarrassing for my subconscious, but since 9/11 I’ve had frequent dreams about the city or boat or train I’m in being bombed by a ‘terrorist attack’. Right after 9/11 I had them probably weekly, then it faded to monthly, now it’s a handful of times a year or so. I can see the explosions getting closer and closer to where I am, and the whole city blowing up and I want to somehow stop it but I can’t stop it. Also sometimes this is, to my even more severe embarrassment, combined with me not being packed? To escape??

Then the other one I have that turns out to be very common is that it’s the day of the exam and I haven’t been to the class for the entire semester. Every time it stresses me out all over again! When I waited tables, I had dreams like this but they’d be about forgetting to put in an order.

I wish I had a recurring dream to write about, but sadly, my sleeping life has been riddled with nightmares since as long as I can remember. Some of my friends theorize that my brain fixates on the nightmares, and that I just don’t remember good or neutral dreams, but I don’t think it’s true because that would mean this gag has been going on for 25 years. It’s not good, but it has been an interesting source of conversation for my entire adult life. Anyways, the nightmares that happen over and over again are one where I watch a tsunami destroying South Florida from multiple vantage points, one where my doppelganger pushes me off a cliff and then assumes my identity, and the final one is a situation where I’ve apparently been kidnapped and taken to a lab where I’m forced to watch people do weird experiments on a stranger’s dead body but then it turns out it was my body all along. Thankfully, despite this, I’m ok (for the most part).

My worst recurring dreams unfortunately involve my childhood. Any dream that takes me back to primary school and high school. Anything that involves encounters with my childhood hometown and the people who lived there. The accumulation of childhood trauma has made those things incredibly stressful to dream about and they feature uncomfortably often in my dreams. Another theme of my stressful dreams is the good ol’ writing-undergrad-exams featurette. I use recurring stressful dreams and nightmares as a gauge of how much trauma a particular event exerted on me. Unsurprisingly, my childhood and adolescence tops the list. Sit-down exams are also up there, but not quite as bad.

I have a long-running fear of zombies and zombie-like creatures, so they also appear in bad dreams with some regularity. They vary in tension and scope, but most of them involve me hiding or trying to escape some kind of zombie apocalypse. I can trace that to a lack of parental supervision of my media in childhood that exposed me to inappropriate horror fiction from too-young an age.

I don’t place much stake in the ‘meanings’ of my dreams. I view them as the unconscious emissions of a sleeping mind. What I do see reflected in my bad dreams/nightmares are past traumas and stressors that resurface in a different format. Those would be akin to an emotional flashback during sleep. Unsurprisingly, my dreams take a turn for the worse when I’m uncomfortable or stressed. That’s how it goes for most people.

Most of my dreams are of the stressful variety and interspersed with nightmares. It’s not something I’ve been able to change. My favorite kind of sleep is deep and dreamless because 80%+ of my dreams are stressful experiences. I don’t have any recurring good dreams, but dreams where my girlfriend or other loved ones are present are usually neutral or good, when they do appear.

I have a recurring nightmare that I’m being told to perform a show and don’t know any of the musical material. It’s the same dilemma every time: I’m suddenly backstage, being pushed out in front of a crowd, and told to play with a band.

Now, in a normal setting, this isn’t something that would be impossible for me to swing. I’ve been playing piano for 20+ years and jamming on the fly with musicians since I was a teenager. The thing is, this is dream-land, where nothing goes as planned. None of the instruments sound the way they’re supposed to, my arms feel like noodles, and music sounds like another language to me.

This always happens when I’m about to go on tour or have a big show. The brain is a bitch, isn’t she?

I have a recurring nightmare that I’m trapped in a subterranean shopping mall. Sometimes I’ll peek over the railing to look at the levels below and there’ll be no end in sight, just floors and floors of people shopping. It’s unsettling; I know logically there has to be an exit, but I haven’t discovered it yet, and also, this is a nightmare, so perhaps there is no logic. This all feels like a very thinly veiled “capitalism bad” lol but I’m sure part of it is also my brain preying on the fact that I hate endless indoor spaces — they feel claustrophobic to me. I need sunlight, and doors, and the ability to escape at any given time!

Some of my recurring nightmares are similar to Tima’s, but instead of being asked to perform with a band, I’m in a musical or dance recital and being shuffled on stage but I haven’t been to rehearsal and don’t know what I’m doing.

Growing up, I used to have recurring nightmares that all involved me having to hide to avoid being caught by a monster/alien/unseen evil entity. I would also have a recurring nightmare that my mother and I were driving on the highway, or riding on a roller coaster that for some reason required an adult to drive it, and then suddenly I’d look over and my mother was gone and no one was at the wheel.

Another recurring theme of nightmares I’ve had as an adult, though the setting, characters, and situations are always slightly different, is that someone hands me something impossibly small and alive and tells me to take care of it, and then chaos breaks out around me. Sometimes it’s a tiny kitten, sometimes it’s a tiny baby, usually no bigger than my palm, and no one ever helps me. I’m always trying to tell people to be careful or grab my bag or find out where this kitten/baby belongs or who it belongs to, but everyone just hustles and bustles around me, caring not for the precious thing in my hands I’m desperately trying to protect.

I am not a great sleeper and only learned a few years ago that not everyone dreams or has nightmares every single night, so more often than not I’m dreaming of something completely new, but these are the dreams/nightmares that are always familiar — sometimes so familiar that I can wake myself up from them, but also not a comforting familiar since I always wake up with my heart racing.

I haven’t been one to experience recurring nightmares since childhood, but one thing that’s started happening on a recurring basis lately has been that I am actively doing witchcraft in my dreams! I’ve gotten supplied up and fully gone through performing spells and rituals in my ding-dong dreams! This has been somewhat stressful as at least one of these dream spells seemed to have had material results in the real world, AND because it’s a dream, I don’t get to use my better judgment about whether or not I should be attempting to magically influence the object of the working. One of these spells was definitely questionable at best! It feels like sleepwalking but it’s sleepwitching and I’m slightly concerned.

As for recurring dreams, sometimes I’ll have dreams where I have a distinct sense of returning to a place, and I will in fact wake up to remember that I’d had other dreams in those same settings, with some of those same people. I have a lot of trouble remembering the exact events of these dreams, but it feels at times like I’m dropping into the same settings where there’s a kind of continuous plotline. These settings aren’t places I’ve been in real life, or even representations of those places. They’re just random houses and apartments and the streets of towns I don’t think I’ve ever been to.