The World Dreams of Snakes

December 7, 2022 12:16 AM

"Mornings.co.uk was curious which dreams were most common in different countries around the world. So, we analysed Google search data to see which dream symbols every country is searching for. And then we looked at what the most common dreams might mean." For those who dream of maps, here's the hi-res one Mornings.co.uk drew up.
posted by not_on_display (62 comments total)

If I have a strange one I write them down.

Brisbane marble architecture + Milla's jade earrings

Tuppy's cursed chicken parkour

Emma Stone's costume movie theatre and soft drink pachinko

bjork loves the swamp. bjork puts pigs in the swamp. drains the swamp. starts a coal fire. uses pokemon to dig a hole around the coal fire. makes music about it. the hole causes problems, she fixes them with cat power and science. Then there are cherry blossoms.
posted by adept256 at 12:57 AM on December 7, 2022 [9 favorites]

bjork loves the swamp. bjork puts pigs in the swamp...

I can't believe this didn't make it onto the map!
posted by yamel at 4:21 AM on December 7, 2022 [7 favorites]

I am curious about the methodology. I suspect "what English speakers from these locations Googled", as the other options would require too much effort.
posted by Meatbomb at 5:12 AM on December 7, 2022 [6 favorites]

I think for many of those, "nightmares" might be more appropriate than dreams. I tend not to google what it means if I have a dream about something like winning the lottery.
posted by pangolin party at 5:29 AM on December 7, 2022 [4 favorites]

I can’t believe not being able to run due to achey legs isn’t on there.
posted by waving at 6:02 AM on December 7, 2022 [4 favorites]

Dream symbols that are the most searched for are not necessarily the most common dreams. People aren't going to search as much for the familiar and obvious things, right?

I don't think I've ever dreamt about my teeth falling out -- if I did I'd be more likely to search for interpretations (if I felt so inclined) than I would if I had yet another dream about being late for a class, or crawling around in a spooky building, or public toilets that are way too public.
posted by Foosnark at 6:11 AM on December 7, 2022 [8 favorites]

I'm surprised that flying dreams didn't make it on the lists at all... I have those so frequently that I sometimes forget that I *don't* actually know the secret of how to fly (take a long jump, and then just keep your feet tucked up under you in a squat instead of putting them all the way down to touch the ground)
posted by FatherDagon at 6:41 AM on December 7, 2022 [15 favorites]

ah, my "getting married to a spider-snake baby and all my teeth falling out" dreams are finally seen
posted by scruss at 6:42 AM on December 7, 2022 [11 favorites]

Armenia: Grapes.
Spooky.
posted by signal at 6:46 AM on December 7, 2022 [4 favorites]

Tooth loss makes me feel seen!

I was talking with a good friend about the recurring dream of hunting for a serviceable toilet, to no avail, followed by waking up with a desperately full bladder. She has the same dream, and we wonder if it’s common among others who were bedwetters in childhood — that our brains have been trained come up with all manner of nightmare toilets to discourage us.

I was a little bummed, then, that “toilet hunt” didn’t crack the top ten.
posted by armeowda at 7:19 AM on December 7, 2022 [11 favorites]

I have not had dreams about my teeth falling out, but I have had dreams where they shatter like glass. All of them, with very little effort. Yes, those dreams are as horrifying as they sound.
posted by May Kasahara at 7:36 AM on December 7, 2022 [6 favorites]

I love the outlier countries: while the rest of Africa dreams of snakes and sex, Namibians are fixated on squirrels; France is in reverie about exes while tine neighbouring Andorra muses about being cheated on. Different items of desire too maybe: shoes in Ethiopia and cars only in Haiti
posted by rongorongo at 7:36 AM on December 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

I'm an apartment renter who dreams about houses. The other night I dreamt I lived in a cottage near the bottom of a Toronto ravine, with other fancy old homes up slope from me. One house had a dozen large trampolines arranged like steps below the back door, so they could bounce down to the bottom of their yard.
posted by brachiopod at 7:45 AM on December 7, 2022 [5 favorites]

My most common re-occurring dreams involve walking around vast and complex buildings, exploring ancient crumbling cities, or driving a rusty and falling apart car while trying to fix it on the road. But what I hate is when one of those dreams include the Substandard Bathroom Dream, in which I really have to go and the only bathroom I can find is filthy, far too public, and/or weird and difficult to use.

But no snakes, teeth falling out, or flying.
posted by fimbulvetr at 7:47 AM on December 7, 2022 [9 favorites]

Speaking as a person of Armenian ancestry it's hard to think of anything more on brand than intense grape dreams
posted by potrzebie at 7:54 AM on December 7, 2022 [18 favorites]

These days all of the dreams that I remember are just the dullest, most obvious variety of wish fulfillment: I just dream about travel and leisure with friends and family.
posted by paper chromatographologist at 8:00 AM on December 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

I usually dream about riding my motorcycle. I wonder what it means?

Sometimes I dream about having a breakdown (mechanical) or getting lost. I also often dream about hidden places, like a neighbourhood just a few streets over, and I can never shake the conviction that I might find them if I turn the right corner or get off at the right stop.
posted by rodlymight at 8:14 AM on December 7, 2022 [3 favorites]

Ad targeting parameters: 18-45, United States, single, dreams about swamp Bjork
posted by credulous at 8:22 AM on December 7, 2022 [12 favorites]

Recurring dreams:

I won't receive my degree unless I take an ornithology exam delivered by the meanest most eccentric professor in my entire university. Dear readers, I never took ornithology, and in the dream I skipped every class.

I must catch the frisbee before it lands in the road. My legs are so weak. The semi truck is bearing down main street.

I keep having to work late by increasing bizarre increments. e.g. the janitors got laid off, so can you clean the toilets at 4am, after filing the returns at midnight, and organizing the party by 11pm? I always accept, and am always frantically trying to call my wife. I then proceed to a) forget how to dial each mode of phone b) forget her number repeatedly c) drop phones into increasingly bizarre orifices.

I am surprised to be the weakest puncher in various scenarios.

My best/worst from childhood (tw: maybe skip this one).
SHE is in the church. SHE is the ultimate evil, a desiccated husk of hate. If I see her, it will end me and everyone I love. I can't breathe when SHE's close. The little girls are at the altar rail in communion veils. Their throats are bleeding from the sharpened patens. I can't catch all the blood. While I'm trying SHE is slowly coming up RIGHT THERE BEHIND ME (oh yeah, 12 years of Catholic school, thanks).


Bizarre One Offs:
Well, someone has to escort the SNL celebrities out of the party after one slid down the bannister and broke the ice sculpture.

My wife is wearing every coat and I can't hear why she's mad at me. I don't think I buried her in coats.

Every person is hugging me after coming in from the winter. I mean literally every person ever. It's very warm and sleepy. (this was my happiest dream ever).
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 8:23 AM on December 7, 2022 [10 favorites]

Last night I dreamed I ate a giant marshmallow. When I woke up I was a butterfly.
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:23 AM on December 7, 2022 [5 favorites]

the recurring dream of hunting for a serviceable toilet, to no avail, followed by waking up with a desperately full bladder.

I was never a bedwetter, but I've had this dream for years and years, including waking up and having to visit the bathroom. I dread what might happen if I ever dream of finding a clean private working toilet...
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:25 AM on December 7, 2022 [8 favorites]

How about the one where it's finals week and there's a class you haven't been to all semester. You're not even sure which room it meets in, so you're looking all over the building, even on floors you didn't know existed.

I still have that one about college and sometimes about high school.
posted by Pararrayos at 8:26 AM on December 7, 2022 [12 favorites]

Whoa, wait I'm not the only one with swamp bjork dreams??
posted by The otter lady at 8:26 AM on December 7, 2022 [3 favorites]

Guess I should move to Nigeria.

I like the way South America moves from lice to snakes to rats and on to spiders and mice. Wonder if that's a climate thing.
posted by MtDewd at 8:28 AM on December 7, 2022

Bjork dreams in her sunken city? Presumably sunk under a swamp?
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 8:30 AM on December 7, 2022

My recurring dream of meeting the love of my life who subsequently turns into a chicken and drowns herself in a swamp...now that I've read these comments, I guess can thank Bjork for that one.
posted by Token Meme at 8:37 AM on December 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

I was on a narrow path on the side of a rock wall. The further I went the narrower the path got. Soon I was clinging to handholds while inching along on what was left of the path as the rock wall leaned ever more towards me.

Then I fell...

Halfway down in the fall I realized I was dreaming... and I relaxed.

So when I hit the ground, I bounced! :)

Never had that one again. Though there was an even stranger one.
posted by aleph at 8:44 AM on December 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

I love this chart. It's silly and meaningless but so much fun.

My most common dream -- and the one that fucks with my head the most -- is dreaming about random, normal, everyday events. They fuck with my head because sometimes I can figure out if I'm remembering a dream or a real event. The other night I dreamt my wife was standing on the threshold of our kitchen having just come in from getting packages on the porch and asked me if I'm the one who ordered snow shoes for her. It was right after her birthday so it would've been a completely normal thing to happen. For the following day or two I kept an eye out for a pair of snow shoes in case it really happened.

I'd also have a recurring dream that I'm lying awake in bed, unable to sleep. Those suck.
posted by slogger at 8:49 AM on December 7, 2022 [4 favorites]

How about the one where it's finals week and there's a class you haven't been to all semester.
As a college professor, I have the variant on this dream where it's the last week of class and you realize you were supposed to be teaching a class in a subject you don't know, which you forgot about for the entire semester, and you're desperately trying to find the classroom in the basement of an unfamiliar building that looks vaguely like your old junior high school, etc. etc.

Happy finals week, everyone!
posted by daisystomper at 9:01 AM on December 7, 2022 [9 favorites]

Pretty sure I will now start having dreams about my mouth overflowing with extra teeth. Thanks, Mornings.co.uk
posted by BigHeartedGuy at 9:17 AM on December 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

I'm such a heavy sleeper that I rarely remember my dreams, but when I do remember a dream, it tends to be quite detailed and strange. Here's one of my favorites, actually this one is from about mid-2020 (a few months after lockdown):

I am in the downtown area of a large urban center. It feels like an amalgamation of Salt Lake City, Calgary, and...London? I am trying to hail a cab, but none of them are stopping. Suddenly out of nowhere, an ancient-looking station wagon --painted in a fading red livery that reminds me of a Hong Kong taxi-- pulls up to the curb beside me. The driver is Neil Young.

Neil Young says "get in kid" and I oblige. He explains that he likes to run a pirate taxi service, as a sort of hobby. He gives me his business card, and I dutifully enter the details into my phone contacts. Before I can tell him where I need to go, he starts driving.

As he drives, he gives me a tour of the city. He seems to know the history of every building and street we pass. Finally I ask him where we are going. He says "back to my place, kid. I found some old vinyl at the swap meet and I want you to help me catalog it. You can keep anything I don't want.

When we get back to his place, we listen to some of the records (I don't remember what they sounded like, maybe like early 2000s Radiohead b-sides). Then, Neil starts doing whippets. The whippet balloons are extremely pink.

Neil offers me a fresh pink balloon, which I assume is full of nitrous oxide. I have some fear about trying this, but it's Neil Young, this'll probably never happen again, eh? I am about to inhale, and then I wake up.

At the time this dream felt so real to me that I checked my phone to see if I somehow had Neil's phone number in my phone (I didn't).
posted by Doleful Creature at 9:19 AM on December 7, 2022 [13 favorites]

I had a nightmare the other night that people were stealing seals from the waterfront - by sneaking up, enclosing them in large suitcases, then tossing the suitcases into the trunks of their cars and peeling out - and there was nothing I could do about it. It was horrible. I woke up shaking. I didn't google it although perhaps I should have.

I've had the teeth dream and the flying dreams (those are the best and I still think maybe I just forget the trick during the day) and the exam dream and many, many bear dreams. I'm surprised nobody reported the collapsing ladder/ staircase dream - the rungs break just as you step on them - or the finding an extra room / apartment in your house that you had just forgotten about dream. I always thought those were pretty commonplace, along with weak legs, inability to run and the car is out of control but I suddenly cannot reach the brake.
posted by mygothlaundry at 9:26 AM on December 7, 2022 [3 favorites]

fimbulvetr, I think we share a lot of dream types. I walk through spaces like yours a lot, although frequently mine are big malls where I'm trying to get to one end and keep finding myself outside on the wrong side. I also am a champion at substandard bathroom dreams. Filthy? Check. Public, whether that means literally in public or in a room that has no partitions? Check.

Also, many of my dreams are dreams like I hear other people describe, but I sometimes have movie dreams: I am watching a story play out and I am privy to the emotions of the characters I see but I am not myself involved in the story.

I just started writing in the fifth volume of my dream journal, which is spread over many weird notebooks. Sometimes I can't get to it so I recite it into my phone. I've noticed I definitely dream reoccurring situations and sometimes locations feel familiar. My most common ones are:
-I have to leave a hotel room or an apartment or some space that I've been in and need to pack. The amount of stuff I am trying to pack is ridiculous, but I keep chugging along trying to put things in suitcases and boxes
-the above mall/big space dream
-I am trying to punch someone but my punches are really weak and I can't defend myself properly (seems like a variant of the weak legs one)
-I am trying to get to an airport gate in a big hurry but I am at the wrong end of the airport and can't go faster than a walk and end up stopping in a bathroom or getting stuck behind people going even more slowly
-It's the end of the school year/semester and I have been skipping classes, can't find my classroom, am not prepared for an exam, or haven't written a paper. This one is obviously insanely common.
posted by PussKillian at 9:39 AM on December 7, 2022 [5 favorites]

I don't think I've ever dreamed about teeth or snakes. My recurring dream is being in a car that goes into the water, like by falling off a bridge. I guess that happens a lot in movies and TV so maybe it has just implanted itself into my subconscious.
posted by emd3737 at 9:53 AM on December 7, 2022

I'm guessing that there's a correlation of countries that have dreams of teeth falling out and countries where they eat a lot of sugar, leading to tooth pain, which our dreaming mind uses in its storymaking.
posted by eye of newt at 9:54 AM on December 7, 2022

we wonder if it’s common among others who were bedwetters in childhood

My parents trained me out of bedwetting by waking me up in the middle of the night and insisting that I pee. So now when I have to pee in the middle of the night, I pretty close to sleepwalk to the bathroom to pee.

To this day, I check on my surroundings before I pee to make sure I'm awake. Sometimes, especially when I'm tired or in a new environment, I have to be really really sure. Works great!
posted by aniola at 9:59 AM on December 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

I forgot my favorite dream/nightmare, which I have actually had several times: aliens have landed, right in front of me on the classic deserted road - and the camera is broken. So unfair.
posted by mygothlaundry at 10:00 AM on December 7, 2022 [3 favorites]

Does anyone else remember the comic strip "Slow Wave" by Jesse Recklaw? Readers would send in their dreams, and he would do a four-panel strip based on them. There are two book collections of the strips, Dreamtoons and The Night of Your Life which I still regularly go back and read.
posted by fimbulvetr at 10:25 AM on December 7, 2022 [10 favorites]

Yes! I sent a few dreams in to him.
posted by jessamyn at 10:30 AM on December 7, 2022 [5 favorites]

Also, fun dream lifehacks - the reason it's frequently so hard to run or throw a punch in a dream is directly related to the nerve action that prevents your real-life limbs from thrashing around as much while you sleep. So instead of trying to do karate or sprint to safety, switch to MMA-style ground control. Grapple, choke and rend - the key to martial victory in the Dream Realms! Just like Dune: the slow hand penetrates the soft skull of insect-eyed dopplegangers that haunt the warped anti-home version of your childhood bedroom.
posted by FatherDagon at 10:31 AM on December 7, 2022 [6 favorites]

I just remembered a dream situation that used to mess me up in a fun way.

As a child I would always read a chapter or two of fantasy or scifi right before sleep. But some nights I would then dream reading the next few chapters, and they would be plausible continuations. The following evening when I cracked the book, I would be completely befuddled that I was a few chapters behind what I remembered happening in the story. I would then have to “unremember” the plot points I’d invented in my dreams.

It was pretty great.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 10:51 AM on December 7, 2022 [4 favorites]

Has anyone had someone pissed at them for something you did in their dream? *Not* ever in real life, just the dream.
posted by aleph at 11:05 AM on December 7, 2022 [4 favorites]

What, nobody's curious about this hat everyone in Greece is dreaming about??
posted by biddeford at 11:07 AM on December 7, 2022 [6 favorites]

the reason it's frequently so hard to run or throw a punch in a dream is directly related to the nerve action that prevents your real-life limbs from thrashing around as much while you sleep.

My two variations of that:
- Trying to shout/roar (usually to scare off an intruder) and waking myself up with a muffled "muhh".
- Feeling stuck/trapped or struggling to get up, suddenly I'm awake and heaving myself upright in bed.
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:10 AM on December 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

This thread has generated lots of great user names so far, for example:

cursed chicken parkour
swamp bjork
nightmare toilets
intense grape dreams
increasingly bizarre orifices
stealing seals from the waterfront
many many bear dreams
dreaming of hats / Greece is dreaming
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:22 AM on December 7, 2022 [12 favorites]

I guess I shouldn’t be shocked that more people don’t dream of ascending to the Seventh Celestial Realm to bathe those ingrates in a sea of blood and rule over the shivering herds of angels with an iron fist until they can extend their empire to the Furthest Shore, but I’m a little sad more people don’t dream about well-deserved work promotions.
posted by GenjiandProust at 11:38 AM on December 7, 2022 [6 favorites]

I've had lots of teeth falling out dreams. But I've only had one dream where I awoke in a medical research facility on the moon, having fallen deathly ill in my sleep and thus crygenically frozen for the prior 300 years. A records mix-up led to everyone insisting I was Dick Clark. It proved impossible to convince them otherwise.
posted by The Great Big Mulp at 11:53 AM on December 7, 2022 [8 favorites]

Slow Wave was the greatest! I wish it were still active. A four-panel comic was the perfect medium to prove that no, really, other people’s weird dreams are as fascinating and messed-up as our own.
posted by armeowda at 12:40 PM on December 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

I think I've had a few teeth falling out dreams, but not that many. I can say with certainty there is one recurring theme to my dreams, it's of travel and moving from place A to place B. I often have some task to do that usually involves going from one place, often by train, and with a particular cast of characters. That will morph into other situations and characters and locations like dreams do. But I didn't see "traveling" on those lists at all.
posted by zardoz at 12:40 PM on December 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

looks like I'm the only one having a recurring nightmare about chewing gum? lucky me!
posted by supermedusa at 12:55 PM on December 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

Bert Kaplan and his team of professional dream catchers did something more rigorous but along the same lines in the middle part of the 20th century. There was a book a while back, "Database of Dreams," all about this. Here the paper "X-rays of inner worlds: The mid-twentieth-century American Projective Test Movement" by the same author.
posted by meehawl at 1:06 PM on December 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

pregnant snakes take my shed teeth to woo straying lovers, and the coins on my eyes cannot buy them back
posted by Iris Gambol at 1:08 PM on December 7, 2022 [3 favorites]

Nobody wants to hear about other peoples' boring dreams but I'm sure everyone will be absolutely riveted (/s) by the story of My Most Interesting Dream Ever:

I had discovered a super advanced film-maker, and I had several of his movies on DVDs. I was trying to turn people onto them, in a room full of DVD players. I would hook people up to the DVD players with headphones and put one of the disks in the player. Some of these people were like distributors, or corporate types, and I was trying to get them to buy the movies to distribute.

The movies were incredible, absolutely mind-blowing. They were very hard to describe with ordinary language. They involved amazingly complex imagery--very fast-moving, transforming, melding shapes and colors, but the images were intertwined with abstract concepts as well. It was almost like the movies were made by aliens. They were not unlike the extreme visions some folks see after a heavy duty dose of DMT.

I cannot picture them all now--only snippets of the imagery--but I remember one in particular: It was about a family of supernatural beings, a father, mother, and two sons. They traveled through space by manipulating imagery somehow, so the whole movie was this incredibly fast-moving sequence of complicated, psychedelic imagery. The two sons had gone on a journey of some kind, practicing their traveling technique as taught to them by their father.

On the last leg of the trip, the two sons became separated, and one arrived home before the other. The father was dying in a spectacular fashion, through his own explosion of images and sound. He was lying on the ground, covered by a shiny, metallic blanket from which he was absorbing his power, but it wasn’t enough to keep from dying. The late son soon arrived, propelled through a tunnel by a river of yellow, dough-like sludge, just in time to witness the father’s final death throes. Upon witnessing this, the son unleashed his own explosion of imagery in a fit of mourning, spreading the images (and himself) across the stars in the sky.

[In the real world, my father died unexpectedly from a massive stroke a few years after I had this dream. I wasn't there when he died, but my brother was, and he went through an intense manic-depressive episode.]

In my dream, which seemed to last for hours, I watched several of these mind-blowing movies. I think some of them had radical political themes of some sort, and I had the distinct feeling that they were powerfully subversive, having the ability to completely undermine the whole movie-making paradigm, and even reality itself. The corporate distributor types who were viewing them were afraid of them, but they too were having their minds blown – they’d watch them wordlessly, with jaws open, shocked looks on their faces, while I went around putting headphones on people and plugging them into DVD players.

I woke up, desperately trying to recall the incredibly complex and bizarre imagery of the movies, but it was too difficult to hold in my mind. I could only recall snippets of them, because they were so alien and impossible to imagine even, in a conscious state at least.

Definitely one of the heaviest dreams I’ve ever had. Took a couple hours to get back to sleep.

[BTW, I've since become aware of the deadly-viral-movie-cartridge story line DFW wrote into Infinite Jest, but at the time of the dream I'd never heard of it before.]
posted by mikeand1 at 1:24 PM on December 7, 2022 [13 favorites]

[Adding one more thing, in case it's not obvious, I've had a fair amount of experience with psychedelics in the distant past, and those mindstates seemed to influence the nature of my dreams. I've even had dreams in which I ingested a psychedelic substance, leading to a full-blown psychedelic experience within the dream.]
posted by mikeand1 at 1:46 PM on December 7, 2022 [3 favorites]

The two that I have the most are:

1) Wandering around an oceanside city with a mountain range a few miles inland, walking around neighborhoods on hills and trying to figure out where they link up. This has variables like sometimes there's a ski chairlift that goes for miles through the valleys; or, there is rail transport linking many offshore islands; or, I wander out of the city and have to retrace my steps because I forgot to get something.

2) Wandering inside a dormitory-type building which is all wood walls and carpet, but also with pedestrian flyovers, staircases that lead to half-offset floors; one room leads to another. Sometimes I wander into the pissy-floor-dream bathroom in those buildings and, because I know that's a dream room, I try to initiate lucid dreaming, but most of the time I fail to become totally lucid and wake up. The building usually has lots of human activity going on around every corner, and could be attached to academic buildings. I blame this on a year on Carnegie Mellon's campus.

There are other "dream locations" that I end up in every so often. The most frustrating things I have happen in dreams is (a) I will try to yell but nothing comes out, or (b) I try to close my eyes to avert seeing something, but I can see through my eyelids. Oh, and there's no way I can consistently read books of clocks in dreams, and I can never dial a phone or enter a password correctly when dreaming. That's extra frustrating because that actually happens to me (not often) in real waking life—like I'll dial, make a mistake, then restart dialing, and repeat that action until I'm like, "okay fuckit am I dreaming this?" If yes, I wake up. If no, I am already awake and have to just take a moment to refocus.

I've had some of the surreal bad-trip types of dreams, but not lately. It's been ages since I've had a nightmare. I am lucky. I used to get them nightly when I was a child and sometimes the same one over and over. The most common one was nothing weird or creepy if described out loud, but also very Dalí-surreal and probably confused and frightened me as a young child, and I couldn't wake myself up until I'd wake up screaming. Then (IRL) my (probably exhausted) parents gave me some placebo they said would cure my nightmares, and they stopped.

The thing is, I wish I could retain more dream plots in my working memory; mostly when I wake up from a dream, if it's not in a familiar setting, I'll try to remember it, and within 15 seconds of being conscious, I will lose every detail.
posted by not_on_display at 7:21 PM on December 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

Occasionally I have recurring dreams resolve and it is very satisfying.
posted by aniola at 8:18 PM on December 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

Bhutan wins with rainbows, and the rest of us should probably meditate more, amirite?
posted by mollymillions at 9:19 PM on December 7, 2022

“I have those so frequently that I sometimes forget that I *don't* actually know the secret of how to fly”

Isn't that weird? There are a few "muscles" which are key to flying (in my dream world) and even awake they are familiar to me — it just seems like I really do know how to fly. In fact, in my dreams, I've learned how to teach other people to fly; taking them up with me and nudging them toward discovering how to start controlling those flying "muscles". (It's like a mental effort, but with some actual control of esoteric, normally involuntary muscles. Like, if you are able to move your ears or scalp, you might know what I mean.)

In dreams, I'm very smug about my ability to fly but, balancing that, I'm also really happy and excited to teach other people to do it, too.

I don't think I've ever dreamt of a snake. I do have the teeth nightmare, though.

I was recently surprised and relieved that other people had the "end of term, never gone to class" nightmare. They are a source of deep dread for me. But it's because I actually have a history very, very close to this scenario, and not only just once, so I've thought up until recently this dream was very specific to my history. Knowing it's common helps.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 9:58 PM on December 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

"I'm going to class, when in a hallway full of peers rushing to and fro, I realize I am not wearing any clothes. Where to hide, what to do, and why doesn't anyone seem to notice?"... Luckily it's been a long while since that, or any school dreams at all! (e.g. it's finals, forgot to study, forgot to go to even one class, etc) So I am a lucky person. Even in those "unprepared at school" dreams, I was always trying to find a workaround, "what to tell the prof, but I just can't remember anything from the whole semester... how to tease the right answers out of a subject i never studied..."

That said, when I was in college, that was my reality. Not the naked part, but the "not going to a class for a whole semester and then trying to fake it" thing, several times, several classes. But, being a snotty overprivileged 17-year-old, I didn't give a crap about flunking out, so I figure it wasn't the cause of either the "naked at school" dreams or the "didn't study" dreams—I'd had those as far back as I can remember, until about a decade or two ago, by the time I was 40 at least. And even then, they weren't BAAAAD dreams, just kinda funny. "Wait... nobody seems to notice!" or "Why can't I even read what's on this test? Do I even go to school here?"

(When I got srs bzns about school, I did go to classes in my pajamas and a hoodie dozens of times IRL; it seemed quite common.)
posted by not_on_display at 10:33 PM on December 7, 2022

My most frequent nightmares are a lot like Piranesi's. Normally, I enter a building that I know well, but then on the inside it has vast spaces with several floors and stairs that don't exist in real life. In my dreams, there are also tons of people who are carelessly destructive, and I am often going around trying to get them to stop ruining stuff, but it is as if they cannot hear or even see me.

Decades ago, there was a lovely dream that came back fairly often. It was as if I was floating in a very soft and warm cloud. It felt like bliss. I always hoped for that dream. It had a special taste/spell associated with it, and when I had to give my youngest formula for a while, I realized the dream was a sort of memory of being a small baby, wrapped in an eiderdown comforter, and drinking formula. Unfortunately, the dream never returned after I figured out what it was about. I once heard about an eccentric lady, who had a huge cot/pram made for her, so she could sleep in the garden like a (Scandinavian) baby all year round. I can follow that.
posted by mumimor at 1:44 AM on December 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

I stopped getting flying dreams as a young adult, and I miss them. I was able to power-climb, soar, dive, roll and loop with ease by leisurely flapping my arms. I remember flying quite high and being thrilled by the view of land spread out below me.

Those dreams seem to have been crushed under the grinding tedium of adulthood, replaced by dreams of ceaselessly receiving more work while falling further and further behind (those have fortunately become rare), or of trying to get from point A to point B but being thwarted either by lack of transportation or by having to go through some incredibly convoluted path to get there (sometimes involving squeezing through/getting stuck in a very tight space/door, which is apparently a mild phobia of mine), or of trying to walk but meeting such resistance that the only way I can move forward is by crouching down and pulling myself along by my arms, as though climbing up a very steep hill. Then there's the tedium dreams; those consist of nothing but sorting and organizing a pile of things, or of trying to clean up an impossibly messy area but never seem to make any progress.

Sleep is where I'm not really a Viking at all.
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:43 AM on December 8, 2022 [5 favorites]

Teeth falling out seems like the last thing Australians should be worried about.
posted by waving at 10:25 AM on December 8, 2022