Thread: Hi I'm Julie, I'm new, and I have dream problems, help!

I keep having this dream every night that is caused by stress at my summer job. It is basically the opposite of a lucid dream- I have full body awareness and can feel myself lying down, but my mind believes I am at work and fills in the background of where I'm lying down. I constantly feel anxious that my boss will see me lying down and not doing the job so I keep looking around to see if anyone is watching me. I want to get up but my body feels so tired; Some nights I just feel anxious the whole time and sleep badly, other nights I actually force myself to sit up in bed and it takes me a minute or two to realize I'm not at work and then I lie back down. I can't stop these half-dreams from coming every night and it's making me lose a lot of sleep, any suggestions?

Hi, Julie. Welcome to Dream Views. I think the tactic to solving your dream problems should be to reduce stress in waking life. There are many techniques for stress reduction out there. Exercise can help reduce stress, as can meditation, for example. Increasing your awareness in waking life, so that you notice the cause and effect of how your stress and negative emotions build up, and then work on consciously changing your emotions. Pay attention to your inner monologue: what are you telling yourself? Catch yourself whenever you tell yourself something negative and change it. Whenever you catch yourself stressing out, calm down and start breathing in and out calmly. Pay attention to what you think of before going to bed: think peaceful thoughts, think of pleasant stuff, do not think about work. Consider the positive aspects of your summer job and focus on those - and if there aren't any, is there any chance that quitting the job and finding another would be a good idea. If you cannot or should not quit the job in your opinion, are there other things you can quit or reduce in your life to reduce your stress - sometimes letting go of some obligations that are less important and taking more time to exercise and/or relax can be key to stress reduction. Reduce caffeine. You might also google the web for more advice on how to reduce stress. I think once you reduce stress in waking life, your dream life will follow suit, but it would be much harder to solve your dream problems without solving or at least reducing your waking problems first. I wish you all the best!

Hi Julie, Welcome to DV! This sort of dream is probably the most common in the world, and there is a reason. You mention it is a summer job, so I assume it is new to you. If you are young, the very act of having a real job is probably pretty new to you. The process of learning new tasks and skills involves endless replay of variations on what you are learning over and over in your dreams. This is like writing the information from a flash drive on to a hard drive. It is an act of burning an image of each variation on the theme into your brain. If someone is not sleeping well, and they have a new job, or take any form of class, then they can witness the burning process. It is very irritating and can be hateful. You spend all day at work, why spend all night there too!
What to do??? First realize what is going on, that will help a little. It is going to happen no matter what, but you can request of your own brain that it happen way off in the background.
Second, having accepted what the dreams are, attempt to get deeper sleep. First reduce or stop using caffiene, and look into taking an over the counter diphenhydramine sleep aid. It is non habit forming and only lasts 4 to 6 hours, so you do not feel bad in the morning. Any pharmacy will have it and cheap. It is the same thing as benadryl allergy tabs, so if you can get those cheap, get those.
Basically, you will have the dreams anytime you are in new setting and forced to adapt to new things, but you can do things to sleep deeper and then not be bothered by the dreams. Hope that helps.

I get stressful dreams of being at work as well. Becoming lucid helps considerably. I usually just end up walking or teleporting out. Sometimes I will throw things beyond the normal realm of human strength or the possibilities of physics. I loath such dreams and change them quickly.

The fun part is that this might actually be a good thing for you. While you're at work in your waking life, frequently ask yourself if you're dreaming. If you experience a moment of stress at work, question the reality of the situation. Perhaps do a reality check. Basically, make this behavior part of your routine. If you do this enough, it might actually help transfer that behavior over into your dream world where, hopefully, you'll realize you're dreaming and you can then proceed to vent all of that stress on the dream characters unfortunate enough to populate said dream.