Hi there, I made this account specifically to seek some help interpreting a recurring dream I've had for years, in a few different forms. I hope I'm not too presumptuous popping in with this as a first message.

For some background I'm a 30 year old woman, with a husband and one adopted child, living in western Canada.

Here we go:

My most recent iteration of this dream occurred last night. I started thinking about the plot as well as the feelings the dream evoked and realized I've been having versions of it for almost a decade. The one last night was very simple, but also felt, as corny as it sounds, full of meaning.

The dream starts as I find myself seated on a passenger jet, already buckled in. The person seated next to me is a female friend whose face I never actually see, although she only seems to be relevant in one small part of the dream. As the dream starts the plane is reaching the fastest point of taxi-ing, and in my dream I very clearly feel the "roller-coaster stomach" feeling as the bottom falls out the world and the plane lifts off. In reality, I don't fly often but I've never had a fear of flying. In my dream, however, as I sit in my seat all I can think about is how planes typically crash in take off or landing. In my dream I am thinking "I can't escape now, if I am going to die, it's going to be in the next 10 minutes, and I will have no control over my odds of survival nor will I have any way of predicting whether this day will be like any other or my last." In my dream, I sit quietly and do my best to find a way to be okay with being trapped in a flying metal box with my own mortality. I have the intense urge to scream and flee, but I know I can't, and the dream is largely just about that sensation: I could die at any second and never know it was going to happen until it's too late, I can't make it stop, it's too late to run, I'm trapped, I just have to sit here and take it and hope for the best. I also feel like I can't express my fear to my seatmate, because I don't want to scare my friend. I wonder if she feels the same way, but I don't speak to her.

I never dream about the cruising altitude portion of the flight, because in my dream that isn't something to be afraid of (even though fear of flying doesn't work this way at all). It feels like when you've zoned out staring at something for a few seconds, then snap back not sure of how much time has passed. The dream picks up again during landing, where again I can distinctly feel the roller-coaster feeling in my stomach, and I am essentially white-knuckled and counting the seconds until I can be sure I'm not going to die, as the plane lands. The same sensation of "I should have run when I had the chance, I'm trapped and there's nothing I can do to stop death from coming if it chooses" is there, possibly more intense than the first time. I have the distinct thought of "if something terrible is going to happen, now's the time".

The dream ends right before the plane touches down.

Another version of this dream I used to have had a slight variation where it was a small prop plane, and it landed, nonsensically, using a long wooden pier/boardwalk, constructed in a T-shape in the middle of a swamp. The fear/mortality/uncertainty sensations/thoughts were always exactly the same, though. Sometimes this dream would end with me swimming through the swamp back to land, which was always cool and refreshing and weirdly enjoyable. The swamp/prop plane version was less crushing dread and more anticipation/exhilaration in some ways. The passenger jet version is a much more unpleasant dream. It also seems to have gotten progressively "darker" as I've gotten older.

Well, there you have it. I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts!