Thread: Common Dream Categories- Why?

I notice a pattern of certain dream categories that are common to a lot of people.

I am very curious as to why these are. Here are the ones I have noticed so far. Feel free to add to the list, and discuss why you think certain categories are common. What is interesting to me, is a lot of these dream themes are not common occurrences in waking life.

Flying Dreams

Teeth Falling Out Dreams

Naked in Public Dreams

Being Chased Dreams

Killing Dreams

Outer Space Dreams

Geometric Shapes Dreams

Battle Dreams

Going back to your old school or a place of work.

Deceased relative is still alive somewhere.

Looking for your partner but you can't find them.

Having to make urgent phone call but the phone doesn't work.

Funny you should mention.
I dreamed last night that I was in the Green Room of the auditorium where I went to high school. I alsoe dreamed of my sixth grade teacher.

I think the strangest common one is the teeth falling out one. Well, we do all experience this as children, but that pretty much only happens once.

I think that it says somewhere here that dreams of being naked in public, having our teeth fall out/crumble, being chased, device failure, excessive conflict, and a number of other things are actually a sign of stress and/or anxiety (I forget which).

Others, such as seeing a deceased relative, meeting old "characters" from one's life, and going back to places of past commonality can be signs of nostalgia or wishful thinking...

That is, unless your tenth grade math teacher was a complete sadist, or your great-grandfather told long and pointless stories (you know the ones I'm talking about), or your high school was a junk heap and you'd never go back for ANYTHING...I'd count these latter ones in with the stress/anxiety category.

My dreams always involve comradery and guns.

I always seem to be well supplied in my nightmares its funny, I always have a bunch of friends or guns or something in all my nightmares

We often look at dreams from the predictability of our own waking life. That is why having your teeth fall out seems odd for us, because in waking life that would be a major event that would impact us in all kinds of socialized ways. Yet in dreams, it can happen a lot.

It's important to look at dreams as a closed system. Things like anatomy or social standards have completely different uses in dreams. DCs don't conform to our expectations of people, animals, or even furniture, yet I believe there exists a standard from which they do conform to. Since there are common themes and archtypes in dreams, there must be common rules. These rules may be so complex and temporal though to intellectualize them would need a format that is adaptable by the millisecond. Such a thing can only exist in the mind, and really would form a way of thinking then communicable tenets. And thus the personal nature of dreaming.

Originally Posted by TheWeirdnessSymposium

Going back to your old school or a place of work.

Dreaming of your school and recognizing it, even though it looks nothing like the your actual school or work place.

Deja Vu's

Originally Posted by WakingNomad

I notice a pattern of certain dream categories that are common to a lot of people.

I am very curious as to why these are. Here are the ones I have noticed so far. Feel free to add to the list, and discuss why you think certain categories are common. What is interesting to me, is a lot of these dream themes are not common occurrences in waking life.

Flying Dreams

Teeth Falling Out Dreams

Naked in Public Dreams

Being Chased Dreams

Killing Dreams

Outer Space Dreams

Geometric Shapes Dreams

Battle Dreams

To help understand this, I think we can further divide these types of dreams into subcategories.

Anxiety/Death dreams:

• Teeth falling out
• Killing
• Battle
• Being chased
• Naked in public

Dreams of transcendence:

• Flying
• Outer space
• Geometric shapes

It is obvious that we all experience anxiety and a fear of death. This quality is not only unique to humans, as we have observed countless times the parallels between our behavior and animal behavior. Anxiety, we know, has been gained through evolution. On the most fundamental level, we are inherently concerned with our survival both individually and as a species.

Dreams, although there is much mystery still surrounding why we have them, are manifestations of our most basic fears and desires. It is only natural that we often experience scary and life threatening situations during dreams, as this is probably helpful from a survival standpoint. Dreams also provide a relief from the stresses of everyday life, which further allows us to see the connection between dreams and anxiety.

On the other hand, humans are unique in our ability to think and reason, experience emotion and consciousness, and act intuitively. I believe this is why we experience dreams of transcendence. We are sometimes allowed mind blowing experiences that reveal to us realities far beyond human understanding.

This is what makes dreams so amazing- they can reflect our most basic qualities of being alive, or conversely, they can involve profound and extremely complex experiences that no one can quite put their finger on or begin to explain.