When I remember what I dream it often involves me running away from something.

My recurring nightmares involve abandonment and not being prepared (not knowing my lines on opening night/not having a lesson planned/etc.)

I have recurring nightmares about going back to school. It is usually that I am in high school again. I can't remember where my locker is and I haven't been to class in ages and I don't know why. It's weird to me that the nightmares are set in high school, but I know that the anxiety comes from my thoughts about going back to college.

Hubby wakes me up from dreams where I'm thrashing around and making scared sounds, but it turns out I'm just living an episode of an action movie or something and I yell at him for interrupting. Really, though, running away from people who want to kill you because you've discovered their secret plan would be scary, though fun to watch on TV.

The dreams I wish he would wake me up from generally involve body parts coming off in my hand and me trying desperately to reattach them. Apparently tiny whimpers of dread don't wake him up.

I have recurring nightmares about going back to school. It is usually that I am in high school again. I can't remember where my locker is and I haven't been to class in ages and I don't know why. It's weird to me that the nightmares are set in high school, but I know that the anxiety comes from my thoughts about going back to college.

Gah, yes. I can even tell myself in my dreams, "Stop it! YOu graduated with honors, you didn't forget that one class all year! You're married and college was 20 years ago!" Doesn't help.

My long-standing nightmares involve being in one of those parking garages with the spiral downramp. In my dream, I go down and down but never get out of the parking deck. Many dreams start out more promising, but always end up in the parking deck. Once I dreamed I was going to class on music theory taught by Bruce Springstein, but then I couldn't get there because I couldn't get out of the parking garage. Occasionally I have dreams in which I am very late to something. This doesn't seem too unusual, because I often have days in which I've very late to something.

Gah, yes. I can even tell myself in my dreams, "Stop it! YOu graduated with honors, you didn't forget that one class all year! You're married and college was 20 years ago!" Doesn't help.

Yes, this. I tell myself in the dream, why wouldn't I go to Ms. R's class? I adored her. I went to school most days just because of her.

In high school I used to have very vivid, very violent dreams. Usually there was some kind of military battle, but sometimes in was action movie-esque with hand guns and hiding for cover. I was always on the losing side and trying to win. Eventually they stopped.

The one that I had the longest was always dogs and wild animals or people trying to break in, or getting in and trying to hurt me. In the dreams I could get to the phone but I couldn't get 911 to work or the people to understand what was going on. I'd always wake up anxious and freaked out. At some point in the last couple of years in the dream I figured out that I had power and got off the phone with 911 and took care of it myself. I've never really had that dream again.

I've never really had that dream again.

I love that feeling. Learning to drive freed me from my trapped in cars anxiety dream.

Of course, I just got another one. Probably the teeth, or being swallowed by meetings.

For me, though, the most uncomfortable dreams are the ones in which I have sex with someone I actually know IRL, and then once I've woken up and I see them the next day, I am convinced that they must know.

I've only had a few of those, but they are seriously cringeworthy.

Before I married, I had recurring nightmares about weddings gone awry. Some involved people I wanted to marry, but couldn't--the aisle would keep stretching out so I'd never make it to the altar, or we'd be on the way to our honeymoon when my husband informed me he had no intentions of ever consummating the marriage. Others involved somehow having ended up married to a stranger without knowing how it happened, and that I couldn't get it annulled because I'd already consummated the marriage and gotten pregnant without actually remembering the sex (somehow a simple divorce was never in my nightmare repertoire), marrying someone I didn't know very well or have any interest in but feeling like I couldn't back out on the morning of the wedding, and getting married, realizing at the reception we'd made a mistake, and going our separate ways, but then my "husband" refused to cooperate when I wanted an annulment or divorce so I could marry someone else because that was sinful.

Creative little subconscious I had back then.