According to the all knowing Wikipedia, the most common feeling experienced during dreams is anxiety. I am prone to dreams that are full of anxiety. Typical dreams include the following:
I am living in the world without Howie. I have an awareness that I had a soul mate or life partner at one point…but in the dream I can’t remember who he is, what he looked like or what happened to the relationship. In a variation of this dream, I am with another person (usually faceless, nameless) who is not Howie and it just feels wrong.
I am waiting tables at a restaurant and the hostess has just seated me 4 tables. I’m trying to get water to all of the tables at one time…but the fountain is coming in slow drips.
I am taking a class during a summer session at a University. Except I haven’t gone to any of the lectures in the past 5 weeks and there is an exam coming up. I vacillate between believing I can study to make up for the exam and believing I should drop the class and take an incomplete.
Once I decided to get pregnant, these dreams started to form around pregnancy plots. For example, after Burning Man last year I dreamt that Howie and I had left our dog at home during the festival. In the dream we’d failed to get a dog-sitter or leave food out for the animal and we came back to a shivering animal with bald patches and soft teeth.
Terrifying…I know.
My friend Elizabeth compares the above dream to ones she has about literally LOSING her baby. She puts the baby down and then can’t remember where she left it. Sometimes she can hear it cry but can’t get to it or find it.
So, last night I had one of the weirder dreams I have had. I dreamt that I gave birth to Cougar Dan too early. Except instead of being small he was big…like 18-month-old big…with a huge baby head. In the dream I had a midwife who was convinced that I had to put Cougar Dan “back in.” To let him gestate longer. As much as I thought that I’d want Cougar Dan to have adequate in-utero time before meeting the world…I couldn’t understand how she planned to put him “back.”
What does it mean? Anxiety about parenting? Anxiety about pregnancy? Anxiety about a baby with an enormous head (see my husband and father)? Who knows!
What’s your anxiety dream?
The Forever Endeavor 
I once had a dream where I was in charge of a baby who wasn’t mine but whom I cared for. In the dream, I kept winding up in very inappropriate places–like crowded nightclubs and rocky mountain tops–and couldn’t figure out how to get anywhere safe. Eventually, baby and I made it home. Unfortunately, the dream ended when I *literally* threw out the baby with the bathwater. Yeah, I know.
Around the death of my last car, I had this dream that I was driving. I drove my car off a cliff near the golden gate bridge, and while the car was careening off the cliff I jumped out the window and grabbed onto the bridge. Happy that I averted certain death, I looked down at the falling car only to notice, then instantly feel, that my car was tethered to my ankle. I couldn’t hold on.
Mostly my anxiety dreams are about being unable to save the kids from something. Like the other night when I had a dream about coyotes trying to eat Maxwell and Zara.
A close second is probably infidelity dreams.
This kind of discussion makes me happy that I almost never remember my dreams — except lastnight when I dreamed that a co-worker near my office was smoking in her office, and I was disgusted and afraid that the smoke was going to affect my embryo.
That said, my co-worker (same as above) has this interesting way of analyzing dreams that, I think, comes from Dr. Jung:
1) Write down all the things, visually, that stand out to you in the dream, for example: car (maybe, for traveling to Burning Man), dog, food bowl ….
2) For each object, write 5 adjectives describing what it was like in the dream. So, the dog was: sick, balding, sad, hungry. The food bowl was: silver, empty, ….
3) THEN, you say “I am ___” and fill in the blank with each adjective you’ve written and decide whether it resonates for you. And if it does, that, theoretically, is one of the emotions manifesting itself in your dream.
This worked for me one time. But other dreams are more obvious and it doesn’t really work. I dunno, but I think it’s kind of interesting.
i do not have anxiety dreams. I am the picture of serenity. Like a lake. Filled with beer.
except I am the lake. and the beer is non-alcoholic. And lauren has a straw.
except it’s not really Lauren. and her teeth are soft.