Wednesday 13 August 2014

Anxiety dreams

Apropos of nothing, I've been thinking about anxiety dreams, and how they change over time. Most people, at one time or another, will have had the naked-in-public dream. Having failed to revise for an exam is another common one.

My most regular one, for many years, had a cricketing flavour (I used to play club cricket regularly). I'd get the call to go in to bat at the fall of a wicket, and find I had no pads on. I'd rush to get padded up, manage to do so in time, then find that the spikes in my boots were stuck fast in the wooden floor.

These days, I occasionally get a poetry anxiety dream instead. I'm doing a reading, usually somewhere pretty upmarket-looking, when I realise that I've got no books or manuscript or anything. At that point, it occurs to me that I've never actually written a poem, and I'm caught between asking the organisers why on earth they booked me, and legging it at high speed.

But anyway, my question is, does anyone out there get anxiety dreams that are nothing to do with any aspect of their real lives?

4 comments:

globeonmytable said...

No, mine are clearly linked to what's going on, even if I don't spot it at the time. Or linked to my worst fears in the past.

Nellissima said...

All my life I've had anxiety dreams about being in a stage play, in which I've forgotten my lines, although I've never ever done any formal acting. When I was a little girl, I used to hear my father's lines for him, that's all.

Alice said...

My anxiety dreams are always centred around trying to walk/get somewhere but my feet are stuck fast and I can't get my legs to move... I figure it's my fear of being rooted to one place so entirely related to my real life, I guess!

Matt Merritt said...

I find it odd that I used to get them related to cricket, which was never more than a Saturday afternoon hobby, but never have them involving birds, which now come into my day job. I do occasionally get one where I see a rare bird and wake up convinced that it was real, then slowly realise that it wasn't.