Published: April 27, 2007 06:30 pm            

Not-so-sweet dreams haunt us all

If Ellen Crouse is having a bad dream, there’s probably going to be a periodic table of the elements involved.

There she is, back in high school chemistry, about to take The Big Test, when she suddenly remembers she hasn’t been to class all semester.

There’s no way, she realizes with a wave of panic, that she will pass. And assuredly, alarmingly, her entire future hinges on this one test.

“I just know I won’t be able to graduate with my friends and go off to college,” she says. “I’m horrified.”

It’s been 35 years since Crouse was in high school. But she can’t remember a time when she hasn’t had that dream.

Sue Reed, 47, regularly has the same dream as Crouse. So does Nancy Gutherie, 69.

And so, according to dream expert Patricia Garfield, does 40 percent of the population.

It’s called an anxiety dream, and everyone has them. You’re being chased and you don’t know why. You’re in a play and you don’t know your lines. You’re trying to get somewhere and find you can’t.

They may not top the list when it comes to our worst nightmares, but there’s something about these particular dreams that haunts us. There’s also something about them that is universal.

The most common dream, according to Garfield, is the one in which you’re being chased, followed by the one in which you’re either falling or drowning. These dreams cross cultures and languages, gender and age, and we’ve been dreaming them since we started studying dreams — and maybe since the dawn of the dream itself.

But if we’re different people living different lives in different places under different circumstances, it begs the obvious question: Why are we all having the same dreams?

The short answer is that no one really knows. But Garfield has developed a theory, based on 58 years of research, that there is something instinctual in humans that plays out in our dreams, a universal set of problems we try to cope with through our universal dreams.

“We all struggle to have control in our lives, to take care of ourselves and our loved ones and have the best life we can,” she said. “Dreams are a kind of problem-solving device.”

And since we have, at base, the same problems, she says, we end up having the same dreams.

Take the car dream. You’re driving along, everything’s fine. Maybe it’s not, you know, your car, but it is in your dream. Then something goes wrong. The car breaks down, it’s careening wildly downhill, you can’t see where you’re going — it’s bad.

Well, no one was having “the car dream” 300 years ago, when cruising around town in a Chevy Caprice wasn’t exactly the norm.

But they did, Garfield says, have “the horse dream.”

“The basic human emotions are limited,” she said. “We use what we’re familiar with in our environment (to express them in our dreams).”

About two-thirds of our dreams involve some kind of apprehension, according to Veronica Tonay, the author of three dream books and a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

But what they mean is up for debate.

Tonay subscribes to the Carl Jung school of thought, which purports that our dream self is an inversion of our waking self. Though we behave in our dreams much as we do in real life, she says, we feel things differently.

In the case of “the test dream,” those who tend to have it are the kind of people who are the least likely to be unprepared for a test, according to “The Complete Dream Book” by Gillian Holloway (Sourcebooks Inc., $14.95, 344 pages). Having that dream is a way for the dreamer to recognize they’ve taken on too much and need to step back, according to the book.

But of course, everyone has their own interpretations as well.

When Julie Calderwood was in her 20s and 30s, she often had the dream where she was about to walk on stage in a play and didn’t know any of her lines. It was, she felt, a reflection of her anxiety about her performance in social and work situations.

Now that she is in her 40s, instead she frequently dreams she’s in a house containing an endless labyrinth of rooms she’s never been in — another common anxiety dream that she believes indicates the different concerns that come with age.

“You reach a point in your life when you’re not as worried about what other people think — you know your lines (so to speak),” she said. “(The room dream) is more about exploring other possibilities in your life as an adult.”

For many of us, our dreams are a more accessible way to deal with emotions or people that might be too threatening if we approached them head-on, Garfield says.

“The monsters that are after us are more mind monsters,” she said. “Nightmares tell us to pay attention.”



Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.shns.com.

        

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