Anybody having intense stress dreams lately?

This is dream expert Sigmund Freud, whom you may recall from "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure"

This is dream expert Sigmund Freud, whom you may recall from “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.”

I ask because someone told me that a lot of people were having these during the pandemic. Apparently, this is a thing. Although the explanations I’ve seen don’t really work for me. I know a lot of people have been stressed by quarantining and all, but as I’ve said, I haven’t.

I was told about this when I mentioned some super-weird ones I had back after my stroke. They weren’t so much stress dreams as obsessive dreams. I found myself in different universes in which it was necessary that certain things be done a certain, specific way or else, I don’t know — the universe in question would stop operating properly.

I figured I was having them due to a change in medication. I described one or two of them to one of my kids, and was told lots of people were having stressful dreams that were being chalked up to the coronavirus.

I’m not going to describe any of them to you because they’re so weird, just explaining one would be too much trouble.

I’m just asking whether y’all are having any. If so and you want to share, and what you share is interesting, maybe I’ll try to share one, too.

If I can remember. I’ve actually sort of stopped having the unique obsessive ones — the ones that were a new experience. Lately I have had a stressful dream or two, but of the ordinary sort — the kind that are closely related to the common “it’s the last day of the semester and you’ve supposed to take an exam but you’ve never been to the class and are afraid to ask where it is” dream that everyone who’s been to college has. (For me, those particular dreams are not really symbolic, but sort of based on literal experience.)

Anyway, share if you feel like it. I’m curious…

14 thoughts on “Anybody having intense stress dreams lately?

  1. Randle

    My days are stress dreams, watching this in insanity unfold. Ionesco couldn’t have come up up with a more absurd scenario. Except people are sick and dying.

  2. JesseS

    Nights back in April and May were nothing but nightmares. Now the weird dreams are gone, but I’ve started having fits of vertigo. I try to hunker down and read or exercise, but nothing seems to help.

    1. Brad Warthen Post author

      Any nightmares worth telling us about?

      By the way, I was having vertigo before the stroke, but it went away. Not that I recommend having a stroke or anything…

      1. JesseS

        End of the world stuff mostly.

        Also, decided to take your unspoken advice. The doc just put me on blood pressure meds.

          1. JesseS

            Nah, no statins. just one med for blood pressure and one for dizziness. Thankfully the world finally stopped spinning. On the plus side my EKG results were good.

  3. Brad Warthen Post author

    Did y’all notice my cutline on the Freud picture?

    “This is dream expert Sigmund Freud, whom you may recall from ‘Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.'”

    Sometimes, now that we’re living in Trump’s America, I feel like I need to explain things in terms more likely to be broadly understood. Rather than, you know, assuming that people are familiar with Freud. Or, as Bill and Ted would say, Frood….

    1. Brad Warthen Post author

      Sometimes I remember them in absurdly extensive detail. I suppose those are ones that happened just before I woke up. Although the most memorable ones feel like they were going on for hours and hours, and the details I remember support that. The dreams tend to have chapters with different actions and assumptions, and within the dreams themselves I can remember all the earlier episodes.

      Those are often the worst ones.

      Thank God I’ve never experienced anything like Twain’s story, “The Great Dark.” You ever read that? It was the last piece in Letters from the Earth (at least, it was in the edition I had), a bunch of dark writings that his family suppressed until 1962. I read it in high school, and it probably influenced my view of Twain almost as much as Huck Finn and Connecticut Yankee. Which is why his family had suppressed them.

      Anyway, to synopsize it… (This includes a SPOILER, but not too much of one. Anyway, he never finished writing the piece.) It’s about a guy who falls asleep, and starts to dream, and in the dream has a disagreement with the Superintendent of Dreams, which proves to be a horrific mistake. Because the Superintendent is all-powerful in his realm, and he punishes the protagonist by trapping him in the increasingly grim nightmare for years and years.

      At the end (I can’t remember now whether the ending was written, or this was just in Twain’s notes), the character — finally released — wakes and realizes he had only been asleep for a minute or so.

      It was pretty chilling. But if Twain was right, of course, maybe the dreams I think go on for hours don’t…

        1. Brad Warthen Post author

          Actually, I’m very close to taking the plunge and ordering a full barber clipper kit from Amazon. Has all the clipper guards, including my own 4 and 7.

          The hard part is, getting up the nerve to cut my Dad’s hair. Mine is simple. His is complicated.

          I’m afraid I’ll get halfway through the job, and find myself having to ask him, “Um… hey, remember how you had a crewcut the whole time I was growing up? Why don’t we go for THAT?”

  4. Mottes' Mom

    Ball of confusion

    1918 flu epidemic
    Great Depression
    Civil Rights movement
    Wrap it up.
    Who knew at 64, when I finally grew into a Beatles song, it comes down.
    https://www.tm.org

    No advert.

  5. Barry

    No nightmares at all or weird dreams.

    But I am in my late 40s now and I almost can never sleep more than about 4 hours. It really wears on me.

    I realize it will shorten my life considerably

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