Do you experience recurring dreams? Most people do. Dreams are messages from us to ourselves, yet people seldom pay attention or understand how to decipher their own dreams. The movie Inception, although it was fiction, also revealed a lot of information about how dreams work.
When we are sleeping, our minds continue to work. That’s why sometimes people say, “let me sleep on it,” and when they awake they have a clearer perspective on their preferred course of action. In fact, you can deliberately ask yourself a question before you go to sleep and awaken with an answer or decision that has eluded you. So, what are our dreams trying to tell us, and what can we do to resolve the things our subconscious may be flagging for us?
There are many universal recurring dreams or themes within dreams.
- Driving (or being in a car). This represents the direction your life is taking. Where you are sitting in the car can also indicate how much control you feel you have over your direction. I have lots of these kinds of dreams: 1) I’m driving and going very fast, but entirely driving backwards looking over my shoulder, 2) I’m driving but the longer I go, the worse the road gets until I am literally driving in a small rut in a field, 3) the car won’t go where I want it to go; it just idles or drifts slightly backward. Consider the pun “going nowhere fast” or “all revved up with no place to go” or “headed in the wrong direction.” This is one I believe you have to resolve in your waking life by either gaining control of your direction or “going with the flow” by accepting the new direction you’ve taken.
- Bathrooms. In dreams, these can represent your emotions – things you need to “let out” that might be getting clogged up inside. Consider puns like “all bottled up inside.” To resolve this dream, you have to just “go” anywhere you happen to be. Gross, I know. But it is a great way to tell if you are dreaming.
- Underwater. Usually represents things that are “below the surface” of your consciousness. Things that you can’t quite grasp that are inside of you – can be good or bad. Often this one doesn’t need a resolution, just some reflection on what you are seeing.
- Clothes. Represent the persona or how you portray yourself to the world. Consider ideas like “just doesn’t fit me” or “this doesn’t suit me” or “buying off the rack.” Likewise a dream in which some of your clothes are missing is usually about feeling exposed. I think the best resolution for this one is to go with it and become comfortable naked (in your dream anyway). Tell yourself you have nothing to be ashamed of. After all, since you are in a dream, the other people are really just manifestations of you anyway. If it’s about poor clothing choices – are you trying to fit in where you know you shouldn’t?
- Test taking. Sitting an exam for which you are completely unprepared is about performance anxiety or fear of failing and being seen through. You may feel unprepared for the challenges you are facing, and afraid you will be found wanting. Personally, I like to just walk out of the test, but I’m not sure that’s much of a resolution.
- Animals. Often represent our underlying emotions. It’s good to pay attention to these to find out what you are discovering about yourself. If you are confronted by something really scary, I resolve this by confronting it, and usually it fades away or changes to something less scary.
- Being lost or never getting to destination. This is my least favorite one I sometimes get. I’m trying to get somewhere, like home to my family, but obstacles keep happening and I just never get there, or I’m trying to find my way to my childhood home, and I don’t remember how to get there or it has all changed. I think in my case, this is either a reminder to call my parents or to quit traveling so much in my job.
- Airplane. This can literally refer to being “on a higher plane.” Like a car, it deals with going somewhere – one’s direction in life – but in this case you are traveling with others who surround you, so the crowd you hang out with. Once I had a dream about having a conversation with a person who had wronged me sitting next to me on a flight. It was evidence that we had risen above the previous conflict and were able to relate on a higher plane (at least in my mind).
So do you have any interesting recurring dreams? Discuss.
Wheat & Tares 
Hmm, whenever I have a “bathroom” dream, I wake up and realize I need to find a real one. Then I go back to sleep and the dream doesn’t come back.
Interesting, the variety of human experience.
Stephen, yes that can be the case, too – but you can have the bathroom dream either with or without the physical need. Good point!
I had a recurring dream for years as a child and young adult. It included a bunch of disjointed images with no meaning readily apparent to me. Some of the images were a little troubling, though not overtly so. Perhpas because of that fact, or the fact that I did not understand the dream, it was always disconcerting and unpleasant to me. After years of having this dream, I once told a friend about it. I have not had the dream since.
Of course there are variations on these themes. The “actor’s nightmare” is like the test dream, but not knowing the play or lines (and sometimes incorporates the clothing idea by having the dreamer appear naked).
I had a particularly poignant experience with the driving dream. I was driving not one, but two cars simultaneously in the wrong direction on a busy freeway. Had the dream several nights in a row, waking in a sweat as the cars flipped, crashed together and burned. (A therapist helped interpret the dream pretty quickly, though sorting through what it all meant for me and my life took a little longer.)
In other maddening dreams, I find myself repeating what happens in real life. I cannot remember most names, try as I might. In my dreams I’ll meet someone and ask his or hear name, and never be able to hear the response. Maddening.
This post reminded me of a dream I had a few years back where I was driving a car. In the car were 2 of my brothers and a former stake president. As we rounded a corner (I was driving too fast if I remember correctly), we drove off the road through a field and, finally, over a cliff where we were in a free fall. The dream ended in the freefall and only happened 1x.
Depending on how you interpret it, it may have come true.
My recurring dream was about being chased by goblins of some kind or another, with the dream ending with me being hit by arrows. Goodness I hated that dream. Curiously, I stopped having it after I moved to my mothers and went back to church.
The interesting thing to me — because dreams have played an important role in profoundly important decisions in my life — is whether the sub-conscious can be a route for revelatory experience.
Presumably, if one believes in personal revelation or inspiration from an external source (which most readers here call God), there is SOME mental process occurring in which the inspiration becomes conscious to us. So, do we believe that messages can come from God to our subconsciousness before they become “messages to ourselves”?
Paul:
A therapist helped interpret the dream pretty quickly
There is no way anyone can accurately name the reason you have dreams. We don’t know the source of dreams and why we have them.
I don’t feel like I have recurring dreams in the strictest sense–not where the same scene plays out again and again. However, recurring themes like the ones you mention above do occur. I’m guaranteed a couple of tornado dreams every year, which I attribute to tornados hitting the city I grew up in when I was in kindergarden. I periodically have celebrity encounter dreams. These are often anti-climactic and/or confrontational, rarely satisfying.
Even though it’s been many years and I don’t practice the faith anymore, I still occasionally have dreams about being a Mormon missionary again. These aren’t dreams of being back out on my actual mission. They are dreams about getting called on another mission (even though in the dreams I’m aware that I am inactive). These aren’t very intense. They play out more like punching in a time clock to do another shift. Puzzling.
I have had the dream of getting called on another mission countless times. Usually for some reason in the dreams I decided to take another two years out of my education process to serve a new, separate mission call. It happened before and after I was married. Sometimes in the dream I will realize that I am in fact married and have children that I can’t leave and the dream will segway into something else. Other times I actually end up on the mission. I’ve gone back to the same country in some dreams and been called to another country in other dreams.
I’ve also had recurrent dreams about needing to find an apartment/apartment hunting for going to another semester of college back in my college town. I’ve been out of college for a long time, but still have this one.
The ‘forgotten class’ used to be a recurrent dream. Usually I dream that I forgot that I registered for a class until the end of the semester and relaized that I hadn’t attended the class for weeks or months. I don’t have that one much anymore, but recently had a variation of it.
I recently had one of the weirdest dreams I can remember. My wife and I drove to her gravesite (she recently passed away). After we visited it, she helped me load something from her grave into a trailer the car was pulling. I think that’s only the second or third time I’ve dreamed about her since she died four months ago. I’m surprised I haven’t dreamed about her more often. Maybe I just don’t remember them.
Thank you for posting on the oft neglected spiritual gift of dream interpretation, which was, in Biblical times, an essential aspect of divine communication.
Dream symbols are subjective of course, but I like many of the meanings you have found.
I personally like to interpret a car as the body. If it breaks down, or if we are not driving it, it could mean that our subconscious is telling us that our body is sick, or that we are out of control.
I interpret bathrooms, water, and clothing in a similar way to you.
I personally interpret animals as habitual ways of thinking or behaving. Animals are creatures of habit, instinctual, so I think that when they become aspects of our subconscious identity, they are expressing our habits. Not always of course, but something I always consider. But I think they also could indicate emotional states.
I agree that airplanes are about life direction, but perhaps life direction on the spiritual plane. Like trains and buses, which have groups of people, airplanes can be interpreted as attitudes we share with cultures or groups, and the direction they are going in. You can also interpret cities as cultural attitudes. Flying I generally interpret as freedom.
Thanks you for sharing. I think writing down dreams and trying to interpret them can be a very meaningful spiritual exercise.
Every dream is about the dreamer, and I think every dream has something to communicate to us if we will stop to think about it.
Two recurring dreams: From the age of 10 to 18, I had alien invasion dreams. I was always being heavily pursued, and felt very scared. When I was 18 and at BYU, I realized in my dream that they never got me and I never died after a fall, so I fought back and killed them all. Never had another alien dream. Classic coming of age dream.
#8 Henry: Wow. I am startled at your wisdom. You’re probably right: the help I gained working with the therapist did nothing to improve my life, my family, my work. He was completely clueless.
If fact, as the therapist and I discussed my dream and the matters that were deeply concerning me at the time, the meaning of the dream became quite clear — not because he said, “Oh, you’re dream means….” In fact, his ideas were couched far less definitively: “I can’t say for sure, but do you think your dream might be related to….”
He left its interpretation to me, and the interpretation helped me to resolve some significant issues. When I’ve had similar “driving out of control” dreams since then, I’ve been able to identify more quickly the possible triggers for those dreams and sort through them.
Henry, I’m uncertain if your hostility is toward therapists or dream interpretation. If it’s the latter, I don’t know why you chose my comment as your insertion point.
Though I don’t tend to have recurring dreams* I very often have dreams with the same curious format. In the dream there is more than one person and I am one of those people, but I experience the dream from a different person’s point of view. For instance just last night I dreamt that I was on a bike ride with a high school friend, but I was the friend on a bike ride with myself.
I’m not sure what it might mean or be connected to, but it happens almost every time I have a dream I can remember.
* Well except the one about the spider when I was a kid, but we’re pretty sure that was due to a Gilligan’s Island episode.
Paul:
Nothing personal.
It just annoys me when people set themselves up as experts on dreams when no one is an expert on dreams. We don’t know the source of them or why they happen so for someone to say they know for sure what it means just gets my goat.
And I am glad that you were helped and that things are better for you.
Thanks, Henry. It seems your beef is with the entire OP, not just my experience, then.
Exactly.
Henry – that’s an interesting criticism. Is it because you feel dreams are not meaningful in a decipherable way or that you feel all dream interpretation is completely subjective to the dreamer? If the former, I think you are rejecting psychology, but if the latter I think even psychologists would agree (ironically perhaps). I agree with the latter that subjectivity trumps the collected wisdom, but I do feel the collected wisdom is a great starting point.
I don’t dream myself so I don’t have anything to really contribute in a significant way except this anecdotal story from when I was teaching Elders quorum which makes me smile about reoccurring dreams.
We were talking about revelation when one of the members asked us about if dreams were a form of revelation. We spoke about how sometimes that it is a form of revelation. He then proceeded to tell us how he kept having a dream that the world was going to be flooded, and how he thought that was God warning him. We said that was probably not a revelation, as that would probably come through the prophet, he muttered something and the discussion moved on.
Weeks later, we get a report from the Home teachers, that this brother was so convinced that his dreams were a revelation that he had moved all his furniture to the top floors of his house for when the flood came and had been living like this for several months as he waited for the floods to come.
My most recurring dreams are action oriented…like I’m a James Bond kinda guy, sometimes in a car, sometimes jumping from a plane, sometimes climbing up the side of a submarine (what??). Silly, I know…but I keep having them. And I get the girl. And its not my wife (oops…some dreams you shouldn’t share with others).
I probably forget more dreams than I remember. I know I had a dream, just don’t remember what it was.
I think I used to put more stock in dreams, thinking kind of like Father Lehi that dreams are from God and mean something. Maybe some do. Maybe some are just random thoughts from a brain that was clogged up all day with stimulus, and needs to “let it out” in the form of crazy ideas, since the next day is sure to bring hours on the computer filling out reports and spreadsheets.
#21: Jacob…interesting story…so apparently God only floods the whole earth on the ground floor across the world? 😉
I think other peoples’ dreams are always weird to me, but that’s because the emotional part isn’t there whereas my dreams are experienced and I feel it, and that makes it somehow more impactful to me. Just hearing the anecdotal stories are hollow to me…which is often too much of the church experience in my current ward.
If some of the earlier comments in the thread are valid, perhaps the elder in Jacob’s story should have looked more at the symbolism of the dream before moving the furniture, since his literal response wouldn’t actually help anything if God DID flood the entire world.
Actually the guy with the flood dream probably just needed to pee. Now he’s gone to all this trouble . . .
Hawk, Indeed, according to him it would seem that flooding is limited to one floor only across the world. I suspect that if God followed the same flooding pattern that if people in the time of Noah had only had two story houses they would have been saved.