I’ve heard people talking about weird recurring dreams, and among my friends, it usually has an element related to school, like forgetting an exam date or missing a deadline for a paper. There are studies about recurring dreams trying to find evidence to suggest recurring dreams have any deep or significant meaning but while it’s not proven, the only meaning may be exposing potential areas of stress in life. And they generally reflect bold themes in your life like unmet needs or frustration or issues from the past that you haven’t addressed.
My sister has this recurring dream of falling which makes total sense, cause she has this excessive fear of heights, she gets anxiety even if I step foot on the balcony. My friends’ school-related dreams probably come from the strong push our parents had during our education back in those dark years after the revolution in Iran, which shows how much unhealthy stress was pressured on us for our homework or excelling in school.
Anyhow, that’s not my nightmare, I guess mine is more of a modern age concern. Also, I was a smart nerdy student back in those ages and I was rarely worried about exams or my grades. In my recurring dream, I see myself wandering around a big area, the place may be different from time to time and from dream to dream, sometimes it’s a dessert, once it was in a huge campus, last night it was a part of a village I guess. Wherever it is, the feeling is always the same. I am lost and I’m trying to figure a way out of this vast area and by out of it, I mean to get to a place that has internet coverage!
Yes, I am worried and agitated about losing my internet connection, I keep getting emails, keep hearing these notification sounds of some sort, and while I wanna answer them, my internet cuts off. I even get to read them and start writing back, but the minute I press send, everything freezes. It’s like suddenly drowning into a zero-point space. I wake up every time with that feeling of frustration, suspension and hopelessness, and in a fraction of a second, I feel relieved that it was just a dream.
This dream has been happening very recently, like in the past year. Before this, I used to have this recurring dream of going back to Iran and having no place to stay. It started during the time that my parents decided to sell the childhood home and move to a smaller place with cleaner air, out of the crowdedness of the city. And that’s when my dream (or should I say nightmare) started, I kept seeing myself in the familiar streets of Tehran, standing there on the sidewalk with my luggage and having no place to go. I could only spend one night in each friend or family’s house, the next day I had to pack and go somewhere else. That dream was devastating, I kept waking up crying and overwhelmed by this hurtful feeling. I called my sister crying several times after waking up, telling her that if anything happens to us, we don’t have any place to go anymore. It was like having a place back home meant some sort of a security blanket for me. A place that I can crash if anything happens. And my sister kept reassuring me that she is there for me, and her home is my home. I kept having that dream for almost a year and crying over it every time till I felt it’s affecting my daily life with the stress of not having any support or being all alone, then I decided to talk to a therapist, which she help me to put that fear behind.
Every time this happens, recurring dreams, it feels like the brain wants to show me something or alert me somehow of unnecessary pressure or stress. It’s like a wake-up call before the actual fall. Although science may not have the answer on why we dream or why we have some specific elements in our dream, but there are always some clues if you dig deeper. And that’s what I am gonna do, dig deeper to see why I am so concerned about losing my internet connection, it may be very well related to this new requirement of our modern daily life which is being online anytime, everywhere and honestly, the internet is consuming a lot of our lifetime, and meanwhile makes our life much easier. Maybe I need to find a balance in my life, maybe not answering work emails on the weekend while laying back on the beach can be a good place to start.
Meanwhile repeating to myself, that was just a dream, just a dream!