I have had a recurring bad dream about three times in the last five or so years, which has been a very similar experience each of these three times. The last time was perhaps two or three years ago. I hope I don’t have this dream again, but if I do, maybe next time I should start keeping a “dream journal” and noting down the date and a description.
After having these dreams, I formulated to myself in words what I thought I had experienced. Writing about it now, I am probably recalling those words more than the experience itself.
My diet is still a work in progress, not too bad, but far from being exceptionally good also. At the time of these dreams, I may have been having too much caffeine, too many energy drinks, not enough good food, or not enough sleep.
The dream as I remember it really begins with waking up from a nightmare, in which one has had the feeling of having to solve an infinitely difficult mathematical problem. It is as if you have a disassembled Boeing 747 Jumbo Jet, which is made up of say 15 million different components, and you have to arrange each component in exactly the right order, but to make it more difficult, you are blind-folded, and you don’t even know better than chance which piece should follow which other piece, and it isn’t even 15 million pieces you have to get right, it is 15 trillion trillion trillion pieces, and you have to get it right. This is a metaphor for the feeling, the dream doesn’t actually consist of visual images of wheels and wiring and different tiny components of the plane.
So this kind of feeling of having to deal with an infinitely difficult problem, also accompanied by a feeling of being very heavy (but not paralysed), is what wakes me up. And then when I wake, what is even more terrifying, is that I feel (and here more so than in the preceding paragraph I am recalling how I conceptualized the feeling soon after it happened rather than the feeling itself) like half my brain has stopped working, and dissociated from my normal sense of self-awareness, like my consciousness is now centred more in the right half of my brain. At this point there is a feeling of decided uneasiness, a feeling that something very strange is happening in one’s brain. Also because I have had this dream several times, there is the feeling on waking of “Oh no, not this again!”. So I wake up and get out of bed, put some clothes on, turn some lights on, have a cigarette or 3, think about whether I should phone someone, maybe just reassure myself that I am still able to recall a phone number and know how to dial a phone, while gradually the weird spaced-out feeling subsides.
I have also had a similar dream of feeling very heavy and dealing with some kind of abstraction of infinity several times throughout my childhood, but without the same split-brained feeling on waking up from it. Once was when I was maybe 12 or so on a camping trip, when I think I conceptualized it as a nightmare about triangles.
So to summarize it might be considered an anxiety attack, but I am not sure if that is the best way of explaining it.
After having these dreams, I formulated to myself in words what I thought I had experienced. Writing about it now, I am probably recalling those words more than the experience itself.
My diet is still a work in progress, not too bad, but far from being exceptionally good also. At the time of these dreams, I may have been having too much caffeine, too many energy drinks, not enough good food, or not enough sleep.
The dream as I remember it really begins with waking up from a nightmare, in which one has had the feeling of having to solve an infinitely difficult mathematical problem. It is as if you have a disassembled Boeing 747 Jumbo Jet, which is made up of say 15 million different components, and you have to arrange each component in exactly the right order, but to make it more difficult, you are blind-folded, and you don’t even know better than chance which piece should follow which other piece, and it isn’t even 15 million pieces you have to get right, it is 15 trillion trillion trillion pieces, and you have to get it right. This is a metaphor for the feeling, the dream doesn’t actually consist of visual images of wheels and wiring and different tiny components of the plane.
So this kind of feeling of having to deal with an infinitely difficult problem, also accompanied by a feeling of being very heavy (but not paralysed), is what wakes me up. And then when I wake, what is even more terrifying, is that I feel (and here more so than in the preceding paragraph I am recalling how I conceptualized the feeling soon after it happened rather than the feeling itself) like half my brain has stopped working, and dissociated from my normal sense of self-awareness, like my consciousness is now centred more in the right half of my brain. At this point there is a feeling of decided uneasiness, a feeling that something very strange is happening in one’s brain. Also because I have had this dream several times, there is the feeling on waking of “Oh no, not this again!”. So I wake up and get out of bed, put some clothes on, turn some lights on, have a cigarette or 3, think about whether I should phone someone, maybe just reassure myself that I am still able to recall a phone number and know how to dial a phone, while gradually the weird spaced-out feeling subsides.
I have also had a similar dream of feeling very heavy and dealing with some kind of abstraction of infinity several times throughout my childhood, but without the same split-brained feeling on waking up from it. Once was when I was maybe 12 or so on a camping trip, when I think I conceptualized it as a nightmare about triangles.
So to summarize it might be considered an anxiety attack, but I am not sure if that is the best way of explaining it.
