Anita Serwacki
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Chris Pauls
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Everybody likes to think they're special little snowflakes, even when it comes to having nightmares. You know, that Rorschach night-sweat stain on the sheets is just so uniquely you. And while many dreams -- both delightful and dark -- are based on personal, individual experiences, there are broad commonalities that haunt our REM sleep. And there have to be. Otherwise dream dictionaries would need to be customized, making them prohibitively expensive for all but the robber barons and teen pregnancy television stars among us.
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"Childbirth was totally worth it to find out what Gorilla George Washington was trying to warn me about."
Some collective bad dreams are experiential. John Cheese wrote about the recovering alcoholic's recurring nightmare of falling off the wagon. Soldiers revisit the grimmest and most terrifying moments from the battlefield.
But a few dreams cross all gender, social, and national boundaries. They seem to be fairly universal -- simply human, in fact. While we take many approaches to problem solving in our waking life, the human subconscious is far more consistent. We're all linked back to the same primordial goo, and our nightmares are that goo's psychological coping mechanism.
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Dr. Goo, Ph.D.
Debates rage about the interpretation of certain nightmares (with a card catalog of dick-centric opinions available on Yahoo! Answers alone). But while we may not agree on what the dreams and nightmares mean, we're pretty well settled on what the common ones are. Here are five of mankind's bad dream greatest hits, with non-dick-centric theories as to why we have them.
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In 1958, American Anthropologist published an article titled "The Universality of Typical Dreams: Japanese vs. Americans." While it turned up some differences, the similarities between the respondents' dreams were much more striking, particularly that 20.8 percent of the American and 16.1 percent of the Japanese subjects confirmed that they'd dreamed of their teeth crumbling or tumbling from their mouths. That's a mighty lot of dreamtime chompers lost across the globe.
Instead of a shared fear of becoming scurvy-riddled nickel dancers, this nightmare is thought to stem from our struggle with mortality.
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Or, if you're a tooth fairy, job security.
Forget Freud and his fancy-pants dream analysis -- when it comes to understanding what common factors in the human condition could bring about such a Lynchian nightmare, look no further than Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes brought the gavel down on this in his seminal work Leviathan (1651) when he stated that life is inherently "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Frankly, life sucks for everybody, and it could end at any instant. Instead of making the most of our brief tenure on the planet, we're eating varying levels of crap as calendar pages rapidly fall to the ground. Like our teeth. With which we have had to eat all this crap. Or, you know, without teeth, your nourishment will be limited to McDonald's shakes and you'll die.
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"Our milkshakes bring all the boys to the yard ... the graveyard."
It doesn't matter if you're doling out cologne in a strip bar bathroom or you're Elizabeth Dole, it's likely you'll be as toothless as Thomas Hobbes at some point in the dead of night.
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You're sitting at a desk, blue book and pencil in hand, armpit-soaked and petrified. There are 15 minutes left on the clock, and your book is blank. Or you realize you missed this class all year -- just flat out didn't show up -- and now the questions on the test are reading like Russian. Oh God, it's Russian 401!
It'd be time to panic, if it weren't a nightmare. After all, you've been banned from entering any institution of higher learning for what -- 10? 20 years? So why freak out about tests when you could be freaking about something more interesting, like how you will ever eat your way out of a giant strawberry pie?
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"You are the only one who can do this. You are the chosen one the diabetic elders prophesied."
It's because you've made at least a marginal amount of yourself and you're afraid of losing it. This is a nightmare of anxiety over personal and professional accomplishment, and it tends to plague people who have already done well (e.g., enrolled in Russian and didn't drop it). No matter the success we achieve, we never get rid of the insecurity that one day we won't measure up to expectations. And unless you went to some hippie school, this is one place where everyone's performance or lack thereof was evaluated in writing.
So, if you want to avoid sharing this one with your fellow man, best not have any ambition or goals whatsoever to begin with.
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Which may explain how hobos can sleep anywhere.
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And now you're free-falling, a heart-tightening plunge from a building ledge or cliff, hurtling toward an advancing ground that you never actually hit before waking up in a puddle.
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"Pleasebesweatpleasebesweatpleasebesweat."
Falling is one of the top reported nightmares and is motivated by a potential for failure that's out of your hands. Things aren't lining up the way you want when you're awake, and there are no proactive steps you can take to fix things, so off the dread-slicked edge you go in Sleepytown.
Contrary to popular belief, you will not die if your terminal velocity comes to a conclusion during a falling dream. Or, at least no one who did die during one of these REM bad times bothered to come back and tell the rest of us about it. But, hey, it's out of our control. We're not the boss of those ghosts.
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"No, the falling dream didn't kill me. The Nic Cage go-kart one, on the other hand ..."
The fact that humanity is plagued by this one proves that we need to chill the hell out. Just don't go so far as taking on a full "The Fates will provide" attitude at work. The Fates are not skilled at spreadsheets and coding.
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Only 33 percent of Americans describe themselves as "happy." If you're in the other 67 percent, chances are one of the following applies: You've been at the same job way too long, and it sucks. Money's always a problem, but there are no non-felonious options to make more. You can't stand your significant other, but change makes you more uncomfortable than stagnation. You have way more bratty kids than you ever thought you'd have, and Grandma's not much help anymore because she's getting up there. The point is that you know your life is one great big confining rut -- you feel it, every waking moment of every day, and you don't do anything about it. And then you hit the hay, just to escape for a few hours. But after a terse dream-visit with Grandma, who's completely sick of your hell-spawn and for some reason now carries around an assault rifle, you find yourself in a room, and the walls start closing in -- closer and closer and closer -- like a Death Star trash compactor. There's no way out. You're trapped.
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"I'll get you for this, Grandma! You're going to the home we saw on the news!"
And that's pretty much it. This one is kind of embarrassing for humanity, what with its trite and obvious interpretation. Then again, it's also pretty refreshing after the whole freaky "teeth falling out" thing.
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While many of man's favorite pastimes involve being au naturel, nudity also exposes us to all sorts of nastiness like nether region wasp stings and "the sun." Plus clothing lets us craft a public persona that we can both project and hide behind. So when you dream of strolling through the grocery store wearing nothing but what your momma gave you, not only are you a wasp target, but now everyone knows just what you are. And it's something worse than a dairy aisle pervert. It's a useless life-charlatan.
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"Yeah, I changed my mind about the sausage and meatballs ... can we just have a salad instead?"
It's not just you. Most of us feel like we'll be unmasked as a fraud at any second, whether it's because we are actually lousy parents, b.s.-ed our way into a job, or wear a man-girdle to make our clothed body appear marginally palatable to society at large.
Occasionally the "nudity nightmare" comes in a combo pack with the "big test nightmare" (which allows you to pick at your failure AND fraud scabs in half the time!). So tonight when you're snoozing, if you find yourself wedged into an old school desk, marinating in a pool of your own naked butt sweat, know that you're not alone.
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The downside is having to fight other naked dream people for the non-lefty desk.
As that American Anthropologist article said: "Typical dreams mark a public domain. They intimate a common bond between us." And that bond is species-wide self-loathing.
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