Have you ever been chased by someone in your dreams? Been naked in public? Flown like a bird around a city? Or just felt utterly lost in a maze-like building?
Psychologist and dream researcher Patricia Garfield asserts that these examples are part of 12 basic dreams that all of us dream, regardless of who we are, what we do or where we live.
These “universal dreams,” as Garfield calls them, are far from a dream dictionary packed with generic terms from A to Z. On her website, Garfield writes: “Like a hearty stew that is rich with local produce, the universal dreams differ among different peoples, but they are all nourishing variants of the same wholesome meal. They are as old as humanity and as widespread as our globe. Possibly further.”
In her book The Universal Dream Key: The 12 Most Common Dream Themes Around the World, Garfield explains that dreams differ based on four factors.
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I experience a great many dreams where I have a task to perform, not always clearly defined, and nothing I do gets me any closer to my goal. Often the people I interact with don’t hinder me directly, but through indirection or irrelevancy make the goal impossible. A study in frustration . . . .
i have had reoccurring dreams since i was 7 years old. i dream of a tornado coming and it never hits where i am at, but it is scary and so real..
I often dream that I am standing on something strange up high then fall. For example, I once dreamed I was standing on a wrecking ball and I slipped off. I also have dreams about drowning, sometimes I am already under the waves staring up, and knowing I don’t have enough breath to make it up there alive. I also have very vivid nightmares where my love ones die and nobody cares about my loss. In other reams I see their ghosts and they take off their heads and are evil. I almost always die in my dream, or something horrible happens.
I have most of these universal dreams mentioned in the article.. flying, being naked, being chased, etc but few dreams like flying, searching for the classroom, being chased are stopped after my 18… now a days i dont remember my dreams properly.. apart from these universal dreams, i get one more dream very common and often. i find some coins in the mud floor, when i take it, i find many, i take full of hands and the dream will stop. but not now.
I dream vividly and sometimes my dreams incorporate several of these. I had a recurring dream that started in my school, on a scavenger hunt…moved into an apocalypse filled with demons, with which I was chased into a city where I got lost. I had this dream from middle school to well past high school. It frightened me at first, I became terrified to go to sleep. But as time wore on, I became more curious in the dream, less afraid. Eventually, as my fear waned, the dream stopped.
It would be nice to see what these dreams actually signify…