Editor's Note: Earlier in the year, HealthLeader asked you to send in your recurring dreams, not for analysis, but for comparison. And, once again, we find that we are more similar than we dared to dream.

Find your dream below.

Twenty years after graduation, do you wake in a panic from dreaming that you are late, yet again, for your final exam?

Or do you find yourself, yet again, in a house that-uh-oh-is not yours,
and oh-NO, whose owners are coming through the door?

Or are you one of the luckier dreamers who, yet again, are soaring high above the treetops, flying without wings?

The dream theme is not the focus here. It is the "yet again" that intrigues.

Like telling a story over and over to the point that it loses its punch, perhaps "re-dreaming" helps us to detach from the trigger or stressor so that we can see it objectively. "Which is what we do in psychotherapy-discuss a problem over again until we hopefully come to a solution, a mastery of the issue," explains Dr. Robert Guynn, professor and chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at The University of Texas Medical School at Houston.

Equally intriguing is the universality of our dream themes. "It has been said that there are only seven plots to a novel, so perhaps, since we project ourselves into both, there are only seven plots to our dreams," Guynn says.

".Dream themes seem to be the same everywhere, across cultures and generations: themes such as being lost, preparing meals, or being late for an examination," writes UT Medical School neuroscientist David Eagleman, Ph.D., in Ten Unsolved Questions of Neuroscience (Eagleman and Patricia S. Churchland. MIT Press. June, 2005.)

True enough, according to the dreams that you, our readers submitted.

Chances are good that you will find elements of a dream that you also have had before.

Your Dreams

1. I'm flying.  Not in an airplane.  I have to flap my arms pretty hard to stay above tree level and often I can't stay above trees so I have to land.  Usually I'm flying around big trees that are slightly lighted, like they're lit with street lamps or moonlight.  I don't think my dreams are in color, at least if they are it's not vivid enough that I remember.  When I was a boy I had this recurring dream a lot.  I'm nearing 60 now and I probably have this dream several times a month.
   
   
2. I have to say that one of my few recurring dreams (over the last 10 years or so) has to be of me sitting at a picnic table. This is not strange, but the table is not on the ground, it is actually set in clouds. These clouds are pink/blood reddish and that is the creepy part. There is something about being surrounded by these red clouds that makes me feel like I am sitting 'in hell' or in some dangerous horrible place. Scary to me.
   
   
3. Within the past week, I had repeated dreams about my cat Salem (the wild one among three cats I have) who was biting my hand as I was giving him a bath. Usually he bites and chases the other two older cats around in the house. This is an annoying dream, and my hand was bleeding, yet somehow I did not feel the pain in the dream.
   
   Perhaps it is related to my life situations somehow, as I had recently served on a jury (I had to put all things aside) and had some stressful events occur with my jobs (I am holding a joint appointment) involving different expectations from different parties.
   
   
4. I frequently am back at my former job (nursing is a second career) of remodeling grocery stores. Usually, everything goes just fine in this environment, but then there is a dilemma for me to return to nursing. So, I end up going back and forth between nursing jobs and remodeling the stores.
   
   My psychologist friend says this is the way my body is telling me that I'm under too much stress and I revert back to a time when I perceived I had more control and less uncertainty. 
   
   
5. I dream I'm flying - not in a plane, just arms outstretched, gliding through the air.
   
   
6. I use to dream many, many times, that I was flying over the home town I grew up in. All I had to do was run and flap my arms. I'd fly like a bird. It was so simple in the dream.
   
   
7. When my former spouse was seeing someone else, I had a dream over and over again that he and she were holding one another and laughing at me. I never saw the girl before the dreams. I wasn't sure he was seeing anyone, but he was acting differently. Come to find out, he was. The girl looked just like the girl in my dreams.
   
   Before those dreams started, I would dream that I was trying call him, but I could never reach him. I couldn't remember his parent's home phone number. It wasn't even them that I should have been calling, since we were married. Over and over and over and over dreams. I never met or saw the girl or was even sure he was seeing someone else. That's when I had the unreachable-by-phone dreams and seeing him and this girl standing, staring and laughing at me.
   
   I have dreams now of my new husband with someone else, but each time, it's a different girl.
   
   
8. Tornadoes...at least once a month.
   
   
9. I have had the same recurring dream since I learned to drive 11 years ago: I'm at a party or some kind of social engagement and there's an emergency situation.  It usually involves a pregnant woman, a heart attack victim or some other urgent situation.  We get in the one and only car (and consequently, I'm the only person able to drive) and it's a manual stick shift, which I have never learned to drive, although both my father and husband have offered to teach me many times.  I'm attempting to use the clutch, shift the gears, panicking and the car is just put-putting along and the person in the back is suffering and on the brink of death or giving birth. 
   
   I usually wake up telling myself that I need to learn how to drive a stick shift.
   
   
10. I find myself in someone else's house. I don't really know how I got there, but I know I have to get out before they think I broke in. I hear them upstairs or coming in the front door and I madly try to get out the back door before they notice I was there. The odd thing is that it is always the exact same house, but I know I've never been in it in my real life.
    
    
11. I dream that I am dating my boyfriend and we are happy. But there is always someone else there, too. Either I have another boyfriend or he has another girlfriend. And I always know about the other girlfriend but he never knows about the other boyfriend. I always try to break it off with the other man and can't seem to. And I can't seem to tell my boyfriend that he needs to break if off with the other girl. In the dreams I feel that I love him so much but can't seem to get it to work.
    
    
12. When I was young, we lived in several different states. Each time we moved, I would dream that I left my house to go play with a neighbor and by the time I reached her house, the whole neighborhood had changed. No one knew who I was, or who my mother was-they had never heard of us. And when I'd point to the house I loved in, it was gone. As I became an adult and situated firmly in Houston for many years, I would occasionally have the dream, but it would be about my car, instead-not being able to find it. The feelings of terror though, were the same.
    
    
13. The dream of being chased. Always on the same street in Houston-at Hazard and Richmond . (I wasn't allowed to be on that side of Richmond as a child.) I am 12 or so in the dream and it is getting dark and I am on my bike. Suddenly a gang of boys on their bikes are chasing me and I am peddling as fast as I can. In the dream I even have a 12-year-old ponytail. I am now 48 with grown children and still have that dream under stress, I suppose.
    
    
14. For many years I have dreamed that I am trying to cross a large body of water, not swimming, but on foot. It starts out with me already in the process (not beginning at a point on land). I am running -- using boulders, warfs, climbing trees and using limbs to facilitate crossing to the next point in the water. The water is deep. At times I am up on something that appears to be like a roller coaster track trying to maneuver to the next object. In the dream I never get across to the other side. It always ends abruptly. But it's an intense challenge, it seems, to find ways to cross and not fall in the water.
    
    
15. I have had a recurring dream for the past several years that I'm walking through my house and when I get to the back of the house I discover a door that I have never noticed before. The main part of the dream is what I discover on the other side of the door and how wonderful it feels to have found such a place in my own home that I never knew existed. What I find is several empty rooms on different levels - extra space full of possibilities. During the dream I'm amazed that I never found this place before and I imagine the ways I could decorate and use the rooms for entertaining and everyday living.
    
    
16. My mother, daughter and I all have variations of the same dreaded "final exam" dream. Either we have never taken the class and suddenly find that we must take the final, or we are late for the final and can't find the classroom. My mother is 80 and my daughter is 25. I am 50. We are still all wandering halls in surreal colleges before we wake in states of panic, only to find that we have all really graduated.
    
    
17. For years I had "the giant wave" dream. A tidal wave would approach and I would desperately try to out swim the swell. For years, I did, or I awoke just before it hit. Then, one time, as an adult I had the dream and the wave crashed down on top of me and I thought that this was the end. Then, slowly I realized that if I were very careful, I could actually breathe under water. I felt real triumph in the dream. I have not had that dream since.
    
    
18. There's a house that I want to buy, or I already own it. In the dream I stumble upon a door that I've never noticed. When I open the door, depending on what's going on in my waking life, it is either a magnificent space-a dream mansion-or it is a terrible space-the floors are uneven, the colors are bizarre. The space is totally useless, even scary.

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UPDATED: 3-29-2005

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