To celebrate the launch of the Trouserless Nightmare, (our latest campaign), we’ve enlisted the help of internationally recognised lucid dreaming author and consciousness researcher, Daniel Love. Once a week for the next month, Daniel will be analysing your trouserless nightmares here on the blog.
“In each of us lives a poet, philosopher, and scientist – each offering unique and equally valuable perspectives towards existence.”
Daniel has been exploring the wonders of the psyche and alternative states of consciousness for over two decades, dedicating his life to the promotion and education of lucid dreaming and personal psychological exploration.
Dreamer: Dear Daniel,
It’s the Easter holidays and I’m back from university, I am in my final year and staying at my parent’s house (as I did back in the day). For some reason, I have loads of essays to start writing (approximately 4), due around May time and I mean big essays, and on top of that, I also have exams looming that I need to start revising for.
I feel quite panicked by it all. However, this never actually happened and I don’t know why I go back to being a 21 year old again and again…
– Emma Rose
Daniel: Your experience is a fine example of what is a particularly common dream, that of experiencing a high-pressure event from our youth. Often these dreams revolve around similar themes, such as exams, competitions, sporting events etc. These are among the most frequent recurring “dream-signs”, those repeating aspects of dream content that can be used to alert us to the fact we are dreaming.
As with your dream, these experiences are almost always accompanied by a strong sense of urgency, stress or anxiety.
Thankfully, you have absolutely nothing to worry about. Such dreams appear to be something of an evolutionary throwback—a means for the mind to rehearse high-stress situations in order to remain prepared should a similar situation arise.
This made more sense in humanities early history when life was a more simplistic and predictable affair.
The stressful events that occurred in our ancestor’s youth, such as run-ins with predators, accidents, dangerous interactions with rival groups etc would continue to act as ongoing threats throughout their adult lives. Therefore, maintaining mental preparation via dream rehearsal would have been a wise and practical psychological adaptation.
I would speculate that high-stress experiences in our youth initiate these “rehearsal dreams” in order to maintain potentially life-saving neural pathways. These dreams may act as a form of mental-exercise, a “psychological workout” that keeps important circuits fresh and ready to act.
Such dreams are rarely a carbon copy of any particular memory but rather a creative amalgam of experiences and emotions that reflect the underlying theme and issues.
However, our modern lives have become considerably more diverse than those of our ancestors, and, therefore, the anxiety-inducing experiences of our youth no longer neatly match those of our adult lives, making such a system a little redundant.
That said, dreams of this nature are often triggered by increased anxiety in one’s waking life, making them a good indication that there may be something in life that requires a little extra attention or preparation.
I’d recommend taking this dream as a sign to assess the cause of any anxiety or stress in your waking life and to move towards resolving these.
Sweet dreams!
For a chance to have your trouserless nightmares analysed by Daniel, submit your dream to community@craghoppers.com either anonymously or publicly – whichever you feel most comfortable with!