Dreams

September 5, 2005 4:21 AM

At what point is it normal to stop incorporating images, places and people from your early teenage and high school years into your dreams on a nightly basis?

I'm in my mid-twenties and I still dream about literal representations of images, places and people from my teenage years. They aren't elements of a notable trauma, just normal everyday things. Does it speak to speak sort of problem with emotional growth?

posted by 517 to health & fitness (16 comments total)

1 of those speaks is a some.
posted by 517 at 4:22 AM on September 5, 2005

As long as they're causing no distress, I doubt any medical professional (and I'm not one) would find anything abnormal about this. I still occasionally have dreams about high school.

You may simply have good recall. I've found the incidents of dreaming about adolescence have dropped, simply because I guess I can't remember most of it.
posted by wackybrit at 4:52 AM on September 5, 2005

Well, if it makes you feel better - I have the same kind of things going on in my dreams (I'm 23/male).

I suppose I have one of those kinds of dreams a week. My circumstances generally are kinda "in-limbo" so maybe unconciously I'm making reference to the past in order to make sense of things.
posted by rc55 at 4:55 AM on September 5, 2005

Don't worry about your dreams--enjoy them. I think of dreams as cool movies unless I am dreaming of a snake in my bed, in which case I invariably fall out of bed!
posted by phewbertie at 4:58 AM on September 5, 2005

I worked at a company for eight years, but I quit there eight years ago. I still have dreams about it.

I think that at some level, your mind figures hey, it's gone to all this trouble to build this lovely set, so why strike it just because of a little rewrite?
posted by mimi at 5:00 AM on September 5, 2005

It is my understanding that dreams are non-literal, but IANAP. If you dream about your school, what is significant is the emotional value your school has to you. If you dream about your best friend or a H.S. bully, you are incorporating what they mean to you on a more psychological level. You aren't actually dreaming about them.

Many times this is done because we don't like to be literal in our most intimate thoughts. Dreaming about an over-bearing coach is much easier than actually confronting a strict father, etc. You dream about what is safe for you to dream. The trick is to then recap and put all the symbolism together in some meaningful way that reflects more of your current reality when awake.

My $0.02
posted by qwip at 5:26 AM on September 5, 2005

Just as a data point, I'm pushing 40, am reasonably sure that I have relatively healthy and age-appropriate emotional and psychological development, and still occasionally have dreams that are set in the time in which I was roughly 13-19 years old.

It's a formative and important time. I highly doubt that there's anything unusual about dreaming about it.
posted by enrevanche at 5:57 AM on September 5, 2005

You're normal. I'm 41, and I still have this dream from time to time where the final exam for some class, usually history, is coming up, only I can't get at my books because I can't remember the stupid locker combination. It also turns out I haven't been going to the class all semester, which means that my dream is nicely mixing high school and college together.

And sometimes I still dream about those horrid school busses.

I also used to do a lot of theater, and even though it's been more than 10 years since I've done a show, I still dream that I have to go on and don't know the lines.
posted by JanetLand at 6:11 AM on September 5, 2005

I have the same thing in my dreams and I'm a late 20s female. I dream about things from my childhood all of the time. Perhaps it is because I feel "homeless" -- series of apartments, not as much stability?

Maybe it is because I am from the 517 orginally too. ;)
posted by k8t at 6:14 AM on September 5, 2005

Why do we dream? WE DON'T KNOW.
How do we dream? WE'RE NOT SURE.

The only reasonable answer to most questions about dreams is "we don't know." Science has been able to determine very little about the utility of dreaming (and there isn't even agreement about the mechanism which causes dreams). This wikipedia article sums things up pretty well. For some reason, quasi-Freudian theories about dreams seem to dominate many people's thinking. I'm not sure why. I almost quit therapy once when my therapist told me "Every dream has a wish in it." The evidence for this? ZERO.

My anecdotal contribution is that my dream imagery lags about five years behind my day-to-day life. So when I was in college, my dreams were set in high school. I didn't start dreaming about college until well after I had graduated. I never had a dream about my wife until we'd been together for about five years. But not everyone is like this. My wife regularly dreams of recent events -- even events that happened the day before.
posted by grumblebee at 6:18 AM on September 5, 2005

I'm 30 and still have high school dreams all the time.
posted by johngoren at 7:46 AM on September 5, 2005

I'm 36 and occasionally have high school dreams and dreams from earlier periods of my life. It's normal.
posted by sic at 9:20 AM on September 5, 2005

I regularly have dreams: 1. set in high school, populated with people from college, and 2. set in college, populated with people from high school. I no longer wake up, scratch my head and wonder, What was she doing in my dorm room? Your dreams are normal. Enjoy them.
posted by emelenjr at 10:20 AM on September 5, 2005

I'm 25 and I still dream about high school. I asked a therapist about it and she said it's normal to dream about something which was such a big part of life for so long.
posted by IndigoRain at 11:42 AM on September 5, 2005

In his autobiography Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, Carl Jung noted his belief that the unconscious is timeless. You may be 85, but in dreamland you might feel 12 again.
posted by captainscared at 12:22 PM on September 5, 2005

Everything in your dream is you, since it's your brain, or your relationship to it, which is the more common association. So it would make sense that you still dream about high school. It was what 10 years away? You still dream about your childhood, right? You're not expected to "get over" your life, but I would think, accept things such as high school as part of you. Possibly the more integrated you are, the more of your entire life would be in your dreams. I dream about high school way more than college because it is more significant, and the more reflective I am, the more vivid dreams I have.
posted by scazza at 5:29 PM on September 5, 2005