Every dream I remember has me being some sort of hero; the world is freezing over and I have to save my friends and family, zombie apocalypse happened and I have to shoot my way to safety, robbers break into my house and I fight them Matrix style for hours and hours, including running and jumping. I seriously think every apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic scenario I can think of has been played out in hundreds of different ways, with different weapons and in different places. I always win, too. I'm thinking I have some sort of delusion of grandeur or desire to be the 'savior' since thats all I dream about. But hey, who knows.
-----Added 17/11/2008 at 02 : 10 : 22-----
Quote:
Originally Posted by abaya
I had forgotten about that one as well... it used to happen to me all the time when I was living by myself in the first few years of grad school. Not a dream about them breaking, but that the were always loose, about to fall out... and I was so terrified of losing my whole, adult teeth in my dreams. That's definitely a recurring one, but not very common now. I wonder what the trigger for that one is, since so many people seem to dream about it with no connection between them.
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Many anthropologists have suggested a learned behavior carried through our evolutionary past as the reason for the recurring dreams that include losing teeth or falling to our death. Loss of teeth was a big thing for our precursory ancestors, because they were the most important tool and without them eating (and thereby living) became much harder. Those who survived kept their teeth. As for falling, our long-long ancestors often slept in trees to avoid predators, so falling from the tree while sleeping would be catastrophic. People who claim they snap awake after a dream of falling could be experiencing the evolutionary training that helps up wake up if we're about to fall from our protective perch.
There's very little evidence which can prove or disprove this hypothesis, since we do not know the thoughts of our ancestors. I like it though, simply because it makes a decent amount of sense. And it sure beat's Freud's theory, which claimed that men dreaming of teeth falling out was caused by the masturbatory desires of puberty:
"But here I may draw attention to the frequent 'displacement from below to above' which is at the service of sexual repression, and by means of which all kinds of sensations and intentions occurring in hysteria, which ought to be localized in the genitals, may at all events be realized in other, unobjectionable parts of the body. Only one feature - the teeth - is beyond all possibility of being compared in this way; but it is just this coincidence of agreement and disagreement which makes the teeth suitable for purposes of representation under the pressure of sexual repression."