Why am I always dying a terrible death in dreamland?

I don't put a lot of stock in dream interpretation, but this has been going on for so many years now, without resolution, that I'll open my mind to about anything at this point.

Since I was a kid, I've had frequent dreams/nightmares about being chased and ultimately violently killed by a wide range of creatures. The most common of them usually consist of bears, great white sharks, crocodiles, lions or packs of wolves. Sometimes though, my unconscious likes to mix things up a bit and get a little creative, just to keep me on my toes. Some of the more obscure things to disembowel me over the years have been things like dinosaurs, spiders the size of a pickup truck, flesh eating beetles, swarms of killer bees, etc, etc.

The vast majority of these dreams consist of me minding my own business and then suddenly feeling that something is terribly wrong. I'll then see one of these things out in the distance, usually a massive grizzly bear. There are other people all over the place, but they don't take notice to the bear lumbering around in their midst. Sometimes I find that if I ignore it, it will go away, but usually it ends up seeing me and begins to give chase. Sometimes I fight, sometimes I don't, but always I die.

There's also a human component that appears often, but not as often as nature. I find myself being killed by people I've never met in real life. There's never a reason for it, they just see me at a distance and then call attention to me as if to convey: "that's the guy!". Once they catch up to me, they always kill me by stabbing me to death with knives or swords. I often fight back but end up moving in slow motion or something like that.

This sort of thing has happened so many times that I've learned to recognize it in my dream and then become aware of the fact that it is just a dream. Because of this, I wouldn't really call them nightmares anymore because I'm so used to it, just, annoying. I'd much rather dream about other things if I could...

Any thoughts on this? I know some of you are into the dream interpretation thing.

For some reason there is an aspect of yourself that you don't like and wish would die.

That is why you keep dying in your dreams.

reply to post by whatukno


That's all you've got? That's about as helpful as a fortune cookie

reply to post by ZombieOctopus


Sorry, but that's all there really is, I am not a psychologist or anything, but dreams are the deconstruction and assimilation of the ego by the subconscious.

Your dream is telling you that something about you doesn't fit right with who you want to be and so you wish that part of you would die, therefore, in your dream you see yourself as dying.

I could go into the whole Freudian thing and blame it on some weird Oedipus complex but that's not what it is, it's an aspect of yourself that you don't like and wish you could get rid of, that is why your dying in your dreams.