Do your dreams tend to have a prevailing theme?

No, but if I have an appointment my dreams are just one…hour… more.

I don’t dream often nor do I remember them, but sometimes I wake up stressed or sometimes crying so whatever it is that I dream about is probably stressful and negative. So that is the “theme.” The ones I do remember are bad usually.

Or I rarely dream of work, those aren’t nightmares but oddly I will remember them.

I have a lot of anxiety dreams of the sort you mention, searching for a street, or my hotel room, or my classroom, or something, often involving buses. There are also the usual back-to-school dreams. Last night I dreamed I was among a group of editors arguing over some tiny grammatical point—exactly as in real life.

An overarching theme, though, would be finding myself back home in Cambridge—even if, there, I’m still looking for my place. The editorial discussion took place in Cambridge.

I’ve been paying attention and recording a fair amount of my dreams for quite a few years now. The surface-layer types of dreams have immense variety, particularly in specific details, but there are also quite a few recurring types of dreams, as well as recurring places, and some recurring characters (although the characters tend to seem pretty different most of the time).

My surface-level dreams often include travel, exploration, shopping, work, conflicts, driving, meeting people, return to school or university, animals, problem solving, projects, computer games, living in various places, finding forgotten rooms in places I’ve been living, and often before I need to get up to go to the bathroom in real life, dreams where I need to go to the bathroom, but usually with very problematic bathrooms.

The underlying themes are also both very varied, but also have some themes in common. Those seem to be much easier to understand by sharing them with others, especially those trained to give objective perspectives and by distinguishing contrasting personal perspectives on them.

My recurring underlying themes tend to be about things I long for in real life, such as connections with people, or freedoms, or for solutions, or resolution of conflicts, or for culture to be different, etc.