I’m no stranger to the stress dream.

When I was in high school, I used to repeatedly dream that I was being attacked by dogs, and that my report card was straight Fs.

Once, in college I dreamt that my transcript was full of Fs and that I had run a bunch of red lights, which led me to wake up in a sweaty panic because my parents would take my car away had I ran all those red lights and gotten those tickets.

As of late, I still dream that all my teeth fall out, that I show up late to teach a class, and that I start my iPod and instead of Latin music, calming yoga music pipes through the speakers.

But the worst of all these stress dreams is the running stress dreams. The dreams where I show up late to a race, panicking about whether I can catch up to the sweeper.  The dreams where I realize my marathon is only a month away and I haven’t started training.  Those kinds.

But the worst of all the stress dreams came after I got off the plane from Atlanta, and laid down for what was supposed to be an hour-long nap.  I was asleep instead for nearly 3 hours, and apparently worked through the entire REM cycle because the dream I had seemed to last forever, and it was completely, completely bananas.

In the dream:  I was running my usual, but by myself this time on Monday evening in a pair of Vibram 5-Fingers.  Pictured here for reference.

The terrain was more naturey than it usually is, and I was running through rivers and woods and over logs and all of that.  I was running, in the Vibrams and jumping tree branches and logs and all that.  All of a sudden, as I was running through the river, a fork that had been littered into the water goes into my toe, and punctures it deeply.  So for the remainder of the run, I’m crawling as my toe bleeds all over the place and I try to get folks to help me call 911. I woke up from that terrifying nap with a horrible pain in my toe, like I’d fallen asleep weird and somehow managed to cut circulation off to it – but no blood.  Yikes!

Do you ever have stress dreams?  Describe some of them!