In another dream, I find myself all alone on an island. It isn’t a pretty island with palm trees – it is taken up entirely by a gigantic factory with lots of machinary, but no people. It’s really eerie, because a kind of green mist is coming out of the chimneys, and it’s filling the air. Then all of a sudden, an alarm goes off and lights start flashing, but there’s no where to go! I hate that dream, it’s so scary.

Other regular visitors include the death of one of my parents, dreams in which my teeth are damaged or infected or rotting (highlight: one in which a rotten molar was revealed to be infected with a larval cockroach!), and, yes, dreams in which I get in a stationary car that then starts unstoppably rolling forward.

My most rampantly Jungian dream had to do with my very intense high school boyfriend, right before we broke up. He always exacerbated my competitive impulses, which bothered me deeply.

In the dream, he had entered a psychic contest of wills. Two closed stone huts were arranged next to each other, with a single granite slab laid in each. The two contestants were tied to their slabs, and then engaged in a brutal psychic battle between the walls of their minds.

I knew that the loser had to forfeit their life, and I begged him not to enter the contest, but he was breezily determined to fight and win. Despondent, I left, unable to watch.

I returned an hour later, with my heart in my throat – and arrived back just in time to see the attendants carry a wet sack of his dismembered body parts from the hut.

I recounted this horror to my mom, who laughed at how much this was one of those dreams where everybody in it represents the dreamer. I felt emotionally ripped apart by engaging in so much competition with him, and I felt like it was destroying the relationship. (which, in part, it did.)

Strangely, anxiety dreams are among the few dreams I have in which I’m somebody resembling myself. Generally I get to play made-from-scratch dream characters, or at least travel around with them.