I do have nightmares sometimes. I do have bad dreams. A lot of my bad dreams are things like I'm being chased by someone and I can't get away from them, or I'm hiding from them. Some other of my bad dreams involve not being able to get home. I'm trying to get home and there are a lot of different obstacles that I have to get past before I get home. And I usually wake up before I get there. So I find it very frustrating. These bad dreams make me really tense. And when I wake up, I'm very, very stressed out.
A bad dream that I kept having over and over again—a recurring bad dream I had when I was in high school—was a really horrible one. I dreamt that my mother had a knife, a meat cleaver. And I was a child, and I saw her in the bathroom cutting up a dead body with a meat cleaver. And she saw me watching her, and she started chasing me with her knife. And she never caught me, but I had to hide from her. And she chased me and chased me, and I was really scared. I had this recurring dream, probably, I don't know, for several months. And to this day, it's the scariest, worst bad dream I've ever had.
Boy, that's an interesting question—bad dreams. Well, I would have to say that the worst bad dream I ever had, and this happens a lot to me in my dreams, is that I was trapped inside a building or I'm trapped in another country and I can't get back home. Usually what happens is that I meet someone there from my past—an old friend, an acquaintance, a classmate, someone from high school. And, of course, it seems normal. It seems just natural when I'm having the dream that I meet these people. But it's always in a situation that never actually occurred. But usually my dreams, like most people's bad dreams, I think are related to things that I thought about or happened to me that day or recently.
For example, I had a very difficult time getting my car fixed the other day, and that night when I had a dream, I dreamt that I was broken down on the highway. And I couldn't get home. And it was dark. And it was starting to rain.
I started to get desperate and so forth. So when I woke up, of course, I was sweating and a little bit scared. But fortunately, I was able to calm myself down. And eventually, I actually got my car fixed. I hope I don't have that nightmare again.
You've just heard two people talk about a bad dream, including me. And I want to now talk about some of the vocabulary that they used that you might have had difficulty with. Remember, this section of our podcast is optional. If you want to go back and listen again and again, we recommend that. But if you want some additional help, then stay tuned.
One word that both speakers used is nightmare. A nightmare is another word for a bad dream. When Lucy was talking about her bad dream, she mentioned that she couldn't get home because she had lots of obstacles. An obstacle is something that gets in your way either when you're walking, running, in a car, or just generally in life. We talk about obstacles that get in our way—things that prevent us from going or doing what we want to do. In the Army, they have something called an obstacle course. And sometimes in school, in physical education class, they'll set up a game called an obstacle course. And you have to go through all sorts of different obstacles, different challenges, such as walking through some tires or climbing up a rope and so forth.
Another word that Lucy used was recurring. She said that she had a recurring dream. To recur means to repeat. So she had that dream several times.
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