Stress Center Peer Support

Every once in awhile I dream of bridges and in my dreams I'm always scared to cross them. They are always associated with something negative in my dream. Like for example, I dream I need to cross a bridge over an ocean but it is thundering and lightening out and there are high waves surronding the bridge and crashing into it. The dream I had last night was I was supposed to cross the bridge by climbing up a flight of stairs all the way to the top of the bridge. There were crowds of people and I was too scared to go up. Then it took me awhile to actually get off of the bridge because there were so many people.

When I think of bridges in reality, they don't scare me as much as they do in my dreams. I haven't crossed a large bridge in awhile, just smaller ones. I hate having dreams of associating large bridges with something negative. When I wake up I feel better that those scary thoughts were just in a dream but it still leaves me uneasy.

Has anyone else expereienced re-occuring dreams like this?

Well, not dreams that are metaphors, but I'll share a story about a bridge that has been a repeating theme in occasional dreams. When I was a child I had the wonderful opportunity of traveling up the Alaskan-Canadian Highway (Al-Can) with my parents. We camped once on the Yukon River. I hiked upstream and came upon an old railroad bridge that stretched half way out over the river. The second half had collapsed and it was basically a dead bridge. I climbed out on that bridge and suddenly got to the open end, the part that had dropped into the river. That river is HUGE and deep. I was having such an adventure, I didn't think what I'd do when I reached that part of the bridge. I FROZE. I was so scared I couldn't move. I just hung on and stared down at the river. My father eventually saw me and climbed out and coached me back off the bridge. When something scares me (all these years later), I will have a dream of that moment of total fear. But when I wake up, I remind myself that my parents were there. I was okay. I didn't fall in the river, and I had a big adventure. The dream is a subconscious reminder I make myself relive to remind myself, I am safe and things are never as frightening as I imagine.

i think the bridge is unimportant. more important is how you feel . how do you feel about the people in the dream. what are you afraid of is it the climb the crowds. or just the bridge. look at what your feeling

I actually think the bridge could be very important, especially if you dream of them often.
You may not be afraid of the bridge, but there may be issues in your life that you are afraid to face/move forward and cross to the other side because of the "storm" you will have to go through to get to the otherside.

What those issues are, only you can know, and the storm itself, well that would be clear once you got clear of what the bridge symbolizes.

Perhaps it just symbolizes you coming out of this (anxiety) and getting to a new place, but because of the storm and things you have to confront to get there, you are afraid to cross the bridge and get to the other side.

I meant you may not be literally afraid of bridges. During the first part of my post.

A dream is only a dream, I used to dream so much when my thyroid was overactive. I couldn't even remember all of my dreams, but it was really weird to have so many every night (and never get any good sleep if I even slept). So remember we all dream, weird stuff, it's kinda neat I think, cuz it's only a dream. When you wake up you know that you had a dream and you should let it go and move on. Smile and show that glow in your face to everyone you can, maybe better thoughts/positive thinking will bring you a better dream.....?