Keep having falling elevator dreams

Think I've had four or five of these in the past year. In two of them the elevator shot up like a rocket, in the others it went into a terrifying free fall. The overwhelming sensation when it happens, apart from the extreme g-forces I feel as I'm plummeting or ascending, is a very vivid thought that "oh my god, I can't believe this is happening to me now, I'm actually going to perish in a few seconds." They're almost lucid in their realism. There's always other people in the elevator and they start panicking too. That feeling of utter horror stays with me for hours after I wake. And what makes it worse is that in my job I'm up and down in elevators all day, sometimes up to the 60th/70th floor. Some of them rattle like crazy, some of them scrape against the sides at certain points of the ride, and after having one of these dreams I'm on edge every time the door closes and the car starts up. Hope I'm not going to end up with an elevator phobia like my friend who always has to use the stairs. 
 
I'm not sure I believe all the baloney written about dream interpretation. I looked this one up online and sure enough, the predictable stuff about how subconsciously, I feel that my life is spiraling out of control etc. Could they be more predictable? I don't think I feel like that at all, even subconsciously. 
 
Secretly though, I love all dreams even when they're terrifying. I've dreamed full scale action movies with "plots" and everything. It just fascinates me how my brain comes up with this stuff when I'm asleep. I even used to enjoy the nuclear war dreams I had as a kid. 
 
 

craigb
I could tell you exactly what it means, but I don't want to scare the crap out of ya. 
 

You're all fur coat and no knickers!

I'm all duffle coat and no sock garters!
 

For the record, there is NO universal key to dreams.  Some guidelines, but those only make sense when compared with the entire experience of the person having the dream!
 
That said, you should still try to figure 'em out 'cause it's your subconscious mind trying to tell you something using the only language it knows.

Rain

I even wrote a song called "planes keep on crashing on my head" at one point, which, incidentally, helped me get rid of the dreams for years. 
 
 

Didn't B. J. Thomas have a hit on that one????
 

Sharke, I had the exact same dreams at one time. My elevators sometimes shot sideways, or went up and flipped upside-down and reversed. Sometimes  they let me out on terrifyingly-high floors. Those dreams began while I was first starting up my business, and my own interpretation was it reflected a feeling that things were happening that I had no control over.

Hmm maybe the online interpretations I read have something accurate in them then Bit. It's weird because I'm not much of a worrier, in fact some may say I have an almost cavalier indifference to the future. I have been through a bit of stress recently, related to a problem employee behaving like a complete and utter tool, but as for feeling like I have no control over the situation, I've always taken solace in the fact that I can give him his cards if things get too bad :)

Mind you I've always had a fascination with height and I wonder if that's part of the elevator thing. Another recurring dream I have is being on the roof of tall buildings and clambering over narrow walkways and walking around ledges etc.

Take the stairs..... yup, that would be my advice.

Going up or going down?

UbiquitousBubba
I watched my subconscious mind whip up a dream. It was a bad one involving rabid wolves, a P.E. coach, being buried up to my eyes in fire ants, and a beginner's banjo class. 

A beginner's banjo class??!!!  How cruel!!!  

Mesh
Wow Bubba!! Impressive!!
That's a volume of info to digest........my mind is just shutting down in this futile attempt to absorb it.......like getting hit by a semi-truck. 
 
Well done!!
 
 
 
 
 
 
(I'm going for the no brainer........BECAN!!)

Why wouldn't you get hit by the whole truck? 

Dreams!
 
Have been writing many things off my dreams for 30 years. I use poetry for all my visions, and the main difference is that visions are harder to describe in detail, and for me, tend to be more about my mental observation states than anything else. Visions are kind of "seeing it now", whereas Dreams, for me, tend to be more evaluation and oversight of my daily life.
 
I am writing a bunch of my dreams on my website in regards to a lot of moments in rock music. However, some of the contents will tend to distort and hurt the idealism surrounding "hit" and "fame" in some of these people.
 
I have one suggestion!
 
Get a pencil, paper and put it on the little table next to the bed. When you wake up, write it. You have to promise yourself you won't read any of these until 30 days are gone. (Date the top of the page!)
 
The not reading is important, to help lessen the "emotional" attachment to what you see, so you can better learn how to interpret what you saw. Only on the 31st day, so to speak, can you look back at that one day and tomorrow the next day.
 
This is only an experiment, not a fact, in my case, because I have written from my dreams over and over again, to the point where I can re-start them if I want to and need to see where else it will go. It does not always make itself "clear" but at least I was able to re-start it.
 
Eventually, you learn that the "story" itself is not important, but that the way you "see" things is way more valuable a teacher, and allows you to go way much further in, if you so feel the need, and are willing to undertake the work to do so.
 
For me, the best book that ever clarified the dream world for me, I had already been tied to my dreams for 10 years then, was the book "The Art of Dreaming". Despite its difficult analogies and sometimes over bearing sense of "this is", when you put that aside, no one, EVER, has put together such a nice road map, for what you can and can not do. There is a part that is difficult for all of us, that he calls "unknown" and "unknowable", and I tend to think that was his way of saying that this separates the student from the master, but I will accept it.
 
Similarly, things like "The Bardo" (Tibet) uses the analogies of dragons, because in our inner visions we do not recognize the places and it makes us afraid. Dealing with that fear of the unknown, ends up being the biggest teach of all out there and the single biggest symbol and lesson there is to the inner core of our own soul.
 
There are other fine books out there, and Robert Monroe's 1st and 2nd are very good and can be scary at the same time, but they "blur" the line between dreams and out of the body experiences, which for me are the same thing, not two separate disciplines.
 
At this point, it is NEVER about what it means, as it is about how much do you really want to learn and understand! The rest is easy and fun! And you can be a kid in the playground all you want to ... how much do you want to?

I love lucid dreaming!  I've read the books, got the tapes and even have a couple of devices you can wear that will signal you when you're in REM sleep.  But, you're right, they are so mind blowing that it's difficult to remain asleep once you realize that you're actually dreaming.
 
For those that have never had one, imagine a world that's not limited by your senses (so colors and lighting can become even brighter than when awake) plus you can completely change everything around you.  Until you have a real one, you really can't understand...

As far back as I can remember, I've enjoyed starting my dreams while I'm awake. They're the best part of the day, so why would I want to sleep through them? I'd create the characters, determine the setting, choose a few future plot twist options, close my eyes, and enjoy the show. Frequently, the dream would run for several nights, picking up where it had left off the night before. Many dreams even had their own soundtrack and some characters had a theme song. 
 
In the morning, I'd wake up and complain to my alarm clock, "Hey! I was watching that!" Somehow, the physical world always seemed less interesting to me than the larger one inside my head. Sometimes, waking up feels like leaving a 3D IMAX HD theater with amazing 7.1 DTS sound and stepping into a 9 inch grainy black and white image with a 1 inch mono speaker. Most mornings, my horizontal hold goes out and I have to keep twisting things around and messing with the antenna before the picture stabilizes.
 
Coffee helps.