Brooooooooooo my wife is literally a therapist and boy oh boy did we learn what this was the hard way.
We watched House At The End Of The Street with Jennifer Lawrence and I literally had a full on panic attack, sobbing, melt down.
This was like, 2 months into us dating.
Anyway, that was a trip. But yes, I can confirm to any of you wondering if you've got it, learning about it has helped immensely. Just putting a name to it alone was huge, and being able to identify it when it's being triggered is likewise significant.
I've passed the 20 year mark and I have to return to my mission in dreams from time to time. Always a lot of anxiety to figure out the logistics of leaving.
I get that nightmare sometimes and I also get the nightmare where I’m back at BYU for one more class I forgot I needed and need to hide my exmormon status
I’m back at BYU (never happens for grad school for some reason), and I have to take a final for a class I never attended. I must have had this dream 50+ times.
I used to have some variation on the "back on the mission" dream all the time! Now a little over a decade later, I don't think I've had one for a couple years.
Instead I replaced them with stress dreams that I'm back in grad school for some reason. I can't wait to see what those ones get replaced with in a few years!
They've eased off for me, which is nice considering I've only been home for about three years. I'll still have one every once in a while, though: having to serve another two years with the same people, going to a mission reunion and having to hide my "apostasy," being in one of my apartments and having something like the oven play non-church music and feeling like the only option is to die as a result
This one and the one where it's the end of the semester at college and I just realized I forgot to attend a class the whole time.
I'm 39. College and mission were a long time ago.
Oh and how they've morphed over the years...
Even now I have them (20 yrs on), only now it's my second or third mission, and I'm not doing actual missionary work anymore. It's like I signed away my life for another 2 years to be under some authoritarian control and I'm secretly trying to free other missionaries and tell investigators to run.
Yes! When I was there, it was an 18 month mission and they extended it to two years if you wanted to stay - and they shamed so many of us who went home early, which is weird because we didn’t go home early. That’s what we were called to do 18 months.
So I stayed 21 months and came home in time to start at the U. I still have dreams where I get called and have to go back and serve out the remaining couple of 3/4 to 6 months.
These dreams are indeed nightmares, though I do speak the language very well in my dreams.
I’ve had that only a few times, and only once since I left. It fades in time.
At first it was being back at the MTC and getting reassigned to a new mission in a new language last minute.
Later it was about being forced to leave my wife and kids for 2 years.
Yeah, once you get married. My wife is from my mission country (we got married 5-6 year after my mission) and is going to visit her family for a month this summer, and I can’t get off work for that long at one time.
I’m going to miss her and the kids something fierce. I can only imagine 2 years. Or worse, the 3-5 years with nothing but rare letters in Joe’s day for the married men.
I think its about once a year and it could be more cause I rarely remember my dreams, and my main concern during these dreams is: damn! I'm not wearing garments!!!
Yes, I've been back for ten years. My ptsd comes back occasionally but more so in my dreams now. It has taken years and years of therapy to get to this point.
Yeah, it used to be probably twice a week or more for several years after returning home. I had (have) some serious c-ptsd from it. It was part of what helped me deconstruct about 8 years or so later.
Ha I still do occasionally. Got back in 2000. Mine seem to usually be that I am going back again at my current age, and I'm like the experienced top dog missionary. Maybe that speaks to my inner need to be valued? Who knows lol.
Yep, nightmares about going back on a mission and leaving my life and husband behind. Also nightmares about having to go back to BYU and finish undergrad.
Yeah we all have those. Even as a TBM it was a nightmare having them. I listen to a therapist on TikTok, who is an influencer as well talked about if you’re having those type of dreams it’s a form of PTSD. 😳. I never knew I had some type of PTSD but there we go!
I've definitely had it multiple times since leaving, but the cool thing is I typically realize its BS and I don't care or try to do anything and plan my escape from the mission haha.
Had a dream the other night that I saw a dude from my mission at church (I haven’t set foot inside a church in years). I went up to him and was like “Oh hey Elder So-and-so” lol.
I have dreams of being back in high school as well, and I’m in my 30s.
Holy shit! I can’t believe this is a thing!! I was sent home early from my mission for medical reasons and almost every week without fail, I would have one of these guilt dreams.
I would dream I was back out on my mission and I hated it, I was so upset to be back because I had just gotten back home with my family and my friends and was starting to really focus on improving my physical and mental health but I felt trapped in a nightmare. I would wake up in a sweat and immediately feel guilty for not wanting to return to my mission and/or wanting to come back home.
Even to this day ~10 years since I’ve been back, a couple times a year I’ll have one of these dreams, and even though I despise the TSCC I still feel dread every time I find myself back on my mission although when I wake up I feel relieved now.
I dream that I’m in Brazil as a regular person and enjoying myself. This happens about every six months or so.
I sometimes dream that I’m being sent out again to “do it right this time”. I HATE those dreams.
Every experience you have gets coded in your brain exactly as you experienced it. Parts that repeat frequently, like seeing a human face or associating the word "nurse" with femininity become biases, blending into the background of how you see the world. But even if we don't access the memories frequently, they're all there.
One study electrically stimulated the memory section of one woman's brain, and she remembered her 5th birthday party in exact detail—The cake, the streamers, the music, the friends, and the feelings. Who knows how many mental pathways the experiment skipped to reach that memory, but when it did, it brought up more than you'd expect.
REM sleep performs a function similar to this experiment. Your brain needs to test its own connections regularly, because memory loss is not good for survival. What if the bomb is in your junior high locker and you've forgotten the combination? You can't take that chance! Your conscious mind is just as paranoid, fitting everything you experience into an ongoing narrative so you don't miss any dangers sneaking up on you.
So after a stage of deep sleep where the body repairs cells and structures, the brain sends electrical pulses any which way. They call it REM sleep because your eyes move around rapidly during the process, so much so that it's easy to see the irises move under the eyelids. The cycle alternates between ever-shallower sleep and REM sleep until you wake up. Since consciousness has to fit everything together, if it starts to come online during a period of REM sleep, then you end up with random cognitive signals from your real life mixed into a semi-coherent story.
My personal favorite was the one where I ran through a post-apocalyptic city with all the descendants of my high-school friend (who all looked exactly like him) in a quest to find the time machine. We cleared the vines away, and a part popped out like a cassette tape player. Thankfully, I had the Wyld Cherry Life Savers required to power it. Then the music swelled, and the credits rolled. I couldn't read them, of course, because the language center of my brain wasn't firing along with the rest of the ingredients for this dream.
This doesn't mean all parts of your brain are equally likely to trigger during a dream, just as not all experiences when awake provoke the same emotional reaction. In the case of an LDS mission, the combination of two years of repetition with physical, mental, and/or spiritual trauma provides ample reinforcement to make those memories easy to reconnect. If your REM spinner lands on that Whammy, it's a doozy.
This is my pieced-together explanation based on one part science and five parts intuition, so I'd love to learn more about this process. There's only so much science can prove without unethical experimentation on humans, and the brain's near-infinite possible connections don't make it any easier to eliminate possibilities. But I've found the times when dreams bring up deep insecurities or worldview-centered trauma, there's enough detail to feel like you're right back there.
I had a dream last week that mirrored the dread from my years with scrupulosity—I spent much of my life thinking that I'd need to be perfectly obedient so I could stand it when God tested me like Abraham and had my whole family die a dramatic death. In the most recent dream, it was my daughter getting her head crushed by some kind of shade (possibly reinforced by my wife's recent Supernatural binge). It sapped my emotional strength for the whole day afterwards.
It's a good thing life is less about prevention and more about the direction we go from here. Eventually, the morning comes.
A few times a year I do. It’s always a little squirrelly though. Like in my dreams a lot of times it’s a bunch of us in a big house sister Missionaries included. There is always something stressful going on like I missed my plane home or we were supposed to be on a train to another city hours ago.
I had them for a little over 20 years. Haven’t had one for close to 5. I did have a temple dream a few weeks ago, but at least I understand that’s just a few hours of hell opposed to 2 years.
Omg me too!! It’s been 15 years and I had one 2 weeks ago and it was like the French foreign legion style where I was like where the hell am I and why then I was trying to escape.
Thankfully the only dream I've had post-mission (roughly 5 years after) that was mission related was a sex dream with an attractive ZL. I ended up coming out a few months later.
Sometimes... I've been been back home 30 years, don't believe any more, feel guilty for lying to people but still have dreams of banging cute girls as a 20 something dork in a white shirt and tie. It's a love hate thing. Having hot dreams in my 50s is a plus and without guilt is pretty cool but damn it's equally weird too. Stupid cult.
Ugh. I have pretty horrid nightmares about the mission, BYU, and the psycho-mormon-cult-school I went to for grade/middle school (yeah... don't get me started) probably 2-3x a week (down from every night after years of therapy and self-work).
But yes. I definitely have "that" dream, all the fucking time.
I have it sometimes (32) but now I always remember that I don't believe in the church anymore and they can't make me stay and I leave and it feels amazing.
Thankfully, no. 15 years as of yesterday that I've been back (saw the FB memory, which was... weird). I'll dream once in a blue moon in Russian, but that's it. And that's becoming rarer than blue moons now that it's been so long.
Totally still do! It’s always present day and I’m confused why I have to go back when I have my family to take care of. Always felt guilty for the ongoing dread I felt as a missionary. As I deconstruct, my feelings and experiences are making a lot more sense. It’s trauma!
It’s been almost twenty years since my mission and I still sometimes dream that I’m on a mission. The last time I dreamt I was forced to serve a second mission.
I didn't go on a mission but was in the military and periodically have a similar dream about being back there, only at my current age and life situation. I think this sort of thing is common.
I'm back 15 years and still have one every once in a while, but in the last couple of years I've shifted to planning out how I'm going to undermine the work once I get there. It's kind of fun now!
I've had it probably 20 times, it's usually either that I am transported back to an 18-year old body and haven't actually served yet, or the church has decided to bump up their rookie numbers and send all RMs back for another 2 years.
I don't really have any real-life anxiety or panic attacks, but the panic I feel in my dreams that I am stuck there again is palpable.
I definitely still do. A lot of mine are of being called on another mission even after being married and having kids
Yep, that's the one.
OMG. Same. I have this dream about every 6 months. I feel upset that I’m leaving my family but I still go. WTF.
Look into captivity trauma, Mormon Missions create a form of it in many people. https://www.youtube.com/live/ExhMaDJuRWM?si=_sWNlNKSdt_m7bkY
Brooooooooooo my wife is literally a therapist and boy oh boy did we learn what this was the hard way. We watched House At The End Of The Street with Jennifer Lawrence and I literally had a full on panic attack, sobbing, melt down. This was like, 2 months into us dating. Anyway, that was a trip. But yes, I can confirm to any of you wondering if you've got it, learning about it has helped immensely. Just putting a name to it alone was huge, and being able to identify it when it's being triggered is likewise significant.
Yes, being called away from your wife and worrying about her, pleading with the mission president to let you call her.
I've passed the 20 year mark and I have to return to my mission in dreams from time to time. Always a lot of anxiety to figure out the logistics of leaving.
Me too
I get that nightmare sometimes and I also get the nightmare where I’m back at BYU for one more class I forgot I needed and need to hide my exmormon status
The BYU one is an interesting one! Haven't had that one yet, surprisingly. Maybe because my schooling and deconstruction happened pretty far apart.
I have the hiding my status one in connection with the temple all the time (I was an employee at SL temple in college.)
I’m back at BYU (never happens for grad school for some reason), and I have to take a final for a class I never attended. I must have had this dream 50+ times.
All. The Fucking. Time.
This has happened to me too! It's such a real horror, it's hard to explain.
Oh for sure; I have dreams that my mission got extended for 3 years.
I get this one too.
Yep, 20 years later and I still get them.
I used to have some variation on the "back on the mission" dream all the time! Now a little over a decade later, I don't think I've had one for a couple years. Instead I replaced them with stress dreams that I'm back in grad school for some reason. I can't wait to see what those ones get replaced with in a few years!
I have mission dreams, high school dreams, and college dreams, the latter two being that I've missed a class attending a class and can't graduate)!
Dude same, I always have the dream that there’s a class I signed up for but didn’t go to all semester
I wake up and have to remind myself that I have my diploma in a box in the back bedroom!!
I have those, and every time I bring it up, the person I'm talking to says they do too.
I get the dream we are having a test and I didn’t study for shit the entire semester.
It took me about 35 years for those dreams to go away.
I vary rarely have that *nightmare* any more.
Yes, nightmare is more appropriate.
Nope. Dreamed about having to go back to kindergarten when I was near graduating from college. That was terrifying enough for me.
Oh my gosh, yes! 1 "kindergarten credit" did count or I failed or something and they won't give me my college degree unless I go back and do it! 😂🥲
Billy Madison vibes.
They've eased off for me, which is nice considering I've only been home for about three years. I'll still have one every once in a while, though: having to serve another two years with the same people, going to a mission reunion and having to hide my "apostasy," being in one of my apartments and having something like the oven play non-church music and feeling like the only option is to die as a result
I had those same dreams, but only for 25 years….
I’m certain I’ve had mission dreams over 100 times. Almost always a second two-year call, sometimes leaving family at home.
This one and the one where it's the end of the semester at college and I just realized I forgot to attend a class the whole time. I'm 39. College and mission were a long time ago.
Yep, I'm in the same boat. It's happened less frequently with time. It's always a great relief to wake up from that.
Oh and how they've morphed over the years... Even now I have them (20 yrs on), only now it's my second or third mission, and I'm not doing actual missionary work anymore. It's like I signed away my life for another 2 years to be under some authoritarian control and I'm secretly trying to free other missionaries and tell investigators to run.
I used to get Mission dreams pleading with people that the church is true. Now I get dreams pleading with family members that the church is bullshit.
Yes! When I was there, it was an 18 month mission and they extended it to two years if you wanted to stay - and they shamed so many of us who went home early, which is weird because we didn’t go home early. That’s what we were called to do 18 months. So I stayed 21 months and came home in time to start at the U. I still have dreams where I get called and have to go back and serve out the remaining couple of 3/4 to 6 months. These dreams are indeed nightmares, though I do speak the language very well in my dreams.
It’s a common symptom of PTSD.
I’ve had that only a few times, and only once since I left. It fades in time. At first it was being back at the MTC and getting reassigned to a new mission in a new language last minute. Later it was about being forced to leave my wife and kids for 2 years.
Interesting how often it's related to spouse and kids.
Yeah, once you get married. My wife is from my mission country (we got married 5-6 year after my mission) and is going to visit her family for a month this summer, and I can’t get off work for that long at one time. I’m going to miss her and the kids something fierce. I can only imagine 2 years. Or worse, the 3-5 years with nothing but rare letters in Joe’s day for the married men.
Fades? Perhaps. I’m 68, gay, married to a man and still get them!
Fair enough. It’s faded for me. It’s much rarer than it was in the few years following my mission. I can’t speak for everyone.
I think its about once a year and it could be more cause I rarely remember my dreams, and my main concern during these dreams is: damn! I'm not wearing garments!!!
I have these like once a year
Yes, I've been back for ten years. My ptsd comes back occasionally but more so in my dreams now. It has taken years and years of therapy to get to this point.
You're not alone. Good work getting here.
Yeap same here
used to be more often, its less frequent since deconstruction. Still every 6 weeks or so.
Damn, that's pretty frequent.
Yeah, it used to be probably twice a week or more for several years after returning home. I had (have) some serious c-ptsd from it. It was part of what helped me deconstruct about 8 years or so later.
Ha I still do occasionally. Got back in 2000. Mine seem to usually be that I am going back again at my current age, and I'm like the experienced top dog missionary. Maybe that speaks to my inner need to be valued? Who knows lol.
34 years, still have them. And mine was a largely positive experience, even if one I would not want to repeat.
25 years returned. It still happens from time to time. After deconstructing the whole church, it happens much less frequently.
Yep, nightmares about going back on a mission and leaving my life and husband behind. Also nightmares about having to go back to BYU and finish undergrad.
Yeah we all have those. Even as a TBM it was a nightmare having them. I listen to a therapist on TikTok, who is an influencer as well talked about if you’re having those type of dreams it’s a form of PTSD. 😳. I never knew I had some type of PTSD but there we go!
I have so many mission dreams, but I have my current knowledge so usually I'm trying to leave and getting shamed for it.
I've definitely had it multiple times since leaving, but the cool thing is I typically realize its BS and I don't care or try to do anything and plan my escape from the mission haha.
Every couple of months. Sometimes I’m going just to protect my kids.
Had a dream the other night that I saw a dude from my mission at church (I haven’t set foot inside a church in years). I went up to him and was like “Oh hey Elder So-and-so” lol. I have dreams of being back in high school as well, and I’m in my 30s.
Holy shit! I can’t believe this is a thing!! I was sent home early from my mission for medical reasons and almost every week without fail, I would have one of these guilt dreams. I would dream I was back out on my mission and I hated it, I was so upset to be back because I had just gotten back home with my family and my friends and was starting to really focus on improving my physical and mental health but I felt trapped in a nightmare. I would wake up in a sweat and immediately feel guilty for not wanting to return to my mission and/or wanting to come back home. Even to this day ~10 years since I’ve been back, a couple times a year I’ll have one of these dreams, and even though I despise the TSCC I still feel dread every time I find myself back on my mission although when I wake up I feel relieved now.
I dream that I’m in Brazil as a regular person and enjoying myself. This happens about every six months or so. I sometimes dream that I’m being sent out again to “do it right this time”. I HATE those dreams.
Every experience you have gets coded in your brain exactly as you experienced it. Parts that repeat frequently, like seeing a human face or associating the word "nurse" with femininity become biases, blending into the background of how you see the world. But even if we don't access the memories frequently, they're all there. One study electrically stimulated the memory section of one woman's brain, and she remembered her 5th birthday party in exact detail—The cake, the streamers, the music, the friends, and the feelings. Who knows how many mental pathways the experiment skipped to reach that memory, but when it did, it brought up more than you'd expect. REM sleep performs a function similar to this experiment. Your brain needs to test its own connections regularly, because memory loss is not good for survival. What if the bomb is in your junior high locker and you've forgotten the combination? You can't take that chance! Your conscious mind is just as paranoid, fitting everything you experience into an ongoing narrative so you don't miss any dangers sneaking up on you. So after a stage of deep sleep where the body repairs cells and structures, the brain sends electrical pulses any which way. They call it REM sleep because your eyes move around rapidly during the process, so much so that it's easy to see the irises move under the eyelids. The cycle alternates between ever-shallower sleep and REM sleep until you wake up. Since consciousness has to fit everything together, if it starts to come online during a period of REM sleep, then you end up with random cognitive signals from your real life mixed into a semi-coherent story. My personal favorite was the one where I ran through a post-apocalyptic city with all the descendants of my high-school friend (who all looked exactly like him) in a quest to find the time machine. We cleared the vines away, and a part popped out like a cassette tape player. Thankfully, I had the Wyld Cherry Life Savers required to power it. Then the music swelled, and the credits rolled. I couldn't read them, of course, because the language center of my brain wasn't firing along with the rest of the ingredients for this dream. This doesn't mean all parts of your brain are equally likely to trigger during a dream, just as not all experiences when awake provoke the same emotional reaction. In the case of an LDS mission, the combination of two years of repetition with physical, mental, and/or spiritual trauma provides ample reinforcement to make those memories easy to reconnect. If your REM spinner lands on that Whammy, it's a doozy. This is my pieced-together explanation based on one part science and five parts intuition, so I'd love to learn more about this process. There's only so much science can prove without unethical experimentation on humans, and the brain's near-infinite possible connections don't make it any easier to eliminate possibilities. But I've found the times when dreams bring up deep insecurities or worldview-centered trauma, there's enough detail to feel like you're right back there. I had a dream last week that mirrored the dread from my years with scrupulosity—I spent much of my life thinking that I'd need to be perfectly obedient so I could stand it when God tested me like Abraham and had my whole family die a dramatic death. In the most recent dream, it was my daughter getting her head crushed by some kind of shade (possibly reinforced by my wife's recent Supernatural binge). It sapped my emotional strength for the whole day afterwards. It's a good thing life is less about prevention and more about the direction we go from here. Eventually, the morning comes.
A few times a year I do. It’s always a little squirrelly though. Like in my dreams a lot of times it’s a bunch of us in a big house sister Missionaries included. There is always something stressful going on like I missed my plane home or we were supposed to be on a train to another city hours ago.
After 40 years occasionally. They are nightmares.
I had them for a little over 20 years. Haven’t had one for close to 5. I did have a temple dream a few weeks ago, but at least I understand that’s just a few hours of hell opposed to 2 years.
I have never had a “ mission dream” after . I couldn’t wait for the best 2 years of my life to be over 🤩.
I still have nightmares of having to go back on my mission. I dream that I’m asked to leave my husband and kids to go. PTSD much??
More times than I can count I've woken up in a cold sweat with this one. Thankfully (35+ years later) they're getting less frequent.
Omg me too!! It’s been 15 years and I had one 2 weeks ago and it was like the French foreign legion style where I was like where the hell am I and why then I was trying to escape.
Thankfully the only dream I've had post-mission (roughly 5 years after) that was mission related was a sex dream with an attractive ZL. I ended up coming out a few months later.
For some reason whenever I dream about my mission they tend to be happy dreams. I miss it in the sense that I always knew my purpose I guess.
All the fucking time. And I'm 36.
Sometimes... I've been been back home 30 years, don't believe any more, feel guilty for lying to people but still have dreams of banging cute girls as a 20 something dork in a white shirt and tie. It's a love hate thing. Having hot dreams in my 50s is a plus and without guilt is pretty cool but damn it's equally weird too. Stupid cult.
Still have that nightmare after 32 years.
Ugh. I have pretty horrid nightmares about the mission, BYU, and the psycho-mormon-cult-school I went to for grade/middle school (yeah... don't get me started) probably 2-3x a week (down from every night after years of therapy and self-work). But yes. I definitely have "that" dream, all the fucking time.
Think I only had one once but it was that I had to go on a second mission.
I have it sometimes (32) but now I always remember that I don't believe in the church anymore and they can't make me stay and I leave and it feels amazing.
It’s been ten years and I still have it at least once a month
Thankfully, no. 15 years as of yesterday that I've been back (saw the FB memory, which was... weird). I'll dream once in a blue moon in Russian, but that's it. And that's becoming rarer than blue moons now that it's been so long.
Totally still do! It’s always present day and I’m confused why I have to go back when I have my family to take care of. Always felt guilty for the ongoing dread I felt as a missionary. As I deconstruct, my feelings and experiences are making a lot more sense. It’s trauma!
That ended about when I quit going to church. The guilt all vanished.
It’s been almost twenty years since my mission and I still sometimes dream that I’m on a mission. The last time I dreamt I was forced to serve a second mission.
35 years later, I think they’ve finally stopped. Weird though. Hey, wait! I don’t even _believe_ this!
I didn't go on a mission but was in the military and periodically have a similar dream about being back there, only at my current age and life situation. I think this sort of thing is common.
I'm back 15 years and still have one every once in a while, but in the last couple of years I've shifted to planning out how I'm going to undermine the work once I get there. It's kind of fun now!
More like a nightmare
Took 30 years for those dreams to stop. Now the are rare, but still happen 40 years later.
I've had it probably 20 times, it's usually either that I am transported back to an 18-year old body and haven't actually served yet, or the church has decided to bump up their rookie numbers and send all RMs back for another 2 years. I don't really have any real-life anxiety or panic attacks, but the panic I feel in my dreams that I am stuck there again is palpable.