So I’m a musician. I study music in college. I either have minimal performance anxiety or I’m really good at handling it. I love performing and to be honest, I’m pretty good at it. I feel like I perform better than I practice. Which is great.

I have nightmares frequently. They are mostly violent nightmares or related directly to trauma. Occasionally, I’ve had dreams about being late for shows before major performances in the past. As in once or twice a year. However, recently, I’ve been having nightmares like this before every performance. This has been going on for about a month which is the amount of time I’ve been playing at a music festival outside of my normal city. For some reason, my orchestra at this music festival has concerts every Monday evening which is unusual. We have Monday mornings off. I have a very uniform routine. I wake up at 8am, grab breakfast, and fall back asleep until 11am. During the time from 9am to 11am, I have a dream about being late for the performance. It is always raining outside, I’m never in the right uniform, and for whatever reason, I struggle to find the venue even though I know right where it is.

They aren’t exactly the same dream. Last week, I dreamt that I couldn’t find my instruments, I couldn’t figure out what time it was, and I kept forgetting things. Today, I dreamt that my parents (who abused me if that adds anything) had me at a hotel outside of the county where the performance is, I didn’t have a car, and I couldn’t get them to get serious about driving me. However, in all of the dreams, I am running late and I’m terrified of missing the show, it is raining like crazy and I get sopping wet, and I’m not wearing the right outfit.

So what is going on? Why all of the sudden nightmares about performing? Could it be something in my routine? Am I just nervous to play with this orchestra subconsciously? I am quite a bit younger than the other people in my section and I do have very serious parts. But I don’t feel nervous in performance… any ideas?