Everybody likes to think they're special little snowflakes, even when it comes to having nightmares. You know, that Rorschach night-sweat stain on the sheets is just so uniquely you. And while many dreams -- both delightful and dark -- are based on personal, individual experiences, there are broad commonalities that haunt our REM sleep. And there have to be. Otherwise dream dictionaries would need to be customized, making them prohibitively expensive for all but the robber barons and teen pregnancy television stars among us.

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"Childbirth was totally worth it to find out what Gorilla George Washington was trying to warn me about."

Some collective bad dreams are experiential. John Cheese wrote about the recovering alcoholic's recurring nightmare of falling off the wagon. Soldiers revisit the grimmest and most terrifying moments from the battlefield.

But a few dreams cross all gender, social, and national boundaries. They seem to be fairly universal -- simply human, in fact. While we take many approaches to problem solving in our waking life, the human subconscious is far more consistent. We're all linked back to the same primordial goo, and our nightmares are that goo's psychological coping mechanism.

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Dr. Goo, Ph.D.

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Debates rage about the interpretation of certain nightmares (with a card catalog of dick-centric opinions available on Yahoo! Answers alone). But while we may not agree on what the dreams and nightmares mean, we're pretty well settled on what the common ones are. Here are five of mankind's bad dream greatest hits, with non-dick-centric theories as to why we have them.