An intriguing phenomenon started after the release of the thriller "Jaws" during the summer of 1975.

		RELATED STORY The 12 universal dreams

Americans started having nightmares of being chased in the water by sharks -- even those who lived hundreds of miles from the ocean.

This relentless marine villain hadn't surfaced before in people's dreams. But for those familiar with these nocturnal fantasies and what they represent, it wasn't a surprise.

It was just a new version of one of the oldest common dream themes -- being chased.

From the dawn of time, people have dreamed of being pursued -- by saber-toothed cats and leopards, by Roman soldiers, by spiders, alligators or bears, by a dark stranger or by monsters in the bedroom closet.

The evidence is found in cave drawings, on clay tablets, in mythology and ancient dream books. And chase dreams occur today among people all over the world, whether they live in New Zealand or Malawi or Chile or Ireland or Canada or here.

Being chased is not the only common theme. People dream of falling or drowning, of flying, of being naked in public or inappropriately dressed, of taking or failing a test, of getting lost, of having sex with a colleague or stranger (even when they're married) or of having their teeth fall out.

Most dream workers and psychologists agree on six or seven of the most common dreams, says Patricia Garfield, a longtime dream worker trained in clinical psychology who lives in the San Francisco area.

"So much so, one feels there may be something really physiological about being human that creates this kind of dreaming," she says.

"Common dreams reflect how our brain works, how our social lives work,'' says Gayle Delaney, founding president of the Association for the Study of Dreams, who has written and lectured extensively about dreams.

"We're all concerned about relationships with other people, our survival and working out problems."

Alan Siegel, a clinical psychologist in private practice and assistant clinical professor at the University of California at Berkeley, agrees, but notes: "Dreams are universal, but for each individual, they may have a different meaning.''

Among other common themes are being injured or dying; having trouble with a car or other vehicle; having a house or property that is damaged or can't be located; missing a plane or other transportation; experiencing telephone or machine malfunctions; encountering a natural or manmade disaster; or being menaced by a spirit.

From Jung to Internet

Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, who developed his dream theories in the early 1900s, believed in the "collective unconscious," a storehouse of myths, ideas and images, shaped by evolution, that are shared by all humanity.

Later, Calvin Hall Jr., a psychologist who did most of his important work at Cleveland's Western Reserve University and at a University of Miami dream lab in the 1950s and '60s, focused on the content analysis of dreams. He had amassed more than 50,000 dream reports when he died, many culled from college students.

Hall developed a quantitative coding system that divided dream content into settings, objects, characters, interactions, emotions, misfortunes and other categories. Ultimately, his work showed that the dreams of groups of people from all over the world are more similar than they are different, although they vary by culture.

New revelations about how the brain works from a computerized imaging technique called PET (positron emission tomography) in the mid-1990s showed that Rapid Eye Movement dreaming begins in the limbic region of the brain -- the most ancient part, which controls emotions. This may explain why some of the early experiences of survival, such as being chased by wild animals or climbing trees to gather food that can promote a fear of falling, continue to surface in dreams.

"We human beings were truly vulnerable," Garfield says. "There was a time that an attack by a wild animal was not that unusual. There may be something we carry over biologically in our bodies that evokes this kind of dream content."

Today, the technological advances of the Internet have enabled Garfield and other researchers to conduct worldwide surveys to collect and catalog large numbers of dreams that can track these trends.

G. William Domhoff, a professor of psychology and sociology at University of California at Santa Cruz who studied with Hall, has recorded thousands of dreams on his Internet site, www.dreambank.net. Although he's uncovered cross-cultural similarities in dreaming, he makes an important point about universal dreams -- they don't happen that often in any individual dreamer. Instead, they are common in the sense that people all over the world report having them at least once.

Indeed, the dreams of most of the people recorded in Domhoff's bank focus on each of these universal themes less than 5 percent of the time.

Five hundred dreamers participated in Garfield's Web site survey during the late 1990s -- 325 from the United States and 175 in other countries. Both groups reported similar frequencies of the common dreams.

Topping her list of negative dreams were being chased (80 percent reported these dreams); falling or drowning (64 percent); being lost or trapped (58 percent); being naked or inappropriately dressed (52 percent); and being accidentally injured, ill or dying (48 percent).

This mirrored more than 50 years of her own dream journals that she began keeping at age 14. She's now 69.

Surveys of Canadian college students by researchers at the University of Montreal conducted in 1996 and 2000 also showed that 80 percent of them reported dreaming of being pursued.

Studies on dream content are tricky, of course, because they're subjective and rely on self-reporting, which can involve faulty memories or embellishment. But the patterns are undeniable.

Problems as pursuers

Local culture influences these dream plots. In India, children are chased by vultures. In Canada, the pursuers are bears. In Switzerland, it's wolves, Garfield says.

She was embarking on a 17-city tour to promote an earlier book, "Creative Dreaming," at the time the movie "Jaws" hit theaters. At the book signings, people recounted their nightmares about sharks.

"To me that was very interesting. In all the records we had ... of different things doing the chasing, there were no sharks. After 'Jaws' came out, oh my God, people dreamed about sharks.''

Still, only 25 percent of people responding to her survey reported being attacked or chased by animals. The main culprit, she says, is a dark stranger, often dressed in black, which was found in 40 percent of attack/chase dreams.

Being chased may indicate that the dreamer is trying to avoid something he is not ready to confront or is fleeing an unpleasant situation. The dark stranger may represent an unknown danger in the dreamer's life. Dreamers may have a vague idea of what it is that they fear, but may not be ready to face it fully, Garfield says.

Other researchers are more wary of making such interpretations, and say that dreams of being chased are simply a way that we attach our anxieties to the old evolutionary survival instinct embedded in our minds.

Garfield says that when she was 15, she dreamed of seeing a man in a black mask and cape walking down the street she lived on, flourishing a whip. She believes this dream -- like others of young women who run from men with knives, swords, batons and rifles -- may have been a symbolic depiction of the ambivalence about sexual intercourse, as psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, no doubt, would have concluded.

The late comedian Gilda Radner dreamed that her husband and pet poodle were about to be bludgeoned to death by a "very thin and hollow-eyed man in a hospital gown'' armed with a hammer. The actress successfully fended off the hammer man in her dream, which may have symbolized her fear of death from the cancer that took her life at 42, Garfield says.

Many of the universal themes occur in dreams that were recorded during a two-week period in September by a dream panel assembled by the Post-Gazette for this series.

Peter Baynes, of Oakland, dreamed about being chased by a gang and then by a pit bull terrier; Rob Brust, of Penn Hills, reported trouble with the air in his tires. He also had dreams of getting lost while driving in Pittsburgh and while making his way through hospital corridors. Jean-Jacques Sene, of the South Side, dreamed of being attacked by a drifter trying to steal his car.

Jocelyn Hillen, of Mount Washington, dreamed of being trapped in the aquarium building at the zoo and showing up at a convention inappropriately dressed in big, white pajama pants. She also feared she'd miss a plane to Ireland because she was behind in her packing.

And as with all dreamers, most of their dreams were negative or had negative elements.

"Dreams are problem-solving devices,'' says Garfield. "They're struggling to work out whatever it is we're coping with in the waking state. Therefore, we always have new problems. We're always trying to master that.''

Good dreams are rarer, but no less important. "Positive dreams can be absolutely wonderful. Very inspiring. Some people change their lives by some powerful dream they have. It gives you a sense of spirit. Whole religions have been founded on the dream experience."

Pregnant with meaning

Siegel, who this year published "Dream Wisdom: Uncovering Life's Answers in Your Dreams,'' has focused recent research on common dreams that occur during life transitions, such as pregnancy or marriage.

Pregnant women, he says, have 10 or 15 common dreams. They dream of having a deformed baby or that they forget to take care of their child. Dreams in early pregnancy may be about fish. Then they dream of giving birth to furry mammals. The animals get bigger and bigger as the pregnancy progresses, from kittens to seals. They're a metaphoric way of preparing for a change, he believes.

Tara Deringor, a Squirrel Hill dream panel participant who was pregnant with twins, dreamed repeatedly about bizarre birth scenarios.

"The idea here is that an inner development takes place during the period of pregnancy," Siegel says. "There's an evolution involved of an irresponsible young person who takes care of only herself preparing mentally to take care of a baby for 24 hours a day."

		Dreams: Day 1 INDEX

People facing marriage may dream about getting to the church late or of having sexual relations with a former lover. Taken literally, the dreamers may interpret that as a subconscious message that they don't want to get married.

But these dreams are common among the engaged, Siegel says, and may, in fact, simply be a way that the mind reviews past relationships or closes a chapter on life. "The meaning could be the opposite of what people would conclude without good knowledge of what's going on."

Siegel uses these common themes in his practice to help ease people's fears about their dreams.

"They show that anxiety is normal. It's normal to be anxious when undergoing a huge transition. Rather than pushing the panic button, it's a healthy sign."