The Recurring Boulder Dream

I received an email from a young Slovenian woman in response to something I written on this blog over a year ago. I was relating a daymare that I sometimes had as a child. Here is my original entry:

I have a recurring dream that there is a tiny rock on my chest as I doze on the floor and as my sleep deepens so does the silence and as the silence buzzes around me the rock suddenly expands, instantaneously, like a balloon and I am pinned helplessly beneath it. And then the rock shrinks again and then expands, noiselessly. And when it is a huge boulder I can hear the sharp hiss of silence very loud around me and when it's a pebble I hear nothing.

Here's what this student from Slovenia, named Miha, wrote:

Hello! I came across your dream report when I searched the web for "recurring dream boulder". Why? Because I kept having the very same dream as a child. All of the details you describe, I experienced - the loopy nature of the dream, the confusion about objects being close and far at the same time, the gigantic yet tiny piece of rock stretching from infinity to nothing, the corresponding high pitched hiss, and the feeling of being too scared to move.

The reason why I searched the net for this dream in the first place was that my mom also kept having this dream when she was little - I found that out when I first decided to tell her about it (I was about nine), and to my amazement we could tell each other different bits of the dream and they would match. But for a long time I thought it was just the two of us who had this (and telling anyone else would be stupid, since nobody would believe you anyway). Then, while surfing the web, I found a description of a drug induced experience, I quote: "The sound reminded me of things I had heard during a high fever when I was a child, like an object very light and small like an eyelash and at the same time something very enormous and heavy like a hundred ton boulder." I couldn't believe it... there was actually somebody else who experienced this. So I figured, with all the dream journals online, why not do a search, see if anyone else dreamt anything similar.
I found one report that came close, I quote: "I used to have a recurring dream, usually when I was sick, that I was tied to a bed on top of an enormous boulder. The dream was scary, not because of what happened (nothing did, really), but because of the feeling of absolute helplessness associated with the dream. Then I searched on and found your blog, and I was amazed, since you describe the dream in such detail. I also showed it to my mom, and she agrees - it's the dream we experienced. Now I know all this may be hard to believe, and there is no way I can prove it to you. But if you would be interested in discussing the matter, you can mail me anytime.

I am curious if anyone else has had a similar experience or if you can theorize how this happens to a person's psyche. Personally, I don't recall the daymare as especially traumatizing, just overwhelming at times. I could always open my eyes to make it stop. I will also add that it happened most frequently when I was laying flat on my back on something like a floor surface. It hasn't recurred in many years. Miha thought perhaps it ends with puberty since that is the last time it happened to her.