Hi Brian -
I don’t know if you’re going to believe this - but your dreams of fleeing on all fours most likely are reaching way back into your memory - back to when you were a very young child - when you crawled on all fours before you learned to walk.
Most people’s earliest memories begin at ages three to four years old. By this age, of course, we have all been walking for several years, so ordinarily we don’t recall our earliest years spent crawling. But in dreams it is not unusual for this distant part of our memory to be accessed. In your case, it appears that your “inability to flee” dreams are causing you to reach back to that most basic means of locomotion - the crawl. You are trying to move anyway you can. If you can’t run - why not try crawling?
I am curious whether this dream, because it recurs frequently, has any older memories attached to it - memories that also arise from the time of crawling. If so, your dream will be offering you a window into your distant past. Next time you have the dream - try to see if there aren’t any old memories floating around. For example, one of my earliest memories in a dream involved trying to close a door against our family dog - who wanted to enter the room I was in. The dog was bigger than me, and I was having a hard time closing the door. Remember how big dogs used to be?
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