It seems like the frustration dream is pretty common among people that work with computers. Before I learned how to program, but while I was studying math, I often dreamt about mathematics. I never seemed to get anything to work right, but occasionally I would solve an incredibly wonderful theorem, only to forget the proof after I woke up!

When I was a kid, I used to get bouts of asthma, which kept me awake, or just on the edge of sleep for hours, gasping for breath. I would have terrible frustration dreams, I remenber one where I was buried under a mountain of pots and pans and couldn't find my way out, and another where I was embedded in an enormous vat of spaghetti, and could find my way out.

The asthma eventually went away, it hasn't bothered me in decades. I know its what killed my father, he was allergic to some kind of pollen that gave him terrible attacks. It eventually gave him cardiac arrest.

Whatever it was that he was allergic to only bothered him in Cuba and in Florida. He lived for years in New York City in perfect health, and served in the jungle in Burma in WWII and it never affected him there, either.