As his April 18 reporting date to Lake County Hill Road Jail approaches, Mr. Neasham said he has had "really bad dreams" about going behind bars.

WSJ: Annuity Case Chills Insurance Agents

The herb also triggers withdrawal symptoms such as tiredness, depression, shaking and bad dreams, although the ACMD said this did not necessarily provide evidence of dependency.

BBC: Man chewing khat

"The App Store provided us with opportunities beyond our wildest dreams, " said Bad Robot Interactive's JJ Abrams.

ENGADGET: Apple: App Store just hit 40 billion total downloads, half of those in 2012

As so often with dreams, good or bad, the details remain sketchy and subject to widely divergent interpretations.

ECONOMIST: Troubled sleep in Sichuan

No one ever expects to regain the intoxicant levels of the boom years, but neither is it considered necessarily bad to stop living beyond our means on a raft of imported dreams. (It has certainly spelled immediate relief for the environment.) Painful, difficult times allow for painful, difficult changes.

CNN: Sign-off 1998

More important than that familiar story, however, is the deeper bad news that a profoundly leveraged credit-economy culture repackages nightmares as dreams.

FORBES: In Our Fear-Based Economy, Fiscal Cliff Talks Obsess Over Income, Ignore Net Worth