Welcome to English as a Second Language Podcast, number six. Welcome to another edition of English as a Second Language Podcast, brought to you by www .eslpod .com. I'm your host, Dr. Jeff McQuillan. Senior Researcher at the Center for Educational Development here in Los Angeles, California. ESL Podcast is especially made for you, those who are trying to improve their English listening and speaking. If this is the first time listening to this podcast, I recommend that
you go to our website, www .eslpod .com. to read more about how best to use this podcast to improve your English. ESL podcasts have two parts. The first part is an interview, conversation, or story by a native speaker. We recommend you listen to this several times. The second part is an explanation of some of the vocabulary and expressions used by the native speakers. This second part is optional, but some people find it helps them
understand better. Before we begin today's podcast, I want to thank one of our podcast listeners in Japan, Noriko, who emailed us to tell us about a problem that we had with ESL pod number 4 on our website. Apparently, we had a problem recording the audio, and so only one side of the audio came out. So if you were listening in your headphones, you may have only heard it out of one ear. We apologize for that. We may have had that problem also in our ESL pod number 5. But we think we
have the problem fixed. We want to thank... Noriko for letting us know, and encourage all of you to email us your ideas and suggestions, and if you have problems, let us know. Now let's get started. Today's topic is bad dreams. We asked two people to talk about their worst dreams. Let's listen to what they had to say. I do have nightmares sometimes. I do have bad dreams. A lot of my bad dreams are things like I'm being chased by someone and I can't get away from them
or I'm hiding from them. Some other of my bad dreams involve not being able to get home. I'm trying to get home and there are a lot of different obstacles that I have to get past before I get home. And I usually wake up before I get there. So I find it very frustrating. So these bad dreams make me really tense. And when I wake up, I'm very, very stressed out. A bad dream that I kept having over and over again, a recurring bad dream I had when I was in high school, was a really
horrible one. I dreamt that... My mother had a knife, a meat cleaver. And I was a child, and I saw her in the bathroom cutting up a dead body with a meat cleaver. And she saw me watching her, and she started chasing me with her knife. And she never caught me, but I had to hide from her. And she chased me and chased me, and I was really scared. I had this recurring dream, probably, I don't know, for several months. And to this day, it's the scariest, worst, bad dream I've
ever had. Boy, that's an interesting question. Bad dreams. Well, I would have to say that... the worst bad dream I ever had, and this happens a lot to me in my dreams, is that I was trapped inside a building or I'm trapped in another country and I can't get back home. Usually what happens is that I meet someone there from my past. an old friend, an acquaintance, a classmate, someone from high school. And, of course, it seems normal. It seems just natural when I'm having the dream
that I meet these people. But it's always in a situation that never actually occurred. But usually my dreams, like most people's, bad dreams, I think are related to things that I thought about or happened to me that day or recently. For example, I had a very difficult time getting my car fixed the other day, and that night when I had a dream, I dreamt that I was broken down on the highway. And I couldn't get home. And it was dark. And it was starting to rain. So
I started to get desperate and so forth. So when I woke up, of course, I was sweating and a little bit scared. But fortunately, I was able to calm myself down. And eventually, I actually got my car fixed. I hope I don't have that nightmare again. You've just heard two people talk about a bad dream, including me. And I want to now talk about some of the vocabulary that they used that you might have had difficulty with. Remember,
this section of our podcast is optional. If you want to go back and listen again and again, we recommend that. But if you want some additional help, then stay tuned. One word that both speakers used is nightmare. A nightmare is another word for a bad dream. When Lucy was talking about her bad dream, she mentioned that she couldn't get home because she had lots of obstacles. An obstacle is something that gets in your way either when you're walking, running, in a car, or just
generally in life. We talk about obstacles that get in our way, things that prevent us from going or doing what we want to do. In the Army, they have something called an obstacle course. And sometimes in school, in physical education class, they'll set up a game called an obstacle course. And you have to go through all sorts of different obstacles, different challenges, such as walking through some tires or climbing up a rope and so forth. Another word that Lucy used was recurring.
She said that she had a recurring dream. To recur means to repeat. So she had that dream several times. During my discussion of nightmares, I mentioned that my nightmare is about being trapped. And to be trapped is to be put in a situation where you cannot leave. But we also use the term trapped in a more general way. You can be trapped in a job or you feel like you are trapped in a situation. This is a situation or a job that you can't leave or you can't escape from easily.
Another word I used in my description of the bad dream is that my car had broken down. Now you probably already know that broken means something that doesn't work. For example, my radio is broken or my computer is broken. But when we talk about motor vehicles, cars, trucks, we use the term broken down when it stops running, when it stops being able to move. So broken and broken down, slightly different meanings. That's going to wrap it up for today's ESL podcast. I want to
thank you again for listening. I want to urge you and recommend that you email us your ideas for topics, suggestions for what you would like to hear in these ESL podcasts. These podcasts are made for you, the listener, all around the world. So we hope that you will email us. You can email us by going to our website, www .eslpod .com, or simply send us an email at eslpod at learningexperts .com. That's eslpod at l -e -a
-r -n -i -n -g. Thank you again for listening, and please come back again tomorrow to ESL Podcast, English at the Speed of Sound. ESL Podcast is produced by the Center for Educational Development in Los Angeles.