Taylor Swift has seen immense career success, but that doesn’t stop her from worrying like the rest of us. Swift said she often has the same anxiety dreams that leave her tossing and turning at night. She shared the most common recurring nightmares in her life at the time.  

Taylor Swift said she had several recurring nightmares

Swift said that when she was in her early twenties, she often dreamt about being arrested for a crime she didn’t commit.

“I keep trying to tell them that I didn’t do anything,” she told Rolling Stone in 2012, “and they won’t listen, or my voice doesn’t work.”

She also had dreams about looming piles of clothing in her home.

“I’ll be in a room with piles of clothes all over the floor, and I can’t clean it,” she said. “And no matter what, they keep piling up and I can’t move. It freaks me out! It makes me wish I could clean it, ’cause I love cleaning. But the piles get bigger, or there’s piles on the ceiling, and I don’t even know how that’s possible.”

Swift also had stressful dreams about her future. While she wanted children, she often had dreams about the way her fame might impact them.

“I have a kid and the paparazzi is taking pictures, and it’s scaring my baby,” she said. “And I know that I caused it, and I can’t figure out how to stop it.”

She said she worried about losing control

Swift said that many of her stress dreams likely stem from her desire for control.

“I think I have a big fear of things spiraling out of control,” she said. “Out of control and dangerous and reckless and thoughtless scares me, because people get hurt.”

She didn’t think her desire for control was necessarily a bad thing, but it did create stress for her.

“When you say ‘control freak’ and ‘OCD’ and ‘organized,’ that suggests someone who’s cold in nature, and I’m just not,” she said. “Like, I’m really open when it comes to letting people in. But I just like my house to be neat, and I don’t like to make big messes that would hurt people. . . . I don’t want to let people down, or let myself down, or have a lot of people that I know I wronged.”

Taylor Swift had nightmares after she appeared on ‘Punk’d’

Given the content of her dreams, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Swift’s time on the show Punk’d left her deeply rattled. In the episode, Justin Bieber convinced her to shoot a firework off a balcony. He then led her to believe that she’d set fire to a boat and ruined a wedding. It seemed that her fear of facing jail time was about to come true.

“You know I had serious nightmares where I’d wake up in the middle of the night for, like, three weeks after that? I really thought that was it for me,” she said. “I was thinking, ‘Justin is 17, so he’s going to juvie, but I’m going to big-girl prison.’”

Luckily, this is likely the closest Swift has ever come to time behind bars.