Such references are found (cryptically) in Greek authors including the pre-Socratics and Herodotus, and (more explicitly) in Ecclesiastes 5:3 and Ecclesiasticus 34:1-7.
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This anxiety of not being able to escape (or catch up) was borrowed from Homer by Virgil in Book XII of the Aeneid, where Turnus is unable to catch up with Aeneas; subsequently the dream is found (always in simile, never reported directly) in Oppian's Halieutica, in Torquato Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, and in Phineas Fletcher's Locusts and Purple Island, to be "burlesqued" in Samuel Butler's Hudibras.
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Anxiety dreams have a long tradition in (Western) literature, beginning with Homer, who describes in Book 12 of the Iliad how Achilles is unable to catch up with Hector, "As in a dream a man is not able to follow one who runs from him, nor can the runner escape, nor the other pursue him, so he could not run him down in his speed, nor the other get clear".
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An English translation of a well-known medieval couplet by seventeenth-century poet Abraham Cowley: "What in the day he fears of future woe / At night in dreams, like truth, affrights his mind".
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