Hate to start yet another dream thread but I didn’t want to hijack anyone else’s either so here goes…
I have the most amazing dreams… Unfortunately they’re truly bizarre. (Most people back aways slowly after I’ve related a dream to them.) But I wouldn’t trade them for anything, they’re really quite cool to me.
Anyway, I have one recurring dream that drives me nuts. I know there is likely some “symbolic message” to this dream, maybe a Doper can help me out with it.
It always involves being in a house - the house is always different but in the dream it’s always “home”. In reality, it’s usually the home of someone that I know (my brother’s grandmother, a friend’s aunt, etc.) Each time, I am going through the house and I open a door and find a whole new “wing” to the house. Generally a suite of rooms, such as a living room, bedroom, bathroom and kitchen. Basically, a house-within-a-house. And every time, upon finding this “secret” wing, I think to myself “I can’t believe I forgot this was here!” So it isn’t as if I never knew about it, it’s just that I completely forgot about it. For some reason, this seems like an important distinction to me. The rooms are always very nice, very well furnished, and generally much nicer than the rest of the house.
Occasionally, I’ll go out a door into the back yard, which always looks the same: there’s a bunch of rusted, broken down furniture and lawn equipment (lawnmowers, empty gas cans, etc.), the grass is weedy and overgrown, and it’s just a pretty dumpy place.
Any thoughts?
Oh and last night’s dream was nicely odd. In the dream, I was “writing the dream”, that is, I was the author of the events that were happening. It was very close to a lucid dream, but not quite the same. So in the dream, I was writing the events of a man who had been summoned to save another world*. When the dream began, he had been away from this world for 10 years. He walked into a room, and looked around, and noticed that there was a helium balloon on the ceiling from the going away party they’d thrown for him 10 years before. But as he was looking at it, I (in my writer mode) thought, “Wait, if it’s been 10 years, the balloon would not still have helium in it” and it promptly fell to the floor (literally like a lead balloon). Then a woman (to whom he’d previously been married) came in and was talking about a little girl’s birthday. I had to think of a girl’s name and came up with A’ranna (don’t ask, I have no idea), and he promptly referred to her by that name. What was truly odd was, as the writer, I was reflecting on the background history of the characters. The woman was apparently A’ranna’s mother, but had no idea that she was. She also had predicted that all of her husbands (four in total) would die, but none of them had. He commented on this to her, and then she stated that somebody was on his way. (No idea what the name of sombeody was). Scene in the dream cuts to a really cool looking locomotive headed their way, and I woke up.
No one else I ask seems to ever have “dream history” but I usually do; during the course of the dream, my mind creates this entire history for the people in my dreams, and when I wake up, I can remember the details very vividly. And I will also sometimes have a nagging sense when I wake up that the locale of that night’s dream had been a locale in a previous dream, but not one that exists for me in real life.
yeah, ok so… my dreams are bizarre. But they’re like nightly novels, and so much fun to remember.
*I’m fairly certain he was Thomas Covenant of the Stephen R. Donaldson books.