Just saw this on Yahoo:
and thought “well, I don’t have recurring dreams. But I have recurring Dream LOcations.”
The City
The University
The Super-Huge Mall
The Shore Town
Anybody else have recurring setting for their dreams? Anything different than mine? Do you dream about actual locations instead of made-up ones (like mine)? Or do you , in fact, really have recurring dreams?
The hotel.
I have what I call my “dream city” where all of my dreams take place. It’s an amalgam of real life places and made up dream world places. The bizarre thing about the “dream city” is that cardinal directions are always consistent and navigation through the city is as it would be IRL. The city just gets larger and more complex the older I get.
Different areas of the city set the stage for different types of dreams. The location by the beach (which is the farthest easterly point in my “city”) always yield some horrific nightmare. The north yields silly dreams in which I usually wake up laughing.
Jeezuz I’m weird.
I don’t usually have recurring dreams. When I do dream and remember it, I usually dream about real locations and real people–often combined in odd ways. Like the Target I worked at attached to a parking garage (I don’t know if it was a specific parking garage) or the dream when I started out at my high school, looking for my college chemistry professor(for some reason I needed to show her my driver’s license to get her to sign something, I think, it didn’t make sense then either). Sometimes I even realize that things don’t make sense before I quite wake up–usually about the same time as I start waking up.
The Void.
Nothing exists there.
I do not exist there.
No, I don’t mean that I’m dead in my nightmares.
I mean that I dream of Oblivion.
The Void of my Nightmares is a Non-place…
I’m really glad you started this thread! I’ve only recently discovered that most people (or most people I know, anyway) don’t have recurring locations in their dreams. I was talking to my roommates about an idea I had to draw out a map of my dreamworld, and they had no idea what I was talking about. I’ve since polled a couple other people I know, and so far I’m the only one with many frequently recurring dream locations. As I mentioned, they constitute what I think of as Dreamworld, a comprehensive place where I live when I’m asleep. Some of the places are based roughly on places from the real world, some are completely made up. A lot of my dreams involve moving across distances - walking, canoeing, driving, riding trains and subways - which I think has helped cement Dreamworld in my mind by letting me explore and connect some of the locations. Here are the familiar places:
Milwaukee (the city I grew up in)
The House I Grew Up In (wherever I’m actually living rarely shows up; last night, I had the first dream I remember that took place in the house I’ve lived in for more than a year now)
Generic Suburbs (flat, covered in auto lots and strip malls)
The Huge Store (a kind of enormous department store)
The Grocery Store (also very large, right next to The Huge Store. Both of these are on the outskirts of the Generic Suburbs)
Prosperous Suburb / Whitefish Bay, WI (large houses, lots of trees, sometimes has an old-world-European-style area of town with shops, bars, and cafes)
The Interstate (connects Milwaukee to the Generic Suburbs, but also a location in its own right)
The Mall
The Other City (a crowded, metropolitan city that’s never quite familiar)
The Forest
The Farmer’s Field (a cleared strip on a hillside in The Forest)
The River and The Wetlands (I think The River connects The Wetlands, and The Forest, and Milwaukee, but I’ve only ever followed it from The Forest to The Wetlands)
The Lake / Ocean and related beaches, coasts, and coastal islands
The Country (based on the Amish country of Indiana)
The Art and Natural History Museum/s (sometimes in the same building on different floors)
The Aquarium (which also contains a huge swimming pool; hey, if you’re going to enlose a lot of water, why not do it all in the same building? In my dreams, something about that enclosed water is definitely creepy.)
The Foreign Land (a beautiful place with steep mountains on the edge of the ocean, which has showed up only a couple times and seems to be sort of hidden or difficult to get to, though not far in distance from the other places)
Cemetaries sometimes show up, too, but I don’t think they’ve ever repeated.
Certain themes recur in different locations, but the dreams themselves are different.
Schools. Usually schools I have been forced to attend all over again at a ludicrously advanced age. (I trace this to the trauma of taking driver-ed 2 years late. You just don’t DO that in Iowa.)
The house I grew up in, frequently with mysterious don’t-go-in-there-for-no-clear-reason rooms added. Twice I dreamed we tacked on a third floor we couldn’t use, because it had deliberately been built too small to save money.
Elevators elevators elevators. Usually they’re very confining and imprison you for ridiculously long periods, refusing to stop at the buttons pressed.
Portland, Oregon, a city I have never visited but often wished to.
New York, of course. I doubt anyone living in or near New York doesn’t dream about it recurringly.
I’m maundering around Manhattan and discover a hidden, low-density, grass-lawns-and-frame-house residential neighborhood no one seems to pay attention to, that just shouldn’t be there.
I’m maundering again, this time in the Village, West Village, or Tribeca. It’s dark, and the streetlights are out. The streets are spotted with pedestrians but only a few vehicles. Things seem quaint, antiquated, and slightly menacing. My feet hurt, probably because I’m not wearing shoes.
My university. I dream that I have shown up but can’t find my dorm, and can’t find the offices to tell me what classes I should be attending. I get exhausted hiking around campus and begin to despair of ever finding what I need. It’s college gothic style like my school but some of the buildings are rearranged. And sometimes I am in one of the lecture halls (usually Palmer Hall with the old wooden seats) given a test with information I don’t recognize.
Also my childhood bedroom. I usually dream about interesting things in the closet, or that I have to pack up everything immediately because it’s time to leave for school…and then the dream above begins.
And finally, a huge bathroom with all sorts of types of bathroom stalls but none of the toilets are usable for whatever reason.
Thanks for using this word, as it forced me to learn something new today! I thought, wandering or meandering? Nope, maundering it is!
When I was young I used to dream about this wonderful old house. I haven’t dreamed about that house in a long time.
I miss that house. 
My elementary school, junior high, high school, and college – the buildings have their real-life names, but often contain elements that don’t (or didn’t, in the case of the elementary school, which was razed about twenty years ago) actually exist. In the elementary school, I’m often in the library, which was in the basement and (in the dream) continues to exist, buried under the current (actual) structure on the site and accessible only to me and a few others who know the secret.
Often students from the different locations and eras are together in the dreams, and I either have to go back to take a course I missed (high school) or have been enrolled and living in my dorm for twenty-some years (college).
I also occasionally find myself in my childhood (and much of adulthood) home, which is sometimes realistic and at other times bears only a passing resemblance to the actual early-1960’s ranch house where my parents still reside. At times, the Terminal Tower is visible from my bedroom window, even though I actually lived in an outer suburb of Cleveland. My old neighborhood (in various stages of correspondence to reality) also appears frequently – I’m walking the streets and discovering places I somehow overlooked even though they were in the development all along.
I’ve been in Lafayette for five years now, and more and more of my dreams are set in Indiana, but I suspect Ohio (and Virginia, where I earned my bachelor’s degree) will long be the states to which I “return” at night.
I have four. The first two are real places, the other two my brain invented and likes to come back to from time to time.
The House I Grew Up In (real): This is always the default setting for any dreams that take place at “home,” no matter where I am actually living. It never changes and is exactly as it was when I did live there (unlike other dream locales, which I recognize as being certain places but which have characteristics they don’t have in real life).
The Cabin (real): My family has a cabin on Puget Sound. There are two categories of dreams that take place here: low tide and high tide. All my dreams that take place at low tide are wonderful. I find tons of huge shells, enormous agates, gold coins, pearls, rare fish, you name it. It’s beachcombing with nothing but astonishing results. All the dreams of high tide are nightmares. The water swamps the yard and then the cabin, and it’s filled with swift currents, weeds, salt-water crocodiles (visiting from Australia, I guess), and the waves are enormous.
The High School: It’s simply enormous. I get lost in stairwells and hallways, can never find the classroom I’m looking for and sometimes can’t figure out how to get outside. I am always my real age, but forced to attend high school again because it’s just been discovered that I didn’t have enough credits to graduate when I was 18.
The Mountain: This one’s my favorite. It has lots of scary cliffs, but also forest trails, a waterfall into a lake, and of course the peak I’m working toward. I start at different places, but always know the way I’ve come from (very close to lucid dreaming, but with no active control over what I do there). One time in particular, I made it further than I ever had before along the trail and got so excited to have discovered a new area that I woke myself up. If it’s a nightmare, I fall off the cliffs. If it’s a good dream, slide on the snow and maybe make it to the waterfall and the pool it falls into. That farthest point I mentioned was when I hiked to the top of the waterfall and could look down on it.
I frequently dream of an old mansion on a promontory/high cliff over the ocean. The first half of the dream is always inside the house. The inside is sometimes the house I grew up in (greately expanded and added on to), other times its just a huge maze of rooms and galleries I’m not familiar with.
The second half of the dream is always outside in the yard by the cliff. At this point we start seeing tanks and low flying bomber planes and battle ships. It’s our responsibility to protect the rest of the continent, because they have no warning. All of a sudden I realize there are tanks and AA guns in the yard. I end up commanding my troops (the friends that happen to be in that dream at the time) on the strategy we’re going to take to stop as many of the enemy as we can.
It strikes me as odd because I’ve never been interested in being involved with war or violence. The scenes in my dreams remind me of “Saving Private Ryan” in that there’s a lot of gore and machine guns firing.
Wierd.
I’m a girl FWIW.
Many of my dreams involve looking for something or someone, and not finding them.
These take place in big college dormitories or huge hotels. I go from floor to floor, searching. Sometimes, I’m trying to leave, and I can’t find a way out. I encounter broken stairways, and hatches too small to crawl through.
Since I retired, my dreams sometimes happen in a factory something like the one where I worked. Big sections of the plant are now different, and I can’t safely go where I want to go. Usually, I’ll remember I don’t work there anymore, and I’ll try to leave.
An old apartment in which I resided in the early 1970s shows up in many of my dreams. Somehow my mind seems to think that I still live there. It’s odd how dreams often combine features from different times of one’s life. I’ve had dreams that were set in this old apartment, but the people in the dreams were folks I’ve met only recently. The actual apartment is long gone; the whole block was razed in an urban-renewal effort.
A hill. (On a bike)
Around a big bushy green tree. (Flying in circles.)
In a city with buildings so tall I can’t see the top of any of them.
In the square courtyard of a house, on the porch. In a hammock. While it’s raining.
In Silent Hill. (does that count?)
Up to relatively recently I would’ve had nothing to add to this thread, as I seldom remember any of my dreams, but over the past year or so I’ve started to remember some dreams and they always take place in a huge house that I know is mine. When I say huge, I mean REALLY HUGE, with some gorgeous bedroom/bath combos that I’d kill to have IRL. On the other hand, large parts of it are definitely haunted and not a good place to be. The really odd part is that in many of my dreams I’ll start out in a different house altogether, but by the end of the dream I’m back in “my” house somehow. One day I’m going to see this house somewhere or go inside and I’m already planning my freakout… Don’t make me go in the theater, chump, I KNOW what’s in there! :eek:
Sure it does. I often find myself in Innsmouth. And other…interesting…places from literature, including the Fringes and Gilead.