Recurring Dream Locations

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Oh sure, I get recurring dreams. There’s the one where I remember there’s a class in college I’ve totally forgotten about and haven’t been to in weeks, or the one where I’m back at the radio station, the song is about to end, and I have nothing pulled for the next song. There’s the horrible nightmare where my teeth are falling out and, in the dream, I think to myself, “Oh crap, I used to dream about this happening AND NOW IT’S HAPPENING FOR REAL!” There are the dreams about my ex-girlfriend that always cause me to wake up in the weirdest of moods. Everyone has those sorts of things. But I want to talk about the places which show up in my dreams time and time again.

Like The Mall. There’s a mall in my dreams. And it’s always the same mall. I bet if I sat down and really thought about it, I could give you a floor plan of it.

There’s a Toy Store in it, just around the bend in that weird curve. It’s got this open floor plan - it’s not like a regular mall shop, and it always has these tiny Star Wars action figures of incredibly obscure characters, in addition to regular ones I haven’t seen yet.

Also in the mall is the Book Store with the many many small rooms on different levels. They also sell CDs there.

Small rooms also abound in my Aunt’s House. No, it looks nothing like my aunt’s actual house, and she’s never there, but I know what it is all the same. There are many, many rooms there - it’s almost like a hotel, since there are plenty of bedrooms with bathrooms in them. And I’m always wandering through the house, looking through stuff, just to see what’s there, and trying to avoid being seen by others. There are also sort of secret passages there, like the tower you can climb up in to get to the floor above.

These are familiar landscapes to me in dreams. Whenever I find my dream-self in The Mall, I run to the Toy Store to see what they have. I know my way there.

Oh yeah, the mall sometimes connects to a sort of hotel type place, but I haven’t been there nearly as often, so I can’t tell you too much about it. You come out of the mall through some double doors and you’re in a place with red carpeting and big windows. Looking out the windows you can see what looks like some kind of historical park. There’s a monument or something there. The windows curve outward and there’s a spiral staircase there going down. I can’t tell you much more than that, including why I know it’s a hotel.

So where do you go when you dream?

2

You too? I haven’t been to your mall or your aunt’s house but I have recurring locations also and people. Some of the people match up to real people some don’t.
One of my recurring location is just that, a location, landscape. Another is a very large house that I apparently own. Seems to always be a party going on in the downstairs area. The people at this party tend to be people I know in real life but not. Their names are similar to their real names and when I call them by their real life names they just give me a look that says ‘you are such a kidder’ and continue on as if, and I guess I do, I always call them by the wrong name but it’s okay.
I can leave the house and wander about the area (I ran into David Duchovny at a comicbook store once), visit other parts of the town? Problem is I don’t know how I got to the town, I’m just suddenly there.

Can you make changes in your dream if you don’t like how they’re going? Hubby has nightmares but I can’t seem to teach him how to change the course of his dreams.

3

A city. A small city, based on Northampton, MA. It’s got the Academy of Music (real), and this kick-ass comic store (dream only), and it’s on a hill the way Northampton is.
There’s this bookstore at the bottom of the hill and again at the top with stores in between, but if you into the store just stepping through a doorway will take you from one store to the other. They’re actually just two rooms in the same store, there’s some weird wormhole thing going on which I don’t fully understand.
Smith College isn’t there, though, the Y intersection where Smith sits is where the comic shop is.

4

Hey, that’s sort of weird. I had a series of recurring dreams a few years ago that took place in a mall. The quirky bit about mine was the mall was closed. Through the series, which I’m guessing was more than 5 dreams but less than 10, I was either being chased or chasing someone through a closed mall. It wasn’t abandoned, just closed for the night. Lots of dim lighting, and I remember turning around a corner and coming to the movie theater. The marquee was dark but all the movie posters were lit. I also remember dodging around and hiding in the kiosks.

Then there’s my parents’ house, which I revisit quite often. In these dreams I’m often trying to get away from some horrible criminal. I’ve had them shooting at me from outside, while I duck under cabinets, and I’ve had frantic runs throughout the house trying to lock all the doors before they can get in. This usually ends with me struggling with them to force the door closed and lock it. I tend to wake up about then.

5

I don’t think i have any recurring locations in my dreams. Or at least if i do, they recur so infrequently i’ve forgotten about them by the time i dream about them again!

Legomancer - some of your recurring dreams sound very scary. I very rarely have dreams as scary as that… Your Aunts house sounds nice though, lots of secret passages and everything, sounds like the kind of house a child would want…

Slight hijack but… Catnoe - how do you control your dreams? I tried to teach myself a few years ago, but it never worked…

6

In many of my dreams, I live in this funky apartment with a tiered 2 level floor and L-shaped rooms. I’ve never seen such a place IRL but it is always the same apartment

7

I have the weird “back at college and discovered I have missed about half a semisters worth of classes” dream also. Also have strange dreams where I am going back to college, moving into the little lair I used to live in, checking out the young girls across the alley. These are about the only dreams I can think of that take place at the same location consistantly. I dream I can fly, but the settings change. That one is cool, because it really does have the sensation of flight. Very strange.

Fagjunk Theology: Not just for sodomite propagandists anymore.

8

When I dream I’m “at home” - It’s always the house I grew up in (that I haven’t seen in 25 years.)

And I have a recurring “naked” dream. But I’m never totally naked. Like last night, I dreamt that I was in a large chorus, practicing for a recital among hundreds of other singers. Only I was naked from the waste up and carrying my bra around in my hand. But no body paid any attention to me - and I dream-thought that was because they were used to seeing me that way, so I obviously had never worn clothes around them.

I woke up saying “What must they think of me?” Hubby was quite confused.

Why do I keep dreaming this? Location and what I’m doing varies. But the nakedness stays. Maybe I should sleep in my bra and see if that fixes it.

sorry for the hijack

9

argh - waist not waste

(Freud would have SUCH a party with my slip ups and dreams!!)

10

For many years I have had dreams of being on the streets of New York City – trying to find Tiffany’s.

11

No recurring locations, unfortunately, but I just want to thank Legomancer for letting me know that I’m not the only one who has the recurring DJ nightmare. Nothing like that; last few bars of a song, and suddenly the only CDs in the studio are empty cases…

Of course, it’s worse when you’re having that dream, and realize that not only do you not have another song cued, but you’re also naked.

12

I’ve had a couple, with the most recent one being a nightmarish place. It’s this huge temple out in the middle of a jungle/forest. I’ve never been inside it from the bottom, but on top is like a modern hotel type entrance, with glass doors and a modern appearence inside, with wallpaper, pictures, carpet, and such. Except for some reason just looking inside through the glass doors makes me extremely uneasy. In a couple dreams, I was inside, and it was extremely creepy. It was like a typical haunted mansion, except it was just a bunch of hallways. Nothing was actually happening, it was all psychological, as if the house was trying to make me go insane with fear. In another dream I was just standing outside the glass doors, knowing I did not want to go in there.

Another happier one is a hotel, or rather set of hotels, that surround a lake. There are 12 beaches, so I guess 12 hotels, each one for a month of the year. There wasn’t really anything special about it. I went to this place a couple times as a child.

13

Chalk me up for the DJ nightmare. I mentioned this to a friend who used to do radio and she grabbed me and said “Thank God, I thought I was the only one!” I haven’t been on the air in years and still have that one.

I have recurring places in my dreams, but they’re not the actual places, as in, I know it’s my house, but it looks nothing like my house; I know I’m in New York, but it looks nothing like New York.

14

I have a number of recurring settings in my dreams; I frequently dream of being in the house where I grew up, or my old school (oddly enough, I don’t recall ever having the “naked” and/or “didn’t prepare” anxiety nightmares), or various parks I frequent. Then there are two very different locations…

One is a sort of rolling grassland that stretches to the horizon in the north, south and east. The western edge runs into a stretch of ancient forest along a cliff overlooking the black, rocky shore of an ocean. In the forest are the ruins of a small temple of an ancient Greek style, surrounded by a “moat” of soft moss among the oaks. There are cracked marble stepping stones leading to the steps of the temple. Inside the temple are two pools of water with light shining from them with a small chime on the floor in between them. If you look into the pools, one reflects sunlight, and the other reflects stars (even though the roof is intact). Most of my flying dreams begin with me flying over the grasslands in the form of a hawk, and end with me in man-shape dipping my hands in the pools (the sun-pool is warm and the star-pool is cool) and listening to the echoes of the chime die away. It’s very beautiful and peaceful.

The other place is more disturbing. It’s a very large Victorian-style manor house with a high iron fence, and I never quite seem to learn my way around it. The public rooms are pretty but somehow sterile, as if no one ever lived there. The rooms that visitors never see are more like cells. The only occupants I can remember are an orphan–a catatonic British boy–and the dark man in charge of the place, who never speaks. The boy never leaves his room, and sometimes the man leaves for long periods of time, so the place is echoingly empty and usually cold.

If I may be permitted a small hijack–I recently had a series of dreams in that manor that went beyond creepy to truly bizarre, and I’d like to share them. If anyone cares to analyze them, have at it.

The dream started at a house in London. The boy was there with–I think–his uncle. His uncle takes him places–he thinks the boy’s malady is the result of shock from losing his parents, and hopes that travel will stimulate him. The boy doesn’t respond, and the uncle decides to seek professional aid. He takes him to the manor setting, which turns out to be an asylum. Then the dream moves inside the boy’s mind. In his mind, he’s been in this place ever since “the bad thing” happened. He won’t think about “the bad thing”–it’s not his parents’ deaths, he remembers that. All the time he’s been in his uncle’s care, in his mind, he’s been in the manor, in a little room, chained to a chair with a big padlock. When he dreams, he dreams of being a different boy–a younger child with a mud-smeared face–who’s trying to rescue him. Night after night, the other boy runs through the manor house looking for some way to free him, while hiding from the dark man. Every night, I see him run through an antechamber with a big iron key hanging on a hook, but he never notices it because the dark man is right behind him. Eventually, the dark man in the outer layer of the dream–I suppose he’s a doctor–was called away while the boy slept, and the muddy boy had time to find the key. He unchained the first boy (who immediately disappeared) and then looked at me (until then no one had noticed me watching) and said, “I had to save him. He saved me from the clay.” Then I had a flash of a muddy place with open pits in the ground–I thought of it as “Potters’ Field”; in the bottom of one of the pits was the muddy boy, very cold and still, half-covered covered with clay. In the outer dream, the first boy recovered and went home with his uncle. I still don’t know what the “bad thing” was–maybe the muddy boy’s death?

OK, hijack over.

15

Two recurring places:

First is a hotel, with a complicate series of elevators, some of which go to some floors and others to other floors, so you really have to know your way around to be able to go to the right floor to transfer.

The other is the town I lived in when I was in college – sometimes this is the business district, sometimes residential streets, sometimes a particular apartment (though never an apartment I actually lived in).

(My unprepared/anxiety dream is apparently common amongst teachers and former teachers – it’s that I haven’t taught the course all semester…)

16

Ooohh…very gothic,Balance.

My recurring dream location is a surreal version of Philadelphia, whose highways and overpasses are literally high…like a quarter mile above ground. Think of the roads in the Animated Superman and Batman shows. Also, the roads, walkways, stairs, etc. have no hand- or guard-rails. Look where you walk or drive lest you launch yourself into oblivion. Most of the roads are banked to allow 120mph travel…except for one stretch which…die to a design glitch…ended up banked on the outside!

Also, some locals have taken flash-flood drainage canals (like in Los Angeles) and made them their own personal highways…officialy illegal, but the authorities look the other way.
(there are no such canals in Philly, btw).

Some areas of this Dali-Philly has no ground! So people build their houses on vast acre-sized platforms of cast-iron supported by spindly cast-iron rods and beams. Looks kinda like Victorian-era technology.

One section of the city surrounding the Frankford Elevated train has been abandoned for 75 years and is used as the city dump. Often, trash trains roll down the track and launch refuse overboard: mounds of trash having migrated through the abandoned store fronts, up through the row houses, and out the windows up to the point where the trash is as high as the tracks!

An Urban Housing Reclamation/Environmental Movement/Archaeology Team has proposed cleaning out the trash and refurbishing the area for the homeless (and, of course, refurbishing the “L” cast-iron supports which has completely rusted away.)

One quite odd feature of the area is a Gigantic billboard erected on the Jersey side of the Delaware river, constructed of, what else?,cast-iron rods and beams. Looks like a billboard bersion of the Eiffel Tower…just as high, and twice as wide.

Advertizing for Le Seur Peas.

17

I occasionally have the dream where it is almost the end of the semester and I have not studied or started working on termpapers.

There is a well known local landmark in the Detroit area, where I grew up. It is a huge (80 foot, I think) tire that was once a ferris wheel at the 1964 Worlds Fair. I used to see the big tire in my dreams a lot, but haven’t lately.

When I am awake, I tend for some reason to notice old painted advertisements on buildings. This sometimes carries over into my dreams, and I will find myself in a generic “old downtown” area with lots of old faded signs for various businesses and products.

I also tend to know where I am in a lot of dreams, even though it does not really look like the real life place looks.

18

I tried to do this earlier but the connection was taking so long it wouldn’t go through, I think SD needs to lose some weight.

Someone asked how I can change the course of a dream. I don’t know exactly which may be why I have trouble teaching my husband to do it. When I dream, I know I am dreaming. When something occurs that I think is going to be scarey I kinda ‘change the channel’. Kind of like a director saying cut. In the last 17 years I’ve only had 2 bad dreams, one my (soon-to-be) husband had to wake me up, I was hyperventilating. The other was a few weeks ago. It had two themes, the one that scares me though is my fear of heights. This one was different than other height dreams as I managed to creep/crawl/drag myself to safety. Calling ‘cut’ doesn’t always work with this theme but I am usually rescued eventually. This one I rescued myself.

I fly in my dreams too, When I was a kid I had a stick I had to carry under my arm a certain way to fly. As I got older I didn’t need the stick anymore. When I was a kid, in my dreams, I’d practice flying. Actually my flying is more like a hover or propelled levitation.

Strangely, despite my being able to change the direction of my dreams, there are some things I can’t change. The above mentioned dream with David Duchovney, we were getting ready to have sex when a little voice pops up and says ‘You can’t do that, you’re married’ quickly followed by another little voice saying, ‘Hey, stupid, it’s a dream, you can do anything you want’. Despite my best efforts to get back to sex with Mr. Duchovney, events in the dream would not allow it including using one of my biggest fears against me to stop it, my fear of heights.
Though I have no complaints about performance awake or in my dreams, the only person I can have sex with in my dreams is my husband. I’d love to be able to take advantage of those occassions when Antonio Banderas or George Clooney drifted through my unconscience.

19

I always dream of airports, and plane crashes. I’ve tried to link what is happening in real life to what causes these dreams, but nothing really comes out of it. It’s really wierd.

20

Mark me down for the “forgot about the class until halfway into the semester” dream. Other than that I don’t think I have a recurring location.