Worst writer's block of the year so far.

My wordcount has been dead for a little over a week now, but given the amazing progress of my writing so far this year, I am confident I can catch up to my goals when I manage to trick or conquer my writer's block into submission -- and after a couple of very busy weeks, I have a couple of relatively slack weeks in which to manage it.

Creepy dreams lately.

I can very much believe that dreams are meant to be a safety release valve for stress, because since my writer's block started, I have felt very stressed, and my dreams have responded in kind.  A few days ago I had a dream in which I was making my way across a jungle pool at dusk, which turned out to be just when all the local snakes came out at night.  While they were calm and not terribly hungry, I still had dozens of large venomous snakes slithering around me like I was just another tree branch to climb -- and of course, I woke up tangled in my sheets.

This last night, though, I had a series of dreams with very confusing segues, moving back and forth between suburbia and a set of underground caverns.  In the suburbia setting, I was mostly in a large, slightly-unfinished home.  Possibly I moved between one or two such homes.  They were largely unfurnished, not terribly stable, and occupied by people who I thought of in the dream as my family, but who I have never seen before in my waking life.  Often there was a grass floor in one or more rooms, and at least in one case, the back basement stairs lead down to the subterranean caverns. 

I attribute these places to a mixture of too much time spent cleaning empty apartments, and too much time spent playing minecraft.  However, a similar (if not identical) house has shown up in my dreams twice before, once as the home of my friends Pat & Sonja (which it in no way resembles, except in size), and once as the home of my extended family (in another dream where my dream-family and my waking-family are not at all the same people -- but I don't think it was the same dream-family I dreamed last night, either).

I'm very curious about the migration of these common elements between dreams.  Does anyone else experience similar recurring settings or characters in wildly different dreams?

In any case, in the suburban setting there was a nasty thunderstorm going on, with very high winds and the threat of tornadoes (such a thunderstorm was ACTUALLY going on in the waking world, as well -- no threatened tornadoes, but the LAST late-night storm in these parts came with a tornado warning).  I remember that there was some family conflict going on, and that was affecting the way we reacted to the storm and made emergency plans, but everyone seemed to be talking around the problem rather than addressing it differently.

Meanwhile, when I explored the caverns (sometimes this seemed entirely divorced from suburbia -- as though they were two different programs on two different channels -- but at least once I took the stairs down to look at a cave-like storm cellar, wondering if we could all safely wait out the tornado in the caves), I kept running into spiders.  At first they were small and friendly, but toward the end of the dream I was being chased by a pair of leaping tarantulas the size of jaguars.  I woke up withe the chase unresolved.

Can I please be done with dreams in which I am attempting to flee from large animals?  I don't know what the psychological significance of these might be, but it's goddamned unnerving.