Creepy dreams lately.
Aug. 1st, 2011 02:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
matt_doyleI 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.
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.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-02 12:49 pm (UTC)Wayyyyyy back when I was in junior high, I started having dreams with this random Arab-looking guy in them. Sometimes he was dressed very "Laurence of Arabia," and at other times he was wearing jeans (but still had a white headcovering of some kind). He didn't always talk or even play much of a role in the dreams; he'd just be there, standing on the sidelines, or I'd be having some boring dream about a party and I'd notice he was there among my friends.
Once, when I was in high school and having one of my horrible bouts of insomnia (I'd go three or four nights without sleeping, then embarrass myself by fainting in class), I went for a walk with a friend and could have sworn I saw the Arab-looking guy standing at the edge of a field, watching us. That scared me for days, but in retrospect, having a waking dream-fragment is probably not unheard of when you're exhausted.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-02 07:03 pm (UTC)I know I've had waking dream fragments or something similar from time to time.
I have also, irritatingly to me, had apparently precognitive dreams, most of them very banal, where I would dream a conversation that I would later have in waking life. This is especially annoying to me because I do not believe in precognition or in precognitive dreams. I suppose I don't believe they're impossible, exactly, but it frustrates me that my experience does not match my worldview and I can't find a more rational explanation.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-02 11:01 pm (UTC)Well, that, and the family-who-aren't-your-family (and friends' houses which aren't their real houses) suggest a mysterious alternate reality/timeline of some kind. (As does the grass floor, for some reason.)
Heh, you remind me of myself and The Thing in the Spare Room. I don't believe in ghosts; I love haunted house stories, but only as entertainment. And yet, inconveniently, this house has Something in the spare room which numerous people have seen.
no subject
Date: 2011-08-03 06:55 am (UTC)Honestly, I have found that the more prescient dreams I have (call it... two every three years? And never anything interesting, either), the more stubbornly I refuse to believe in them. Which is not very rational, I know, but having these dreams makes for a very poor foundation when I try to argue with other people about superstitious beliefs with no basis in reality OR their personal experience.