Main post for day isn’t ready yet. Lil dreampost for you instead. What kind of recurring dreams do you have? I have, over the years, occasionally dreamed of Aliens. The most remarkable of those dreams had me as Sigourney Weaver in BA mode, doing gymnastics to get away from the mother alien. But it got too exhausting and I gave up hope, letting her get me. The mother alien gave me an abortion with a clear plastic tube and some kinda gizmos. Good times.
Haven’t had an Aliens dream in a long long time, but I did the night before last. I was in some kinda scifi scenario, on a space station maybe?, and a single alien caused so much ruckus the whole structure busted apart. The survivors were left floating in spacesuits. I found my cat Hecubus, who in this dream was still a shaggy kitten, floating in space – without any protection, exposed to the void!
Somehow he wasn’t dead or exploded, so we got him to some kind of space vet. I ended up at a spaceport bumming around waiting for a flight. I found out I was supposed to pilot the spaceship, but realized I’d forgotten my wig, so I went to see if I could by a bandana for my bald-ass domepiece. This is the first time I’ve ever had a dream that directly related to gender expression issues from my waking life. About how one would expect it to go.
I was late getting back to the spaceship and Lemmy Kilmister made fun of me. He also complained there wasn’t enough time to finish cooking this roast suckling pig, so the only way to keep the meat from going to waste was to freeze it, which would keep it from cooking up as nice when it was thawed. He was giving my vibes of a tall metal dude from my high school who had same last name as The Elephant Man.
I’m so tired but I can’t sleep. Good daynight.
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My main recurring dream is driving in my car and coming upon a hill that is so steep I’m looking at the sky out the windshield, or I have to go down such a hill. Both are terrifying because I know I’m going to fall off. I think this has its roots in real life fears of driving tractors across such hills, and having known people seriously injured by tractors tipping over backwards while filling bunker silos (look it up if you don’t know). Also, there are a number of hills near where I grew up that were pretty much this kind of steep and scared the bejeesus out of me as a kid. At any rate, this is why I can’t drive in San Francisco. I can barely walk around there. It’s like a nightmare I can’t wake up from. Ironically, I was never afraid going rock climbing or being in high places. But walking along a S.F. street and suddenly encountering a bus driving by almost vertically freaks me the hell out.
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I also have recurring dreams set in a house. Different things happen there, I meet different people, but the rooms of the house are always the same, and none of them match each other in any sort of rational design or decor. Like one of the middle rooms is like a Victorian drawing room, which leads off to a large semi-subterranean banquet hall with tapestries and a fireplace with crossed swords over it (but no furniture), which leads to a tiny 50s style farm kitchen, which leads out to…different places. One of the upper rooms is partly a 60s pillow den, and partly a screened in veranda/balcony. That balcony feels like somewhere I’ve lived before (none of the other rooms do), and I can picture what that somewhere looks like from the outside (i.e., the streets it faces, and the weather), but none of that fits anywhere I’ve actually lived. I have no idea why this house keeps being the setting for so many different dreams.
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My other main recurring dream is discovering I can fly, and I can swoop around and do all sorts of wonderful aerobatics, but when I tell someone about it, they of course don’t believe me, and when I try to demonstrate, I can only manage to hover horizontally a few inches off the ground. They are totally unimpressed. I have a lot of dreams about not being believed, which is why I guess I gravitate to stories where people have that problem.
very good comment, thx. telling people about dreams always has the potential to be boring; this one was not at all.
I have a variety of recurring dreams, some pretty horrid like the one where I’m in my teenage bedroom when there is trouble in the street (the worst trouble we had was football fans parking there and blocking the drive when their team was playing at home) and my just over toddler size nephew comes in, turns into a same size my kid brother (he’s only 14 months younger than me so . . . ), I grab him by the arms pulling the hands and arms together his body and legs disappear so it’s just his head at the end of his arms, and I use him as a club to beat up the trouble outside. I’ve never been sure what I’m beating, but I do know that using my kid brother like that killed him.
More regularly and tedious is the one where I am in a house that is relatively narrow but goes back so far I’ve never got to the end of it, even though I know it’s a childhood friend’s house (it starts off like that) it turns into a mish mash of styles,I’m looking for a toilet but every one I find is unusable for a different reason, full of shit, covered in cling film, no paper, the toilet isn’t plumbed in, the toilet isn’t there any more, just a hole in the floor, I can see it but can’t get to it for some reason and so on. I wake up and of course I need a piss. As I said tedious.
There’s another like that where I’m looking for the baby I desperately wanted and never had in a different building, with architecture that does things like turning a wall into the floor when you go through a door or round a corner, all in deep reds, blues, purples, and lots of different textures. Sometimes I can’t find the baby, sometimes I can, and if I do it’s dressed in old fashioned baby clothes, white with a long skirt and several layers. My mum sometimes turns up in those and she’s been dead since 1981.
I do have some nice recurrent dreams, but far less often that the unpleasant ones.
the vividness really is an important aspect of the surreal, i think. i also have potty dreams or potty elements in dreams all the damn time, and did include that in the opening scene of The Septagram.
I’m glad you weren’t bored.
Interesting how weirdly designed houses become recurring elements, huh. There’s probably some psychological significance to that or something.
I forgot to mention the classic “forgot to go to class and it’s finals time” ones, which I think everyone who’s had formal education has. Those are especially disorienting to me because I actually did that in real life once, remembering a couple weeks before it ended that I’d signed up for a work-related class I forgot to attend after the second class. Oops. Sometimes on waking up from one of those I’m not sure if there was another such instance that actually counted or not, and it leaves me feeling vaguely anxious for half a day even though it would hardly matter now even if true.
i’ve had recurring architecture too. closest i’ve come irl to forgetting class is my first day of junior high not knowing wtf a semester is. they gave us sched for entire year and i didn’t know how to read it, in the wrong place all day.
I once dreamt a whole day at school in my teens, woke up and went to school without discovering my mistake so tried to go to classes that weren’t there. I got sent to the head mistress at some point, and she believed me – I already had a bit of a reputation for causing trouble at this point so I was both amazed and relieved. She even gave me a cup of tea, as in from a pot with a cup and saucer, so I think I must have been looking off, I was feeling pretty disorientated by then. I was careful to check what day it was first thing for years after that.
i’ve never had the boundary between dreams and reality blur that hard. closest time was that one i blogged about – the hypnagogic state where i’d imagined i was a floppy disk – which was so absurd it couldn’t survive waking scrutiny. that’s a trip.