dream analysis – Page 2 – commonplacebook.com

The Gambling Dream

Post author:HFM
Post published:July 2, 1998
Post category:Dreams

They were opening a brand new gambling hall in our neighborhood. Actually, the hall wasn’t new, it was old, like a converted community center or something. For the grand opening, the band was playing, and I was in the band – I played a trombone. We sat along the sides of the entrance hall. I remember looking at the floor; it was cracked and part of it was old tile, part of it painted cement.

After the band finished playing, I wandered in to one of the rooms and watched people gamble for a while. I tried to find the slot machines for hours, but I just ended up wandering around talking to people, lecturing on the evils of gambling and how the house is always rigged to win. (But strangely, I don’t actually believe that, but I did in the dream.)

Civil War Dream

Post author:HFM
Post published:June 5, 1998
Post category:Dreams

I was dressed in a civil war costume. It was blue, so I must have been in the Union Army. I had a mustache. (Don’t even laugh.) I and another dude in uniform were strolling through a market place. We strolled past a very beautiful women at a booth who was selling wool. I stopped to tap my cigar ash (yes, I was smoking a cigar. Shut up.) into what I thought was a wastebasket, but I realized it was a basket of the woman’s wool. Oops. Too embarrassed to say anything or apologize, I fled before she could realize what I did. Then I agonized about whether I should go back and tell her.

The Circus Dream

Post author:HFM
Post published:March 14, 1998
Post category:Dreams

I was traveling with a circus, down a winding dirt road. It was a bright sunny day, and the grass was green. I was traveling in the cart with the puzzle girl, who twisted herself into a pretzel and got inside an ornate wooden puzzle box, which was carved on the sides and top in the shape of puzzle pieces. She was doing her act to entertain me as we went along.

Along the side of the road was what seemed at first to be a field of yellow flowers or crops all in a row – the tops of the plants were all level with my feet. When I looked closer, I discovered they were lemon trees, and what I thought were flowers growing on very short plants were the lemons. The tops of the trees were at foot level.

Schoolboys on the Bus

Post author:HFM
Post published:February 7, 1998
Post category:Dreams

In this dream, I was traveling on a Greyhound-like passenger bus, and I was sitting in the very back. In the front of the bus there was a whole group of private school boys with scrubbed, cherubic faces and neat short haircuts. They were dressed in identical uniforms; black pants and pure white shirts and ties. Except one young man’s cuffs were unbuttoned, and the elbow of his shirt had been dragged through the mud.

There were all around seven or eight years old, and yet they were drinking beer and other alcoholic beverages. I started scolding one of them, “In America, we don’t let little kids drink.” And they all started laughing.

What was with the muddy sleeve? It was so out-of-place it had to be significant somehow…

The Angel of Death Dream

Post author:HFM
Post published:January 1, 1998
Post category:Dreams

A dream I had where I was so scared that I was afraid to get out of bed to go to go to the bathroom, at 29 years old.

It started at an archeological dig, where we uncovered a huge skeleton of bird/reptile-like creature, about twice as large as a human. It looked like a human, with a reptile head and tail, and wings. We brought it intact to a laboratory nearby, to study it. There were about twenty or so people gathered around it on a table, when it suddenly came alive, spread it’s wings and rose up in the air.

[This much of the dream I can guess came from a Simpsons episode, although my dream wasn’t animated.]
There was a collective gasp around the room, and as everyone exhaled, it began devouring the people. I ran out the door with several others and down the hallway, as it followed, still eating people.

The dream then turned into one of my standard maze dreams, in which I turned down different hallways and got lost while being chased. Someone running with me believed that it couldn’t figure out where we were if we were shielded by metal or porcelain, so we ran from one tiled bathroom with metal stalls to another, and that seemed to work. But it was still not too far behind us, devouring people it ran across, and there was plenty of blood and guts in the dream.

Deus Ex Machina

We realized though, that we had to get out of the building, so we found a way outdoors. This was bad, though, because suddenly we were on a beach, without any cover, and the monster could see us. And, of course, its impossible to run in the sand. But the monster kicked up huge swirling sand storms as it moved, so we were able to tell where it was and hide in one building or another. Once we were caught without a building to hide in and had to climb in a cement culvert in the sand, and the monster overlooked us.

We found a building then, finally, that was made of cement, metal, and porcelain, and ducked in; we were safe. I was watching out the window as the two monsters shot up through the sky in a magnificent, beautiful, terrible display of lights.

The Clothesline Dream

Post author:HFM
Post published:September 29, 1997
Post category:Dreams

I had a bizarre dream in which I had strung a clothes line from the gables of the roof of the house I live in now, right outside the kitchen window. And of course, I had just done laundry and hung all of my very favorite clothes, when a really violent storm blew up, and I frantically tried to get the clothes off the line before they all blew away.

Sorry to bore you with something that sounds so mundane, but it fascinated me because everything actually made sense except the clothesline. I had been worrying about getting my laundry done the day before. I had had a conversation about “favorite clothes” with some one. Earlier that day, there was a violent storm with high winds.

And the apartment was actually mine… You know how you will have a dream that your in your apartment or house, and you know it’s yours, but when you wake up, you realize, “that was nothing like my house, at all.” Well this actually was my apartment, my kitchen window, my gabled roof.

But where did that damned clothesline come from? And why am I so obsessed with my clothes? That really isn’t like me… Perhaps they represented something I was afraid would blow away…

Reoccurring Contact Lens Dreams

Post author:HFM
Post published:September 24, 1997
Post category:Dreams

In high school I got my first pair of contact lenses, that you can also order here. That was pretty unusual at the time; people didn’t wear them as much as they do now, and they were incredibly expensive. They also didn’t have disposable lenses; you had to clean them and care for them and hope they lasted for a year or two.

Because of the expense, my parents put the fear of God in me about taking care of my new contact lenses, so far from being the joyous experience it should have been, having lenses nearly gave me ulcers; I was terrified I’d lose them or tear them.

I started having reoccurring dreams about them, and in every dream they would change into something different, and I’d know there was something wrong with them, but I would still try frantically to put them in. I had a dream where they because little white shirt buttons. And one where they became large, blue, round jewels, like the Hope Diamond.

But in the dreams I had most often, they would still be lenses, but large, and cloudy. I worked at the library back then, and I had one dream that I had opened my lens case at work and that they had changed and grown huge; two inches in diameter. I still put them into my eyes, though, and tried to reshelve books, but I couldn’t really see them.

I had one of these dreams last year, when I was having too much trouble with my lenses and switched back to wearing glasses most of the time.

Reoccurring Dream: Mazes

Post author:HFM
Post published:September 18, 1997
Post category:Dreams

Since I was young, I’ve had a reoccurring theme show up in my dreams: mazes. It’s usually a familiar building; in high school it was the library I worked in; in college it was the dorm, since then it’s been various apartment buildings and the places I worked.

The building is familiar to me, but the layout is not; as I wander (or sometimes run, depending on being whether I’m being chased in the dream) through the rooms or halls, I discover passages I’ve never noticed before. I end up turning down them and quickly get lost. Usually the dream ends in a panic as I realize I’m trapped or so lost I’ll never get out.

A notable exception to the above is a maze dream I had about Jess Curtis, a very beautiful woman who sings locally here in Indianapolis, and a casual acquaintance of mine. In this dream, we’re in a house I don’t recognize, and she is leading me along, flirtatiously, always just one step around the corner from me, beckoning me onward. Eventually she climbs though a window, and I go after her. The window leads to another room in the house, where an old man sits, and he tells me which way to go to head her off at the pass. It works and I manage to grab her and hold her in my arms as the dream fades and I wake up.

Quicksand Dream

Post author:HFM
Post published:September 8, 1997
Post category:Dreams

The first of two recent dreams about death…

In the dream, I went downstairs to the basement, which looking back now, I think was the basement on South East Fourth Street from my childhood.

Growing in the center of the floor was a plant; a weed, I thought, like a tiny tree. I went over to it to pull it up, I guess because I didn’t think it should be growing there. It seems kind of absurd; a weed growing in the basement with no sunlight. It had a reddish cast to the stalk, kind of like a rhubarb plant, but the stalk was round, rather than square like that plant. It had spiky leaves, and grew upward.

I went over to it and pulled on it, and it broke free of the ground pretty freely, and I was surprised to see that it was growing in sand rather than soil.

Then the ground started to shift beneath me, and I lost my footing. The sand started to fall into the hole I had just created, and I slid down with it. the sand quickly covered me, and I continued my downward slide.

My mind was racing, and I remember I thought, “if I can just stop here, I’ll be able to swim my way out to the surface.” But the sand swirled around me, and I kept falling farther. It dawned on me that I’d fallen perhaps fifty feet, and that I would never be able to get out alive.

And then I woke up, of course, have frightened myself half to death. And I am still wondering at the inner mechanics of my brain, and how I had constructed such a strange scenario with which to frighten myself. Because that dream still haunts me whenever I feel like I’m on unsure footing, both literally and emotionally.

I thought about it this summer when we all went to lake Michigan and laid out on the beach at Warren Dunes. It had been years since I’d been on a beach, and the sand had a way of sucking in around my feet that made my heart jump.
And we were walking across the rocks at The Falls, right here in Broadripple, where every step I took was on an unsteady rock that teetered beneath me, and paralyzed me to the spot, which made my friends laugh.

And I suddenly thought of it tonight, when the fears about my financial state and whether I have achieved what I should by the age that I am overwhelmed me when I laid down to sleep.

Dodgeball God Dream

Post author:HFM
Post published:May 12, 1997
Post category:Dreams

It’s hard to remember exactly how this dream began, but I remember for some reason being on the top of a sign pole, out in the countryside. I was there with Hercules, him beiname of dodgeball with energy balls that could kill us.

We were trapped, so we continued to do this for awhile, until Zeus came and rescued us; I can’t remember exactly how he did. Athena was with him, and we discovered that Zeus had lost some of his powers and couldn’t get back to Mount Olympus, and for some reason I was the only one who could find the way.

So I started to lead our little party off in the direction that I was aware held the answer… after we walked for awhile, I led us up over a hill, and there was the Space Shuttle. I knew right away that we needed to get on the shuttle to get to Olympus.

There were guards milling around, so we had to sneak on. There weren’t any ladders or stairs leading up to the shuttle, just glass blocks covered by wire mesh (I don’t know, don’t ask). But the mesh was too fine to get a grip on. So I looked at Zeus, and he managed to summon up enough energy to crimp the wire so I could get my fingers in and climb up. As I was in the process of climbing, I woke up, of course.

I have no analysis at all for this dream. I can’t even begin to imagine what made me combine ancient Greek myth and the space shuttle, which I think is nice, but not really interesting. I don’t remember what I ate, either. It must have been a burrito.