dreams – Page 2 – commonplacebook.com

Dying All Over Again

Post author:HFM
Post published:March 17, 1999
Post category:Dreams

In the first dream I had one night, I was in my house, talking to my landlady down stairs when I realized the house was on fire. I ran upstairs to get my cat, and when I finally found her, I realized that I couldn’t get back downstairs again. Just as I was catching on fire, I woke up.

I got up and walked around for awhile because I was so terrified about the dream I just had; I wanted to stay awake so I wouldn’t possibly fall into the same dream again.

After I laid back down, I started to dream again. This time I was in an abortion clinic (I have NO IDEA why that would be the case) and I was watching a woman get an abortion. I couldn’t see anything, however. Thankfully. Then a man burst into the room carrying a pistol. He was wearing underwear, and nothing else. Tighty-whities, not boxers. He started to wave the pistol in the air, and everyone ran, including me. Somehow everyone else got ahead of me – you know how you try to run in your dreams but you feel like your running through Jell-o? And the guy with the gun started to catch up. And for some reason I focused on his huge pot-belly that was bouncing up and down as he ran after me – gross, but vivid and strangely hypnotic.

I realized I wasn’t going to get away, so I tried to crouch behind a car, but he ran around it, raised the pistol at me and fired….

… and I woke up again.

This makes a totally of 4 dreams that I’ve had about dying…

The Snake Dream

Post author:HFM
Post published:August 27, 1998
Post category:Dreams

My brother Todd handed me a pure white snake, assuring me it wasn’t poisonous. I held onto it for quite some time, and it bit me several times. When I gave it back to him, I asked him whether I was okay, and he wouldn’t answer, So I called poison control, who told me to go to the hospital.

This was such a weird dream because I hadn’t really talked to my brother recently when I had the dream, so it was strange that he popped up like that. Plus, it’s pretty unlikely he’d hand me a poisonous snake.

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.