One of These Days

Dreams

Prompt: Dreams
What do you think about dreams in general? And if you wish to elaborate, what recurring themes or symbols appear in your dreams? Are there any patterns you can identify?

I've always kind of wished I had dreams like what a lot of people say they have. I've never had any stereotypical dreams and mostly, with the exception of some that I can count on one hand, don't really have any "meaning". At least to me they don't. Most of the time it just feels like I'm part of some movie. Sometimes I'm not me as the "main character". Sometimes I am. The few that have some kind of "meaning" are where I'm trying to go to a class, sometimes it's high school, sometimes it's college. I can't find my class. I think I know where I'm going and suddenly I'm lost as if I've never been in the building before. I did have a dream along that same vein (a couple of times if I remember right) where it was like a house I was staying at? I'm pretty sure there was some other narrative, but I don't remember now. I also had one as a child where my mom, my older sister, and myself were leaving. Walked into the garage to get into the car, my mom and older sister got there first and then took off before I could get a chance to get in. I remember standing in the open garage as I watched my mom's car head down the drive way.

I've had dreams with my mom and my dad, sometimes together, most often apart and those I've always just liked to believe that they've come to say hi to me (as they've both passed and have been gone now for 11 years). It's funny as those often feel the most realistic to me. I remember the first dream I had of my mom, in which when I asked her if she had come back, she said no. That she was only here for a short time and wanted to see me. It was like "a day together", because when I went to sleep in the dream and woke up, she was gone.

I do dream vividly, with color and voices. Most of the time I remember them, but sometimes they've gone by the wayside once I've woken up. I remember one of my earliest dreams from when I had to have been 5-7 years old. I left my house and had gone wondering in the yard (we had a pretty decent yard/property when I was a kid. Total of 12 acres, but some of it was woods. I had gone towards the woods, seeing a giant iguana. Me, being ever the animal lover, headed towards it. Unfortunately, it was a cursed, evil iguana, because it shot its tongue out at me and the only way I can describe this next part is that myself, including my vision, had the texture of a golf ball, where it's those rounded indents. It was shortly after this happened and I realized my new vision/texture, that I woke up. I remember it feeling so lifelike to me as a kid and later that day going out to where it had happened in my dream and feeling such a connection to that dream still. It was funny that it was an iguana as we never had one as a pet and I lived in Central NY at the time. Definitely not a place where they would be wild. I must have seen one in a movie or a TV show and it got snagged into a dream.

I did have a reoccurring dream where a faceless (never saw the face that I can remember) man would chase me, a la Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees, and I would run and find a place to hide, in a very not good hiding place where in real life I would have been found, but he'd walk past me. I haven't had these dream since I became an adult living on my own and when I'd have it, it would be in a place I had lived previously, so never at the current place I lived. I always kind of wondered what the meaning of that was, but they happened far enough apart that I never ended up dwelling on it until much later into my adult life.

I've always found the thought of meaning behind dreams to be interesting, but since most of my dreams always just felt like my brain entertaining me during my sleep, I never looked into it for myself.