Dream Work: Repeat Dreams


It's another in my series about dreams.

Repeat dreams are fairly common. Most often, these are thematic, such as; naked in a public place, teeth falling out, running but staying in place, post-apocalypse, tornadoes chasing you, forgetting a locker number or being late for class on a test day.

A lot of these are universally common. Some are very specific and unusual. The thing they have in common is the issue one is wrestling with. Let's look at the naked in a public place one. Should I have one where I'm naked in a public place and people recognize I'm naked and point and such, then I feel like everyone sees all my shortcomings and I'm under scrutiny. If, however, I know I'm naked but they don't, then I feel there's something others are missing about my character that if exposed would be shaming. In other words, I'm snowing them, but I'm inches away from being found out. This one is likely to happen if I feel I'm in over my head on a task and I fear that others will see the insecurities within me.

I actually do have the teeth falling out one, but only when I lose a loved one. Then, in the grieving process, I dream of my teeth falling out and I know I'm in trouble because the teeth are not deciduous and once lost, cannot be placed back. That represents the knowledge that I have had a permanent loss in my life, someone who is irreplaceable.

These themes tell us much about how feel about where we are in our lives. We choose the same theme to play out the same issue again and again. In fact, early influences can pop up. You might have a sister you don't get along with come up in a dream when you're not getting along with a coworker. Your sister now represents in your dreams anyone who does not get along with you. For me, I bring up Erica Kane, a character from "All My Children" to represent my assertive ambitious side. When I was a little kid, I looked at her character as the strongest most single-minded woman I knew.

Sometimes, we have repeat dreams until we handle them. I had the chased by intelligent tornadoes dreams for years until one dream, I got lucid and decided I wasn't going to run and hide yet again! I looked at the ground, saw a manhole cover, opened it up and climbed down. I outsmarted it and it never showed up again.

Do you have repeat dreams? I'd love to hear which ones crop up for y'all.

Comments

  1. I have repeated dreams with the same theme: I am supposed to be giving a stage performance but I keep messing it up somehow. I forget all my lines, I'm late for curtain, I can't find my costume, etc, etc. I was a theater major, go figure.

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  2. Jeanie;
    (It's rather ironic, your screen name, hee hee. Perhaps we could rename you "Repeatedly dreaming of Jeanie). That's a very common theme. Most of us go back to high school with not recalling the locker number, trying to call home and can't remember the phone number, being told there's a test when you're not ready. It's a pretty worthy theme when someone feels he is over his head in tasks he might not be prepared for. I always got those ones the night before I'm about to do a task I've never done before or the first weeks on a new job. It's like your mind gives you a similar emotional situation but in a nonsensical world where you get to deal with some things you might be trying to deal with in real life. A lot of us, to get through the day, ignore the emotional issue we don't want to face. When my marriage was awful, I had repeated nightmares every night of being chased by tornadoes or monsters and it was me trying to deal with an undercurrent of constant fear of my husband because he was so controlling and dominating and angry all the time. I didn't want to face it in the daytime, so my mind said "guess what we're going to work on tonight? The real issues."

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  3. Ever since I lost the baby in March, I have been dreaming that I have twins.

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  4. That's a very hard thing to assimilate, sweetie. I can imagine that your mind is getting wrapped around it. I'm going to be doing a post coming up in a few weeks about the subject of whether a baby's soul can be re-born after a miscarriage or abortion. It's an interesting subject and one that I keep running into in my ghost hunting. If this would have been a second child, it might be that you're looking at twins as representing two children playing and growing up together, like your first born and this child would have been, so it was a loss of seeing your child as representing "two" children. I hope you're healing well and I am so sad about the loss. I really do understand.

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  5. Thank you...I would be interested to read that. This was my third, so I am not sure, but the other strange thing is I started having the dreams the day my daughter found not one, but TWO four leaf clovers in the back yard. Maybe the universe is trying to talk to me...

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  6. And I am hanging in there. I was due two weeks from today, so i am thinking the next 14 days are going to be very up and down.

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  7. You know, Melanie, I get you on that one. I still in the back of my mind think back to November 4, 1980 when I would have had a due date. I think the post that's going up will give you a very interesting perspective. It goes up on Sunday afternoon.

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  8. I havent remembered my dreams in age. :P

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  9. I sometimes dream I'm back in High School and still haven't graduated. I always have the feeling that I should already have graduated...but I haven't. Basically, I interpret it to mean I'm feeling stuck in my current life situation, and don't know how to move on to something new, or the next stage of life.

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  10. EJ; I'm totally with you on that one. I kept having ones after my divorce that I was still married to the idiot and I kept thinking "didn't I think about leaving him? Wait, didn't I divorce him? What am I doing still here?" It felt like I was back at square one. I think that's probably because since leaving him I'm just as lonely as I was in the marriage. You need to read my Adventure Sunday pieces and get inspired or just read the post above about the new adventures of new sharon and get some ideas for shaking up your life.

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