Lost in a big house

It often starts as a visit to a somewhat familiar house with several rooms, and sometimes several entrances. Sometimes it becomes a building with multiple condo units of varying floor plans. In the building a stairway leads to an upper floor where there is a long dark hallway with doors, supposedly rooms on either side of the hallway. One room has its door opened and across the room  opposite the door is another stairway, a circular one,  The stairway  goes up several more flights and ends at a closed door. I knock on the door and it creaks open. There is a shadowy figure deep inside the dimly lit room. I become suddenly frightened, believing this to be the horrid, evil witch of my nightmares. I bolt from the room to descend the stairway and get out of that place, but suddenly chunks of the stairway disappear and I have to leap from landing to landing.  I remember nothing after the leaping!

Got to go

I still can’t figure out the dreams where I go from one toilet facility to another, sometimes from one building to another in search of an acceptable  ‘head,” but there is something wrong with each one. Sometimes the toilet becomes a sink. Sometimes the privacy of the facility is suddenly compromised or it becomes so small that I cannot maneuver in the stall. I wake from these dreams in a panic, amazed that I have not wet my bed! Of course I make a beeline for the washroom!

Beeping alarm

Last night I had another dream wherein I was being driven frantic by the incessant, repetitive beep, beep, beeping of an alarm clock. I went from clock to clock in my dream, pushing on any button that normally makes the beeping stop. I even went to other people’s rooms and attacked their alarm clocks!  In one dream a taunting teenager got in my face laughing and mocking me,  saying “beep, beep’ beep” in an irritating falsetto. I nearly strangled her! I don’t know why my dreaming self can’t figure out that my real life alarm clock is the culprit!

Gently Falling

Once in a while when I am dreaming, I seem to be vaguely conscious that I AM dreaming. On these rare occasions I seem to be able to “direct” my dream a bit. For instance, usually when I have “falling” dreams, I wake up with a start—because we all know that when you get to ground level in a fall, things are bound to hurt—and I like to avoid seeing my own catastrophe. But one night I decided to “will” myself to continue falling to see what would happen in the dream. What happened next was quite surprising. My “falling” became “floating.” I heard tinkly fairy music as my descent slowed. I looked above me and in the scenario noticed that I was drifting into a ravine topped by a forest. The “tinkly” music continued and I was “caught” before I reached the bottom—by a lion standing on its hind legs! The lion was not ferocious or scary, but, instead, very protective. I felt good when I woke up--very glad I hadn't killed myself in my sleep!

Lost in a big building

Sometimes I am in huge buildings with multiple stairways and corridors—a school? A mall?  A castle? I race around trying to find specific rooms. But there is no logic to the positioning of the rooms. There is a huge ballroom on the upper floor, but to get into it each person must enter through a secret doorway that is extremely small, to the point of having to fold up one’s body to fit through the tiny opening. Once through the hole, the room is large, like a showroom with a balcony. To leave that room, one must climb the ladder of a spiral slide and slide out through another hole in the floor. At the bottom of the slide is a completely different building. In these dreams I usually remember suddenly that I became separated from companions or from children for whom I was “responsible.” These dreams often close in a great deal of angst as I fret about how to reconnect with my companions. The visual images in these dreams are really engaging!

Crossing a chasm

I find myself up high, looking over a vista of canyons in the distance with valleys below. I need to get across a chasm and the only way across is a narrow arched metallic bridge with no railings. Walking it as a tightrope walker might is out of the question for me since heights and vistas affect my balance making me very unsteady on my feet. So I start across on my butt straddling the narrow span inching my way along over the deep canyon on my rear end. The dream ends before I get all the way across. When I woke up I thought, "Why didn't I just fly?"

Judgment day

I appeared to be enjoying a soak in Lake Michigan about 100 yards from the shore. I was facing the shore when the earth started shaking and the water heaving. There was a strange strong current of shallow water moving like a river parallel to the shore-a river in the lake-separating me from the beach. I heard a commotion of voices and singing, and saw a “parade” of several hundreds of people walking in the water following the river current along the shore. They were shouting, “It’s the end of the world!" Others were singing hymns and church songs as they led their families quickly in the direction of the current. I asked, “What has happened?” The reply, “Don’t you know? There was an earthquake that split Illinois in half and the governor’s wife has fallen into the chasm. This is Judgment Day!” That dream faded.

Soon I found myself at the bottom of a gigantic cylindrical hole. I was in a large cave-like “room” of solid stone. There were three doors. Though no one “told” me, I “knew” that each person would have his/her turn down there and that the choice of door would determine one’s fate and abode for eternity. I was a bit confused by the appearance of three doors since I had been conditioned to think in terms of dualities: right vs. wrong, good vs. bad, heaven vs. hell. I suddenly had the assurance that it didn’t matter which door I selected. Whichever door was chosen would be the “right” one for each person. The dream ended.

More screaming

I am in a concrete cellar of some sort and there is a well in the center. The atmosphere is evil and foreboding. I realize that the well is an access/exit to hell itself. A mothlike creature darts anxiously from the well, squeaking. I somehow know it is an "escaped" human soul. I follow it outdoors and it disappears. I am now outside walking on a badly torn up sidewalk. I see “my witch” in the distance. The sense of evil is palpable. The “sidewalk” seems to be resting on an unsure foundation as it moves up and down under my feet like a slowly undulating wave. To my horror I realize that I have been walking on a sidewalk, more now like a carpet, laid upon the bodies of children! I hear the witch cackle in the distance, “Bless the beasts and children.” I awake screaming again.

Terrible joke

I am enjoying a walk in a sunny meadow. Up ahead is a rise with a few trees. As I approach, I realize in horror that a human figure is hanging from one of the trees. I begin screaming hysterically. Then I notice that the hanging figure is my husband! After a few minutes of my screaming, the figure lifts its drooping head, climbs out of the noose and says “Ha, ha, ha, I was only joking.” I awoke crying, horrified, and still screaming.

Alien explorers

I wasn't in this dream, but I was watching it happen from a distance, somewhat above the scene.

I see a team of explorers set up camp in an alien, barren environment, maybe another planet. Four of the explorers are unique from the others in that they participate together in synchronized acrobatic fitness and meditation movements. In the midst of an impressive routine, one of the athletes looks in my direction; his eyes open wide in terror. (I don't think he sees me.) I watch as over the "bottom edge" of the picture, he and his companions are bodily invaded by a pink tubelike, plantlike, squidlike organism. All of them are pierced and screaming and are turned into trees.( I couldn't help them any more than one can help a character in a movie.) As I backed away into a more distant aerial view, I noticed that the entire exploration party and its equipment had been changed into trees and strange rock formations. An eerie voice over all sang in an ethereal tune, “They use up all who come and make them one with them.” Pretty creepy. I’m glad I wasn’t a character in that scenario.

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Fixing something

Last night I had a stupid, almost boring dream. I was taking some kind of device apart to fix it, trying to get the battery working or something. I had the impression that I had been working on this thing a long time. I kept dropping the tiny screws and had to look for them on the floor. I didn't have much luck. Over and over, I kept dropping screws. I didn’t get the device fixed. I didn’t even get one screw replaced before someone moved my project while I was looking for the screws. I don’t know what the device was for or what it would have done had it been fixed. Frustrating. I have no idea why I remembered such a worthless dream!

Flying

I love flying dreams! I've had a bunch of them, but not lately. To get into the air I jump and hold my breath and eventually levitate a bit.Then I spread out my arms still holding my breath and recline on my stomach. I'm not sure how I get myself to speed up. I think I move from side to side. Basically I get around in the air by using that breathing in and out trick, or by aiming and giving myself kind of a jump boost while flying. Sometimes I fly when I'm trying to escape from something, or when I want to discover something that's pretty far away. Sometimes I scare myself because I fly so high that my stomach lurches on the way down. I've "learned" to fly in "plateaus" so I don't plummet headlong. I wish I really could fly. Swimming is the closest experience to it that I will ever have. I do not have the personal courage and "derring-do" possessed by others. You may want to see an example in the video posted below.
Here is a link: http://www.youtube.com/embed/PmZyB_ghpa0

Early dreams

The first terrifying dream experience I remember was of the stereotypical evil, ugly witch figure standing over my bed, wringing her hands and saying in a crackly, witchy voice, “I’m going to make you into apple pie.” (too much Hansel and Gretel?—the witch has reappeared in several dreams by the way. ) I loudly shouted my parents into the room to dispose of the witch.

Mom and dad told me that at age three my hysterical screams  woke up the family and the neighbors. I was convinced that I had seen a man hovering over my baby sister’s crib. Dad made a thorough search inside and outside the house. . Fortunately, no “real” man was discovered. It took a while for everyone to go back to sleep.

Patterns or themes

If my dreams have patterns or themes, they would be these: water and flooding; flying; climbing stairs in buildings, exploring , finding secret rooms; elevators; light and darkness; hiding from a “threat;” squeezing myself into small holes or doorways to enter into larger rooms, riding in cars or in moving chairs, crossing wide and busy streets, avoiding cars that follow me up the sidewalk; falling from high places; roller coasters and slides; school settings where I’m late, missed class or never attended a class I now have a test in—feeling of anxiety, panic; seeing and talking with loved ones who have died. I know from reading stuff about dreams that many of these patterns are not unique to me. It is actually a comfort to know that others dream in similar patterns. We share that common humanity. Aren't there movies about two people having the same dream at the same time and seeing each other in their dreams? Spooky! But to my knowledge, it has never happened to me!

Dream habits

Much of my life I have enjoyed my bizzaro, sometimes boring, sometimes horrifying dreams. Early in life many of my dreams took on vestiges of the macabre. Some dreams I partially remember, others not at all. Some dreams seem to repeat themselves or build on earlier or similar dream settings. There were times when I had so many horrific dreams that I almost dreaded sleeping. I should have noted better what was transpiring in my life at the time, but I never was disciplined enough to journal. I could possibly roughly reconstruct if I were more seriously into self analysis, but so far I’m not. I learned a bit from some of my dreams when I thought about them, but how does one really know when one is “reading into” such a disjointed experience as a dream? I find that most of my dreams do not make too much sense sequentially. I do have the impression that I dream in color. Now, just for the experience of doing so, I am going to attempt to chronicle the dreams that are circulating in my memory. If nothing else, my writing should improve as I do this. Maybe those who read this will wonder how long I’ve been so crazy!