Three different dreams...

[DoubtfulFire495]

Okay, so just to be clear, I've always had vivid dreams. I dream pretty much every single night. Sometimes I think they mean something, and sometimes I don't, or they are just nonsensical and silly.

I've had three different, fairly brief dreams over the past 24 hours that I just wanna share.

Last night, I dreamt that a serial killer was after my friend and I. We had witnessed him brutally murdering several people but we escaped at the last minute. The police never found him. My friend and I were paranoid about going anywhere, living in constant fear that he'd find us. I came across someone's tumblr page one day and the art it showed/his picture made me think of this serial killer. I was freaked out, but I had to know if it was him. So I got his number somehow and called. No ringing, no dial tone, nothing. I chickened out and hung up. After that, he started texting me, sending me pics, and calling, but I never responded or answered. I was creeped out and just wanted to be left alone. Finally, I answered one of his calls, prepared to just say he had the wrong number or something. He was pretty chill, as most sociopaths are. I freaked and blurted out exactly who I was and why I'd called him. I have no idea why I did this. I woke up pretty much right after that.

I didn't feel good today, so I spent a good portion of it sleeping. The next time I fell asleep, I had another dream.

I dreamt that my ex (who is no longer on speaking terms with me) and I were in a house. I don't remember seeing this house in life, but in the dream we owned it and lived there. We were arguing over something or other, then she suddenly stopped and said, "Honey, move your neck." It was then I realized I had one of those red laser dots on my neck, like from a gun. I dove under a nearby table and hid. Then a bit of a time skip happened, and I was back in the house I live in now with my mom and stepdad. Mom wasn't home from work yet, but the sniper who was supposedly after me shot/killed my stepdad. Knowing my only chance for protection was a handgun that my stepdad keeps upstairs under his mattress, I ran up and got it. I hid in the closet, in pitch black, trying to figure out if this gun is loaded or cocked or whatever (I have very little experience with guns and have only shot one once). Then I woke up.

The last dream occurred sometime later in the evening when I had fallen asleep again. In the dream, I lived in the southern part of the U.S., where I am originally from. I kept hearing my family talk about finding dead cats and such around this sandbar in the woods, and I vaguely remembered playing on such a sandbar when I was a kid. Interested in finding it again, I convinced my older brother (who is 27) to come with me. We trekked into the woods, along the sandbar, and found an abandoned house. I remembered the house, too, so I coaxed my brother to follow me inside. Despite being abandoned, the inside of the house was in extremely good condition, with strange decorations and eccentric tastes everywhere, untouched by dust or time. It all looked brand new. I started taking a few things. Beads, feathers, bracelets, crystals/stones, etc. I then noticed my backpack was there, and then two more I owned, and suddenly remembered I had left them there for me to find. However, it was confusing, because I last remembered being there as a child. Those backpacks were items from my adulthood. I heard a noise in one room and got scared, but it turned out to be a cat. I found like five or six of them, very friendly. I recognized the youngest as a kitten I remembered, but again it didn't make sense. I remembered seeing the kitten as a newborn when I was little, yet right then in the dream, he appeared to only be about six months old. I had a hard time getting the backpacks together, they were all too heavy and bulky. I struggled for hours to strap them up, tie them, do whatever I could to carry it all, but I couldn't. This fact was troubling to me. I then woke up.

Thoughts are appreciated, I love dream talk

[RockShaman]

Well... simplest is last: my impressions of your third dream are that your burdens/belongings of adulthood are heavier than you can carry and you should maybe unload some.

Further impressions stem from the hypothesis that everyone in our dreams are actually ourselves. I was taught that long ago but to be honest it only works for me in an interpretative way - I play with it and look at the dream from that aspect, as well as simply as it presents. If I do that with your dreams, then it MAY flow with the interpretation that you are doing a lot of potential killing off (of potentials or opportunities - people's lives can have that dream meaning), running and hiding and stressing out and feeling as if things are getting out of control / moving too fast to deal with it all for the present.

Common theme is feeling overwhelmed by events or the actions of people around you, (and perhaps your own) and the solution being dreamed is to simplify perhaps... That your third dream harkens back to childhood (simpler times) makes me feel ok with this picture and general meaning. Some of the baggage stems from there, it seems? Too much to carry though....

That is all I "get" from it. Welcome to UM, enjoy your time among us and relax .... lol... really . The war can be over.

[DoubtfulFire495]

Thanks! That actually makes a lot of sense. It's a recurring theme in my dreams as of late - different setting/circumstances, but it always includes me struggling to carry bags and luggage and unable to. Sometimes I spend the entirety of my dream going through my stuff, trying to throw away some things to lighten my bags.

I deal with a lot of stress and anxiety. I don't think my dreams are psychic or anything, but I've always noticed that they do tend to correlate with how I feel or what I'm going through at the time. At the height of my depression, I was feeling very suicidal and out of control, and every night I was having nightmares. These nightmares included death, finding the corpses of my friends, being chased, being raped, being murdered, small cute things turning into monsters, blood, serial killers, alien invasions, parasites, fire, plane crashes, and all kinds of things. I do have wonderful, adventurous dreams quite often, and I've always been thankful for them because they're really fun and interesting. It's just, on the flipside, when I'm not doing so well I have to endure these bizarre or awful nightmares.

Next time I have a bizarre nightmare I'm gonna post it on here and see what people think. I could talk about this crap all day, haha

[RockShaman]

Well, as to dreams being possibly psychic, I do believe when we are dreaming and thus dealing with our subconscious, we are closer to "it" or "other" or simply tapping in to our own higher awareness than when we are fully awake and alert. Hmm... or more easily closer. On the whole, though, my dreams are more "psycho" than "psychic" on the surface lmao. Perhaps this is true of most of us, I dunno.

Dreams and sorting them out is like wrestling with jello. I am very good with them, but still frequently find they just do not sort out reasonably into a nice interpretation or insight. I work with and learn from my own. Try telling someone else what you think their dream may mean and you get denial a lot. Probably why this information is still in their subconscious in the first place *grins*. The brain uses your own symbology, so really you (I, he, she) is best suited to recognize the key to your own and picking up on symbols that work for your own inner language.

Intensifiers, such as depression can get you some pretty lurid and freaky dreamstuff that is all about something way simpler and more readily communicated with prettier imagery but NOOOoo ya just gotta get the drama )). I have spent a year or more at a stretch dancing on that edge myself and am always in stone/s throw of it. I am glad to hear you beat it, too, DoubtfulFire.

Anyway, I hope my thoughts helped give you some new ideas to play with. The subconscious is a fascinating thing to me, too.

***Oh and because the forum here really DOES care (jeez even the trolls are pretty cool), and this can be read later by people of all states of mind and ages, I will add the disclaimer that if you ever are thinking you are depressed, or if you ever have thoughts of injuring yourself, or feel frightened of intense and violent dreams, please seek help from an adult you trust and get assistance with emotional trauma. Help is there and it does not make you a nut job for needing some help to get a handle on it. Suicide is the worst answer, and it ends all hope for the dozens upon dozens of way funner answers. If you bail, you won't ever find out what those are, now, will you? Hmm?

[DoubtfulFire495]

The other night I had another weird dream that disturbed me.

It started out pretty cool. I had this huge old house on top of this tall pinnacle of rock in the middle of a large lake. I had inherited or earned the house somehow, in any case it was mine. From the house was connected a rope bridge that spanned the entire lake, but I honestly don't remember what was on the other side of the bridge; it was never shown. I owned the house, the lake, and the shore - quite a large area. I invited some friends of mine to live there with me - these were people who were odd or strange and otherwise had no family or places to go. I can't remember the details on most of them, but I do remember one woman who was older and had dementia. She would wander from room to room, asking nonsense questions or saying things that didn't make sense, but she was harmless and I was quite fond/protective of her. I was very happy during this time. I remember diving into the lake from the rope bridge, swimming to shore to sunbathe, and spending many days and nights playing and enjoying my time there with these friends.

I woke up after this briefly to use the restroom, then went back to sleep and the same dream continued but things went horribly wrong. My grandma showed up (she was my actual grandmother from real life), but she was different. She had these wild, cultish beliefs about God and Jesus, like a religious zealot but kinda crazy. Thinking back, she was a bit like the mother in the movie 'Carrie'. She drove my friends from the property and held me hostage in a blimp that she had floating low over the lake. I watched in horror as she bound my father (she was my mother's mother, so not her son) and laid him out on a table, almost like in a ritual. She kept quoting verses from the Bible and saying how she was sorry to do this, but sin must be repaid and it was God's will and yadda yadda. She didn't seem sorry at all, it was just talk. She killed my father slowly with a small knife, little cuts here and there, bleeding him out. She then opened a sort of trapdoor on the floor and dropped him, barely living, into the lake some forty feet below. Without thinking I dove in after him.

At this point, things are a little fuzzy. I remember hitting the water and swimming, but in between doing that I saw images of my father's face flashing in front of my eyes. He was a corpse, and badly decomposed, as if he'd been killed months earlier. His face was swollen and grey, his lips puffy and black. His eyelids were swollen shut and his tongue was hanging out. Further decomposed tissue and innards kept spilling out of his gaping mouth, and his body was bloated and rotting. It was incredibly realistic and made me feel sick. The feeling of seeing someone you love so badly decomposed and rotting with filth and gore was so mortifying and devastating. I felt like the little happy life I had built there had been completely raped, my happiness violated. I felt completely out of control.

Then I woke up.

It may be important to know that, in real life, my father actually did pass away a couple years ago after suffering for four months in the hospital. He was only 48, and the experience traumatized me deeply.