Recurrent Dreams....

While my overactive subconscious is in the habit of frequently throwing out some truly epic gems of originality (more of these to come in future entries :-)) ), at the same time it often also regurgitates the old, mainly anxiety based, classics with depressing regularity… Of these, the most common recurrent dreams are:

• Tsunamis – possibly related to narrowly missing the 2006 one when I was backpacking across South-East Asia in my early twenties. All I know is each time I have this dream, it is always with a sense of dreary resignation that after all my previous dreams about this happening, this time a tsunami is finally coming in reality and there is no sense in running from it, as it will soon engulf us all anyway…
• Past Nemeses – involving either one girl at school who was always a snidey bitch to me, who I always pleasingly seek out and punch in the face (hah!!), or former evil / sociopathic colleague who seeks to destroy me with her characteristic piercing death stare…
• School – lately I’ve been dreaming of high school reunions, at which I surprise everyone by the fact that I am now a sophisticated, confident, urbane woman (ahem) with enviable life in one of Europe’s most beautiful capitals, as opposed to the swotty, self-righteous, calorie-counting, woefully attired geek I was back then, and all the popular girls of the Class of 2000 now want to be my friend…
• My Old House – a place I was ultimately glad to leave given all the regrettable family crap that went on within those walls, but which nevertheless keeps creeping back unbidden into my dreams… Don’t need a psychoanalyst to tell me I have “issues” from the past here I should probably deal with, but hey, good old British emotional repression has served me pretty well up till now, and either way definitely works out cheaper than years of introspective self-indulgence in therapy at any rate!
• Little Brother – at the moment am dreaming frequently of having to somehow protect my cherubic little brother as a child from some unknown danger. Given that he is a 6ft 3in, karate brown-belt, fully-fledged anaesthetist with house / fiancé these days, am not sure where this one is coming from...
• Mum – these are the absolute worst. Either I dream her cancer of ten odd years ago has returned, or she is ill in some other form and I can’t do anything to help or prevent it… Too awful a prospect to even want to think / write about.
• Exams – usually in the form of suddenly remembering that I forgot to go back and do my final year at university after my Year Abroad, and realising with horror that I no longer remember anything about Kafka or Dostoevsky, forgot all my Russian, and can’t remember where I put all my university study notes…
• Irrevocable Mistakes – i.e. lapsing back into smoking, accidentally cheating on my other half, being late, getting bollocked at work, missing flights, or putting something accidently on Facebook or sending in an email that really shouldn’t have done etc – either way always a dream I am insanely relieved to wake up from…
• Aeroplanes Crashing – not one I’ve had in a while, but in the run-up to my move to Prague I used to dream I saw an aeroplane crashing from our UK office on the third floor. As the date of my move moved ever closer, so too would the plane crash ever nearer to our building, until the week before I actually flew out, the crash site was so near that the explosion blew out the windows and we all had to be evacuated…
• Moving – recently I keep dreaming that I’ve found a fantastic new flat in Prague that I get all excited about and move into, only to slowly realise that my old one was much better / cheaper / closer to work and I’ve forgotten to find someone to take over the lease and I’m now paying rent for two flats simultaneously…
• Hamsters – this one is a fairly new addition to the recurrent crop, and invariably involves lots of adorably cute little baby hamsters running all about the place and me desperately trying to scoop them up and put them in a cage before they get squished underfoot, but they all keep on climbing out again. According to the Dream Dictionary site, hamsters are a sign of undeveloped emotions, which I of course take great offense to – my emotions are perfectly well developed, stupid judgemental website!
• The Devil – for a confirmed atheist, I do seem to have an uncanny fear of the devil (or at least some overwhelming force of inexplicable evil), and sometimes have those nightmares where you think you are awake in your bed and some malevolent force is preventing you from moving / breathing etc.
• Fat – dreaming I have reverted to my previous teenage incarnation of chubby Sarah, and have to lose it all over again…
• Teeth – not the normal teeth dropping out, but having my extremely expensive / excruciatingly painful to install bridge work come loose, leaving me as a peg-toothed, gappy-gob on one side of my mouth…
• Vomitting – apart from spiders, my other extreme real-life phobia or worse (don’t read if your squeamish) – coughing up shit…

Which pretty much exhausts the list of recurrent dreams – looking back clearly all reflections of my deeply angst-ridden, vengeance-seeking, history-beholden psyche… Hmmm, perhaps that therapy might just be called for after all!! ;-))))))))