Recurring Dreams

I have only had one recurring dream in my life. It was a nightmare that when I think about now really makes me giggle. My family owned the movie Popeye with Robin Williams. I loved the movie and thought the music was fun, but the actor who played Bluto REALLY scared me! There is a scene in the movie where someone is force fed spinach and it is really gross to watch. I somehow combined the spinach image, Bluto and a third image from the movie, hamburgers, to create what was, in my 7 year old overactive imagination, a terrifying dream. I dreamed that I was laying in bed asleep at night and Bluto slowly opened my door and came into my room breathing heavily and grunting like he does in the movie and then sat me up in bed and force fed me giant hamburgers that had toothpicks sticking out of the top.

I know. It's hilarious. But I remember laying in bed at night and being scared to fall asleep because I didn't want to dream of Bluto again. It is the only recurring dream that I have a memory of and I probably haven't dreamed it in 20 years. But it is interesting... now, as an adult, I don't have recurring dreams, but I have certain themes or items that show up in my dreams regularly. 

The last two nights I have had vivid, gruesome nightmares and the one on Monday night had one of my recurring themes in it. I was in an old southern manor that was my family's home and in the beginning of the dream, we were attacked by a neighboring family. The details are fuzzy now, but I know that there were several casualties in the feud and then the family that we were fighting left. I think they were going home to tend to their wounded. It was early in the afternoon and we knew that they would be coming back when it got dark so we decided to hide. Here is the recurring part: there was a trap door at the top left corner of the coat closet in the front hall of the manor that led to a secret attic and we were going to go there to hide. The house was big and gorgeous and looked like something out of Gone With the Wind, except for the front hall. The front hall was the front hall of the house the I actually grew up in in Irving. And the closet was the same closet full of coats that I used to walk into with my arms outstretched hoping to find Narnia. I have had multiple dreams in the past two or three years where there was a trap door in that closet that led to a secret attic. It was always used for a different purpose in my dreams. In this dream we were going to live in it Anne Frank style. In another dream it was an attic that led to a private school where I had been sent and they were abusing all of the children so I would take people up there to hide. In another dream in was an attic that connected to my church and a homeless man was living there.

I just think it's really interesting. Anytime that I dream about being "home" in my dreams, it is always the house that I grew up in. My grandmother's house that my family moved to when my grandmother got sick when I was young. And there is always that closet. The closet that, as a child, I hoped held something magical in it. And now it my dreams, it is always a means of escape from some danger.

It's funny what our brains do at the end of the day when we are resting.

That's it. I don't really have a point. I have just been thinking about recurring dream elements since I had that dream. I find it very interesting. The end.