Recurring dream landscapes I have known:
- The green street: around the age of 9-12 or so, had recurring dreams of a suburban street bathed in a leached green light. Featured a number of spec homes, cheap middle-class housing development; in one of the houses something awful had apparently happened, because the dreams were always full of dread.
- The cloverleaf: based on the Markham bridge in Portland, confusing and scary high-altitude mess of freeway-interchanges and bridges high over water. Dreams always scary.
- Seattle/Tokyo: neighborhood featuring aspects of Tokyo (large city) and Seattle (included bridge and freeway like the part where the I-5 goes over by Lake Union/Lake Washington there, and the Aurora bridge) and aspects of the Latona neighborhood in Seattle, where my sister’s previous and present houses are (only in the dream) also a phone booth that always has the phone book I’m looking for, but the phone book always lacks the page I need and tricky, Escher-like sidewalks…
- The peep show bordello: cement interior with slanting, un-level floors, red velvet curtains and large aquariums set into the walls which contain not fish swimming around and water but air and women plying their trade. Alas, last time I dreamed about it, it had gone out of business and was just an empty shell.
- “Near where my parents live” sort of SW Washington State landscape, rolling hills, big trees, rural. Drive past the same houses and lakes in the dream every time. Last night, was looking for my brother’s junked cars with Jessica, D. and some other people. Looked and looked for my brother’s Lambourghini, but when we finally found it it was only a junked, gutted, stripped beat-up red Ferrari. It had no interior or engine, but wheels. So we pulled it out of the weeds, turned it right-side up, attached a tall mast and colorful spinnaker and sailed around the field with it. It was a lot of fun.
You weirdo. You just can’t get me out of your head.
Na nana, na na nana na…
I enjoy reading about other peoples’ recurring dreamscapes, especially since I’ve been kind of inventorying mine lately….
1. A house that I have recently moved into which keeps becoming more and more complex. I discover secret rooms, amazing things like a big tree growing inside the middle of the house, etc.
2. Wandering through the city in the San Francisco/Berkeley area. Sometimes I’m kind of trying to get somewhere, but usually just walking and seeing things.
3. In Ukraine in the neighborhood where I used to live, with muddy playgrounds and my anxious host mum.
4. Traveling through airports trying to catch the flight I need to get to some obscure place. (Like a specific piece of ice floating off of an iceberg in the arctic…) Complicated organization is necessary to work out how to do it.
I love realizing in a dream that ahhhh, I’m at this place again.
That’s very cool. When you realize you’re in a familiar location, do you also realize you’re dreaming? Are these lucid dreams or not?
The world gives you a rusted hollow shell of a (sexy sexy) car and we make an all-terrain clipper ship! What a happy metaphor; I’m gonna keep that in the back of my mind right, maybe stack it on top of the sagging box marked “self-doubt” and see if it collapses.
right
I do have some lucid dreams, but mostly only when I try (if you like napping, take a lucid dreaming class….hrmm, possibly only available in California, heh, and then you can say you have to go do your homework and snooze).
In my recurring dream landscapes, I recognize them as places that are familiar to me, but not necessarily as dreams.