Dreams

I am and always have been a very vivid dreamer.  I can recall in detail what was happening, who was in it and how it made me feel.  I can still remember a dream from childhood which involved a green witch that flew around throwing acid on people's houses and how one of my classmates tried to fight her in my house...but came out the front door missing a leg.  And did I mention, I had this dream in the second grade?

For the three years that I was at McKamy, I coached with and had a classroom right next door to my friend Beri.  Every morning when we got to school, we would check in with each other in our classrooms and even our kids knew that if I wasn't in my room at 8:25...it was a safe bet they could find me in Coach D's room next door.  Part of these early morning chats was always me relaying my weird and crazy dreams and apparently Beri found my frequent and vivid dreams amusing...or disturbing.  Either way, one year for Christmas she bought me a book all about dreams so that I could accurately interpret the crazy things that were part of my conscious and more importantly...my subconscious.

After the dreams I have had the last two nights, I have had to pull that book off my shelf.

Dream #1: My two brothers and I are in a very old indoor stadium made of rocks and stone.  In the middle of this coliseum there is a large group of people gathering.  For some reason I am down there with them, but get an uneasy feeling - I know that something bad is about to happen.  I climb out of the center of the stadium to safety with my brothers.  But then Mike goes back down into the middle and Stephen and I start to yell at him to get out because there is a major flood coming into the stadium and all those innocent and ignorant people down there are going to die.  Mike starts heading back towards us and Stephen and I pull him to safety just as the water rushes into the center section.  We leave the seating area of the stadium and begin walking around the outer concourse and when we come to an entrance back into the coliseum, I stop to take a look.  The water has filled the bottom "field" section and it is calm...no more rushing waves...but there are tons of dead bodies floating in the water.

Potential Meaning: After I woke up sweating and shaking from that one, I knew that there had to be some sort of greater meaning...or maybe I wanted to believe that there was a bigger meaning so that I didn't feel so absolutely crazy.  From my book, it states that floods mean "water may symbolize the unconscious, and being swept away by a flood may mean your conscious ego feels threatened by something in your unconscious."  Or maybe it means "water may be a feminine symbol, and the threatening flood may be your mother or your attachment to mother, who/which may be hampering your individual development."  And finally, the last option "Flood-water is destructive but also fertilizes and makes new growth possible.  The flood in your dream, therefore, may signify both a need for personal reconstruction and that the only way your new and true self can come into existence is through the 'death' of the old self - or, rather, of those things that have been hindering the unfolding of your true self."

Dream #2: I wake up in my house and outside to the east the sky is disturbingly dark and there is an ominous feel in the air.  Craig has the weather channel on and there are three separate storm systems circling around our house and threatening our safety.  Without it being explicity said in my dream, I know that these are some of the worst storms that our area has ever experiences.  I gather up Angie, Annabelle and Andy (my pup and my mother's dogs) and throw them under the stairs and afterwards, I run upstairs and grab Natalie and scurry into our storm shelter (the closet under the stairs).  But we're not alone...David Finfrock and two other older children are also with us.  I remember I felt a little bit safter having our local weatherman huddled up with us - like he could give us some better insight on what was going on outside.  We sit out the storm...meanwhile, I'm nervous about being late to school so I text my assistant principals that I'm hiding out from the storm.  Soon after, David Finfrock tells us that the storm is over and that it's safe to get out.  Craig and I emerge to find all my friends from Forestwood in my kitchen and I look out the back door - everything is fine...a little wet from the rain but nothing is damaged. 

Meaning: I know this one doesn't sound nearly as bad as the first one, but I can't express to you how much fear I had in anticipation of this storm.  Storm season in Texas is usually my favorite time of the year, but this year I had so much more anxiety and trepidation about it...probably because I was cradling a newborn baby under the stairs while the tornado sirens went off.  When I looked up the meaning it was basically the same thing as the flood...something that I fear might is approaching.

Either way...they make me a little unnerved.  I know I probably sound like a crazy woman for remembering my dreams in such detail and believing that they have meaning...but in this particularly difficult season of my life, I think there is something lurking in my subconscious that I haven't dealt with. 

Or maybe I'm just really afraid of water and thunderstorms.