JoannaB

1am
I don't think I was myself. I may have been some kind of scientist. I was with others but don't recall who. We stopped at a spring of water. I had the sense this was not the first water spring we stopped at. This one had been heavily built around and looked like an indoor swimming pool only smaller. My first reaction was that we would not stay because the water looked bad to drink. It was white and more like milk than water due to all the minerals. Who would want to drink this? However I encouraged one of the others to try it - perhaps an assistant or student. He reported that actually it tasted good so I tasted it too. It did taste kind of like milkey water, not bad. I remember having some kind of a vision of some shelter or bunker and I think it was part of this dream somehow but I don't recall how. It seemed like a small room made of concrete?

Another fragment: For a banquet of sort, a collage or painting of the names of the attendees had been prepared but somehow it had gone wrong and the names all overlapped in such a way that only one naw was legible. I don't recall that name.

3am
So it was nighttime and I was going in the dark through my kids drawers in their dressers looking for something. At one point my younger son's dresser's lowest drawer was almost empty except for a few items, one of which felt wet like maybe a wet swimsuit was in there - but in this dream I did not bother taking it out, but left it in there, just noticing it was there. Then when I later in same dream searched the same drawer again it was filled with my older son's homework instead. I extracted two pieces but when I went to a room with more light, I discovered that one of the two sheets I was holding was actualy a homework that still needed to be done, but it just had empty circles on the page and was obviously just one part of the homework, the instructions presumably still somewhere in that drawer. How was I going to find them, in the dark, in a drawer full of papers, not knowing what I was looking for? I went back to searching that drawer. At one point my older son woke up enough to realize there was an intruder in his room, and he grabbed my arm, without knowing it was me. I tried to say "it's me: Mom" but I could not speak, was like paralyzed or frozen. In hindsight, it is odd because it was my older son, but in the bed where my younger son sleeps in in real life.

Another fragment: There was some sort of contraption in my sons' room. I think it started as an alarm clock early in the dream and became a water fountain later, although it was complicated enough so maybe it was both of those and maybe more. It was broken. At first it was playing music and I could not turn it off. Then there were sharp needles sticking out of it, and one of the needles got into my fingertip and it hurt and I had to pull it out, and the machine had many more needles like it. Then it was a water fountain, but my younger son had to climb onto it in some complex way to get water. It was definitely very broken whatever it was, and not safe. And yet my dream self did not remove it from the children's room. I knew how much the kids liked it. So I tried to fix it. Then I wondered whether the boys could live with it the way it was. And only finally did I wonder whether I could get a new unbroken one to replace it. At some point in this dream I was trying to reach this contraption - I think it was when it was playing music too loud in the middle of the night - but I could not move, I was stuck/paralyzed just standig there in midst ride, reaching toward it but unable to get closer. I do not know how I got unstuck, but I don't think this was the end of this dream.

6:30am
I was with my husband near our kitchen. He had just brewed some tea. I told him "yesterday, our older son asked how do mommies and daddies make babies?" My husband's angry reaction "And you told him that both daddy and you need to be present to answer this question!" Me "I wish I had! But when I get such a question I either freeze like a deer in the headlights or I talk before I think." My husband "where is my tea? I was holding it when you started telling me about this, and now I don't know where it is." So we started searching for his tea.

In this dream I was alternating names, sort of trying them on for size, like hats (I thought in hindsight, though sadly, no actual hats in this dream before waking up, which is a shame). They were mostly old family names, like my relatives maiden names, or names of close friends of the family.

This dream was all about self-identity, and I just know that part of why I dreamed it was because before going to sleep I tried to respond toa thread on dreamviews about changing gender in dreams. I say tried because I had server failed errors, so I do not know whether I actually did respond to that thread or not.

I also had some difficulty breathing in this dream, probably due to having a lot of congestion in real life, and hat raised the anxiety level in this dream.

Of course, given my struggles with myself lately and throughout life, anxiety about self-identity is not an unusual theme for me. Who am I? I am the one who is full of contradictions, and that's ok.

I think the fact that these were old family names is significant: I am aware that part of what makes me me is my family history, the women who came before me, who changed their names in marriage to redefine ourselves.