JoannaB

I remember this was a long dream. I remember there were several rounds of it, and it was kind of repetitive but not exact repetition. It was all about me loosing my sons over and over again. It was always either entirely or at least partially my fault, and sometimes also someone else's.

I don't remember all rounds, but in the last iteration the boys were playing somewhere in a grassy area of a city street, and my car was parked nearby with the motor running and key in ignition. A woman who in my dream was the mother of some friends of my kids, but in reality is an unknown, she started chatting with me, and she then went behind the wheel of my car and I got in the passenger seat, and she suggested that we go for a short ride while we chat, and leave the kids here, but come back to them, and I agreed. After we had been driving for a while, she realized she could not easily drive back - I think it was because of one way streets that prevented us from driving back the way we came, and the streets were not in a straight grid like many streets around where I actually live, but they were more curved and complex, more like the streets of old European cities. So in my dream the woman abandoned me or just disappeared. I abandoned my car, and started walking back to find my sons. It took a long time. Eventually I found them. They looked worse for wear, a bit dirty and dischevled, like they had been living on the street for a while. They were delighted to see me, and I them. And just when I found them, my husband found all of us to. I had no idea how he found us because I had not contacted him, and he had no way of knowing that the boys had been missing nor where we were. I had the sense that my husband was reproachful about my loosing our kids, and he had every right to be, because it was my fault.

This dream is reminiscent of a few previous dreams of mine, in which I am also lost, also with a car, and my husband in at least one of them also finds me, and I don't know how. And I also have feelings of guilt in at least one of them.

Fragment: Me and someone else were standing on someone's lawn when we saw a firetruck pull up into their driveway. Meanwhile the woman who was the owner of the house hurried over there. We thought that we better move lest someone become suspicious what we were doing there and whether we started the fire. What were we doing there? Rationalized that must have had precognition of fire, but figured no one would believe that.

Fragment: My mom and I were staying at Polish friends of my mothers. While there the phone rang, and I picked up. I was asked whether I knew the owners and I said I had met the woman but not the man yet, and then I explained they were friends of my mothers, and the person on the other side of the phone figured out who I must be. Btw, I was a teenaged version of me in this dream. My father burst into the house upset that we were in town and not staying with him. He insisted we pack up our stuff and come with him. I was surprised he included my mother in that given that they were divorced.

Fragment: I was in a public bathroom - I think with my mother and I caused a flood. The thing that was flooding was much smaller than a toilet and it was in front of the sink but it was not the sink.

Fragment: In this dream I was staying at my father's house which was nothing like his real house, it was much bigger and older and in ill repair and it was a mess. There were a whole bunch of desks blocking my way to the closet. I needed to get through and my dad needed to help me with that. I then pulled an electrical plug, and we became aware that this had caused a loud crackling noise to stop whereas we had not noticed the noise before. When I briefly turned it back on, we discovered that whatever it was was also causing sparks (which we had not noticed before either) which were damaging the ceiling. My father became worried about the resale value if the home. He wanted to know whether the document about the condition of this home when he bought it was vague enough so he could claim this was a preexisting condition. We tried to examine the damage, but it was in such heavy shadow that we could not really see the ceiling. My father wondered whether this could be used to his advantage to pretend that he did not know about the damage and maybe noone would notice.

Fragment: some weird connection between life and forum, not sure but it may have been that if one did not want animal eaten should have posted to different subforum?

In my dream my mother and stepfather came to visit me at the university campus (in reality I graduated from college more than a decade and a half ago).

I was parking the car in the parking garage of the hotel on the college campus (there really is a hotel there). I did a very poor parking job.

I spoke with the parking attendant or security guy about threat to life of a professor of mine. The professor dismissed it, but I believed there had been two assassination attempt on him already. The guy I was talking to said he would look into it.

My grandmother could not come for health reasons (in reality she is no longer alive), Christmas was coming - I wondered whether I could instead make a brief visit to here (in Poland) but I was worried because I have a cold and might pass it on to her.

My mom had brought a puzzle that required one to find a clue in a library on other side of campus (the layout of campus was completely different from my university's campus, and so was the library). It was like a scavanger hunt. We walked through the cold campus (it was winter in the dream.)

The puzzle / scavanger hunt led one to constructing a paper or cardboard box with art design. I was disappointed, and I let my mother know that this kind of thing did not interest me, that we could have skipped the step of actually going on this scavanger hunt and could have just read about it. My mom was disappointed that I was disappointed.

In reality it is true that my mother and stepfather are coming to visit soon. I am no longer in college, not since over a decade and a half ago. My grandmother is dead. There are no assassination attempts of course. It is not winter / Christmas. I do however usually do a poor job parking my car.

Notice my dream signs: car, my mother, college.

This dream may have been a third person dream, or I may occasionally have identified with one of the characters or another.

There was a young woman with Down syndrome who everyone thought would never have kids or be married or anything. But then a close relative of hers dies and leaves behind either a group of kids or a bunch of eggs about to hatch - there definitely were some eggs involved. Anyway, the young woman with Down syndrome is the only one willing and available to adopt. She turns out to be an excellent mother with the help of her brother. At some point in the dream someone also asks to merry her.

Fragment: I was at a hotel, which had a reception desk and in the next room a separate information desk. I kept having questions, and getting confused and wanting to ask the woman at the reception desk, and bothering her, when I should have gone to the information desk.

Fragment: I was supposed to write like a book review essay in a foreign language. I did not know the foreign language. I was supposed to have learned it on my own for college without classes. I had not done this. The book review was due tomorrow. I could not find the book.

Fragment: I was male. In some country where there was a dictatorship. I rescued and befriended a rebel. Went to the mafia asking female chief of security to search the rebel to see if he had a bug on him. At some point I was watching TV and he approached me with a knife but it was a test of whether I trusted him plus he had to remove something from my eye with the knife. Toward the end of the dream there was something about consuming food and accidentally eating something that shouldn't because there was a microchip or something with information on it. There also seemed to be a wedding or other feast at the end.

In my dream I undertook the mammoth task of writing an updated edition of a Java reference book. In waking life I do not know how to program in Java, and even in the dream I was not good at it and I felt inadequate for the task. However, I felt someone had to do it because it was an important reference book.

The previous edition had been written by an organization we work with in waking life, and the employees of that organization were like in waking life. My coworkers and managers however were not ones like in waking life, and the building and organization and goal of our work were not the same.

In my dream I had to spend some time persuading a manager of why testing was necessary. Then I actually revised one chapter of the huge reference book and implemented the corresponding code for it, which resulted in two lines crossing, one representing actual data and the other some sort of extrapolated data.

A high level executive of my dream organization was very impressed with my work, and meaningfully said to my dream manager that I am "number 1". At least I thought this had some sort of important hidden meaning, but I did not know what it meant, except that I had the sense that it was like "favorite", but i felt insufficiently qualified for that. I was supposed to go to the executive's office later, and hoped to be told what being number 1 meant.

I talked with a representative of the publisher of this reference book. And she said good that I was working on this new edition, because this one was about to go out of date. I said that I would not be done in time because I had just started one chapter, and it was a huge reference book.

The first revised chapter I did was one somewhere in the middle. Now I started tackling the reference book starting from the front cover. I had the revelation that there would be no need to revise every chapter, since this was a new edition, just the ones that needed to change. This made me realize that the task was not quite as huge as the reference book made it look like.

In this fragment I and my sister in law and some others were preparing food for people. Among other things we soaked croutons in soup and sent them to some people who for health reasons could not eat other stuff, but perhaps could eat soaked croutons.

Repeatedly seeking a restroom - this should have been my cue to get lucid, dream sign! But non lucid I staid. At one point in this dream I cause an alarm to go off as I enter a private suite, but I reassure the person there that it's alright - I know the owner. Sometime in this dream I also have my pants down outside the restroom and someone sees me.

In this dream I wanted to study at Oxford University in England. I was told that I could rent an apartment, but to do that I would need to do all the cooking around 1am. At first I thought this was due to my academic schedule, but no, then I discovered I had misunderstood, and I always could cook, but it was recommended that I do it within 25 hours.

I was shocked by how small a village Oxford was. (Now in waking life I have been to Oxford as a tourist, and it most definitely is not a small village.) In my dream, I could walk from one end of the village to the other easily, and that was good because I was supposed to be a priest at St. John's church which was at the opposite end of the village, and I could walk there. I found out that an important member of the congregation had died, and I wrote to the bishop to enquire whether I could hold a simple funeral service, and was reprimanded in the letter back that for such important people the funeral had to be lavish.

Meanwhile returning to food and cooking, I discovered that there was not a grocery store in Oxford, too small a village for that. So one had to go to the next town over to the store.

In other news, I now was not going to be a priest after all! I was applying for a job as a research assistant. Now luckily this was just a non-lucid dream because few people in waking life ever get a job by explaining that the research of the professor in question does not really interest me, but I can do the job.

Ultimately though I decided that it may be too dangerous to go to Oxford after all, because war was coming. I knew that war was coming because people were arguing more than usual. I thought that maybe I could prevent war from starting in Oxford (how???) but that I was not going to be able to do it nationwide, and thus it might be too dangerous to be there after all. I should go back to the US instead.

Incidentally, this was not my first dream in which I thought war was coming and that thus it would be safer to stay in the US. I appear not to have noticed that I was single without kids and probably significantly younger than in waking life.

So this was supposedly in my dream a work related experiment:

You know the starting point of a car. Give the driver some beans. Require him to travel at a certain speed. Measure when/where the flatulance kicks in.

Note: Car continues to be a dream sign of mine.

Earlier in the night I remembered a fragment:
An exercise machine where you can change the height of where your feet are without changing it?

Woke up with a weird shaking of my left hand upon wake-up. Did a reality check, but I was awake. No dream recall.

I remember in my dream thinking about the desirability of inducing recurring dreams, that it would be good for LD initiation, though I realize that some recurring dreams are not desirable.

I had no awareness of this being a dream, plus I did not feel my body. It was just non lucid thinking in a dream.

No dreams recalled today, and I woke up feeling blah. But I exercised for 4 minutes despite feeling poorly - yes, I know 4 minutes is not much, but it's better than 0.

My husband and I arrived at a Taste of ... (Insert name of town) event. (For those of you unfamiliar with this kind of event: it's a way for restaurants to advertise by selling samples of food in an outdoor street feast. Our church collaborates with the Business Improvement organization of our city in organizing one each year. In the case of our event, the proceeds go to a charitable organization.) We arrived but there was no one there other than a couple retirement-age ladies selling tickets. I said to my husband, the crowds must be just confined to in front of the actual booths. That's how it was last year, too. I hate that the good restaurants have a long line, and if one does not want to stand in line as long, the food of those restaurants is much worse."

In this non lucid dream fragment I was under the impression that I was Dr Who, even though I was famale. I remember running to the bathroom from some people who were either my enemies or authorities of sort or both. I remember locking the door. I peed a very long time. I remember thinking that if they saw how long I peed they would not doubt that I was the Doctor. Of course, Dr Who is known for having two hearts not an unusually large bladder, but in my dream, I did not know that.