Your instinctive reaction that the dream deals with an inner issue is the right one, based partly on the fact that no dream generally shows us something we’re not already aware of in some way.

In this case, you’re quite conscious of the problem with the sewer gas coming into your condo and although this is upsetting, it’s not something you can’t deal with reasonably easily with the knowledge you already have of handling such matters.

Also, the fact that dreams use analogies as part of their language means that they will latch onto anything in the outer world which in some way pictures an inner situation in a succinct way.

So your dream starts with you running joyously in the field behind your parents’ house.

This location suggests that attitudes and issues related to your childhood are involved, at first ones related to natural childhood joys but later to a darker side.

The reason for your joy is that you’re getting divorced from a husband who is called by you in an earlier post “controlling”.

Then you ask the dream to show you the nature of the problem you’re having in real life related to the sewer gas.

In this way of looking at your dream, the “problem you’re having in real life” from the dream’s point of view is apparently related instead to some very deeply buried issue (the shattered orange crayon way down at the bottom of a drain in your parents’ house which is symbolically causing a back-up of foul-smelling water and gas).

It looks like this obstruction can be removed with your hands if you want to, and while you understandably don’t do it at the time, you apparently move on to another unrelated question instead of planning a future return and cleaning out of the sewer grate.

So the idea could be that the issue which the dream is dealing with, if not dealt with in some reasonable way, might unfortunately resurface in some kind of a choice being made which could potentially end up as unhappy as the one decided upon in choosing to marry the man you did.

Anyway, I hope that these ideas can be helpful in some way and the concept that lucid dreams have meaning is included in a book which you might like called “Private Myths: Dreams and Dreaming” by analyst Anthony Stevens.

Please feel free to ask any questions or to make any comments about this particular way of looking at your dream.