I'm slightly bothered by the formality of my writing in my journal. Somehow my unconscious tendency is to write like I read, I mean, using the same level of language that I'm used to reading. I don't know, I feel as though I want to be more informal in my writing but I also want to express myself concisely and using all the words at my disposal. I don't talk to my friends the same way I write! Then again I don't talk to my friends about the "weird shit" I talk about here. Maybe I just need to use a different level of language to get my musings over? I thought I'd go back to talking about dreaming. I just find the recurring themes in my dreams fascinating. I thought that maybe I would try my hand at dream interpretation for a laugh. Although, I think that on the whole trying to decipher dreams is pointless. If there is some sort of hidden message in dreams then it's only meaningful within that dream space. I suspect that given enough time though, the reason why certain themes repeat themselves becomes apparent. Here's a few of those themes and reasons why: Running I have a fair number of these. Normally I'm just running and feeling hot and sweaty. I do run in real life (or used to), so there's a connection there. My suspicion is that those times I'm just too hot in bed and I normally wake up sweating. Sometimes though, there's a kind of urgency in my running as if I need to make it to some appointment or other - maybe I just need to wake up and cool down. Swimming/toilets I have a fair few dreams where I'm either in a swimming pool or open water. I'm not a hugely great swimmer in waking life, but I do enjoy being in water. There's normally no particular reason for being in the water and no anxiety, it's a pleasant experience.  The other side of the coin is trying to find somewhere to pee (in the dream of course). Usually, it's a failure. Mostly either it's too exposed, or the toilets are too disgusting to use, or the toilet floor is flooded, or I'm naked or partially undressed and I feel too uncomfortable to go, or I simply can't find somewhere to go. I suspect there is some form of anxiety around this that is a mirror of waking life. Although the level of disgust is unsettling, which I don't normally get in waking life. Occasionally I'm successful within the dream. Yay! Both of these I've worked out is because I actually need to pee, most times I wake up desperately needing to go. Good brain. Ex girlfriends This is a very frequent theme. This is despite having not been in a relationship a fair while. Normally it's just very run-of-the-mill, and the ex is just sort of in the background of my dream like an extra or there's minimal interaction. There's nothing sexual at all about these dreams. For many many years I dreamt about my first girlfriend (I was about 15/16 when I was with her!) and her family. This is strange because I haven't seen or had contact with her since I was about 19. Although I have met up with her brother in the last ten years (who I was also friends with), and her sister is on my Facebook (strangely). I won't use her name but these dreams were so frequent I actually used to call them E------- Dreams, to myself.  The E' Dreams I think has something to do with an intense curiosity about what she's up to now. She was always the black sheep of the family, when I met her brother he could tell me nothing about her, he hadn't spoken to her in a very long time. I had no pictures of her either. She seems to have no internet presence at all. At the time, being a teenager my parents had already separated, and her family sort of adopted me, and they became my second family. I suspect this had a deep impact on my psyche. A lot of emotion and other things are bound up in that period of my life. However, I recently found a couple of photos of E in my mum's photo albums. My E' Dreams have now stopped - weird. Flying, levitating See my previous journal entry about this. In general I think its caused by being horizontal in bed, but upright in the dream, because IRL my feet are not touching anything, so this is interpreted as being off the ground in my dream. Exploration For many many years I used to explore buildings in my dreams. I would go room to room, and through corridors and up and down staircases. There would rarely be people around and normally it would be dimly lit. There would be a lot of attic spaces with weird assortment of stuff up there. Occasionally I would have to climb over balconies to get from one place to another. One particularly memorable dream I was on a balcony and realised I needed to hide from someone, I had nowhere to go, so I climbed over and hung from my fingers from the floor of the balcony, hoping my fingers wouldn't be seen - it would make a great movie sequence! I am an inquisitive type of person. I lot of the reason why I enjoy walking is to explore new places just to see how places fit together. I think my dreams are an extension of this curiosity. However, I have no explanation as to why there are always inside buildings. I'm not the sort of person to get lost normally, and I don't normally go wandering around abandoned buildings, who knows? Maybe there's a computer game element to this, I did used to enjoy games like Half-life and Counterstrike, which are kind of "room based" and exploratory. These types of dreams have largely stopped recently. But have switched mostly to staircases. They're bloody annoying in my dreams. It's like Hogwarts most of the time: staircases that lead into walls, staircases with scary large drops into other staircases. In last nights dream I had to slide down the shiny metal handrail to get from one staircase to the other. Why!? Don't know. Trains Again the frequency of these types of dreams has decreased. It's everything around trains, from waiting in stations, trying to find ways to get to my destination, walking on tracks, mainline trains, tube trains, walking through train tunnels from station to station, and on and on. I mean, most of these things I've never done in real life. I don't even travel on trains frequently any more (I drive). Saying that, I did used to travel on trains a lot in my teenage years and I was fascinated with trains from a young age. In a nerdy way I still am (see my post about subway maps!). I worked out in the end that the trains are just a metaphor for travel in general and especially commuting. They were more frequent when I had to drive into work longer distance.  Aliens I don't have these types of dreams much any more. Normally there was a nightmarish or scary aspect to these dreams. A lot of times I would be staring into the sky, normally at night and weird stuff would happen, like stars would move about. Or, I would be in dimly lit or dark rooms and would feel a presence there. It's hard to describe the scariness of these dreams, I mean most of the time I wouldn't even see anything, very rarely I might actually catch a glimpse of an alien; but there would always be a kind of malevolence about the whole thing. I would often wake up scared. Normally on my back. One suspicion is that maybe I momentarily stop breathing because I'm on my back, it's possible, I do know I snore, so possible sleep apnea? I don't really know how to interpret these dreams really. I do have an interest in the paranormal, and there is something about the possibility of aliens that I find unsettling, it's one of those things where I think it's mostly bullshit stories, but there's a tiny sliver of doubt about my conviction. I found films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind fairly unsettling as a kid, and maybe that's embedded itself in my psyche. A boogeyman of sorts to be scared of.