[Adam]

Are there any dreams that aren't weird? It seems to be the general rule that dreasm are full of straneg situations, changing circumstances, and bizarre juxtapositions. Anyway, I tend to have a number of recurring themes in my dreams:

Convoluted Architecture
It's unusual for me to have a dream that doesn't feature semi-familiar buildings with extra doors, staircases, rooms, levels, etc., or else multiple familiar buildings mashed together to create strange settings. For example, I've dreamed that my grandparents' house (where I lived when I was younger) has a zoo lion house in the garage, that, in that same house, I had to pass through a series of public places (restaurants, etc.) that were in different rooms between the kitchen and the bedroom, that the high school I went to had an attached hospital,etc. Also, these places are often filled with aquariums, pools, ponds, etc. that don't exist in the real world, conatining...

Sea Creatures
For some reason, fish and other aqautic animals appear in my dreams all the damn time. Usually, they're incidental to the 'plot' of the dream. Either there will be a pool in my living room full of tropical fish, or the hallway from one room to another will pass through an underwater viewing room where I can see whales or manatees or something, etc. Even when the fish aren't central to what's going on in the dream, it's not unusual for me to fall into the water containing them at some point. Once in a rare while, sea creatures will actually be central to the dream, as in one dream where I drove my brothers to the zoo to see these horrifying deformed monstrosities that vaguely resembled giantseals or walruses, which leads into another recurring theme...

Mutations and Deformities
If an animal, espcially a pet animal, of any sort appears in my dreams, there's a good chance that it will be deformed or mutated in some fashion. When I used to have hamsters and gerbils as pets, I has dreams about them all the time, where they'd have these weird tumors that popped off them and turned into new, even more deformed, hamsters and gerbils. The sea creatures I menionted earlier are often deformed in some way, larger than the should be, tumorous, etc. Once in a while, people are also deformed, especially my...

Undead Aunt
My favorite aunt died of aggressive cancer in 2001. At the time, I was unemployed, so I was able to move in and take care of her for the last month or so of her life. Leaving aside the horrible nightmares from that time and the time dirctly after it, my dreams picked up a new recurring element after that. She often shows up in my dreams, but I'm always (as far as I can remember) the only person disturbed by her presence. Sometimes she's just her, as she was when she was alive, and it's unsettling that no one but me ever has any idea that she's not supposed to be there. More often, she's disfigured or altered in some way (shriveled limbs, visible tumorous growths, etc.) from having been dead and returned to life, and the unsettling part is that I'm the only one who finds anything unusual about the fact that she's returned from the dead. The rest of my family, in these dreams, doesn't remember her death and simply believes that she's very sick, Which brings me to my next theme, that of...

Memory
I often dream about memory, and how unreliable and arbitrary it is. These dreams are often linked to my aunt. In addition to the way no one but me ever seems to remember that she's died, I've had a couple really weird ones. In the first, I'm at my grandparents' house getting dressed to be in a wedding for a cousin (not that I was actually in this cousin's wedding in the real world...he's not married and I'm not particularly close to him) and I pull a cell phone out of my pocket. I'm confused, because, as I say aloud in the dream, "I won't have this cell phone for another three years". I realize that this wedding happened in the past, and I'm just remembering the day, so I focus for a second and correct my memory so that I have the older cell phone I would have had at the time. Then, my aunt, who would have been alive at the time, walks into the room and begins naming things about herself that she doesn't like, and asking me to remember these things about her differently in the future and, as she does, my memory of her changes in front of my eyes. In the other one, my parents, my brothers, and I are an apartment that we once lived in, but none of us are the proper age for when we lived there, and, even weirder, our ages don't properly line up with each other (i.e. my youngest brother as he appears in the dream is older than the next youngest brother, who appeared as an infant, my dad is about the same age as me, etc.). I'm becoming very disturbed and frightened by this, and I'm listening to my mother, who's on the phone with someone, who I know intuitively is a very impotant someone, like a god or something, telling them that she knows what's going on, that her sister (my aunt) died several years ago, but that's not what really happened. In fact, the rest of us died, her sister lived, and the versions of us in this apartment are just her memories of us. I don't have a clever segue into the final theme, which is...

Flying/Running
When I dream, I'm often able to fly clumsily by sort of running in place and kicking at the air in a certain way. It's very tiring, so I can't do it for long, but I always seem to need to do it when I need to escape from something awful, or when I need to get somewhere quickly, so it's always a frustrating experience, and never a 'whoohoo! i can fly!' sort of thing.