Some Common Dreams and Their Meanings

In this blog I'm linking you to another blog, because, while the basis of my blog is weird dreams, I can't discount common dreams we all have. Before I place the link, I should warn you that this blog has more ads than any blog I've ever seen – finding the content between the ads is like watching an hour-long television show filled with 38 minutes of commercials, so look carefully.

The 8 Most Common Dreams and the Meanings Behind Them

What If Your Dreams Are Not Your Own?

Anyone who knows me knows I love listening to dreams. If you lived with me, you’d hear this sentence repeated numerous times throughout the month, “Do you remember any of your dreams?” In response, I often hear, “I had the weirdest dream last night!”

Maybe most dreams fall into the category of weird, simply because no obvious explanation exists for why we dream what we dream until we examine our dreams. But analyzing our dreams is not always an easy task. And remembering them is like trying to hold on to evaporating water. But sometimes something – a song, a symbol, a conversation – triggers the memory of our dreams and a lightbulb flickers in our minds. We not only remember the dream, but also know why we dreamed it. 

Or maybe listening to the dreams of others halts us dead in our tracks, because maybe we had the same dream as did the one sharing it!

So what if you discovered that other people shared your dream – not as in, “I had the same kind of dream,” but as in, “You were in my dream and I was in yours”? Shared dreams are possible, and they might occur between you and your friends or family members. Imagine that!

But let’s take dreams beyond simply dreaming. What if we not only shared our dreams with others, but also controlled the dreams of others? Or – what if somebody controlled our dreams? Possible? Click Falling Water Controls Dreams on my Paranormal Minds blog to read more about shared dreams and how one television series is taking dreams to a whole new level.

Thank you for visiting!

Saving Baby Seals and Kissing Celebrities

I had this dream about a week ago and forgot to post it:

I am kneeling on a pier. Somebody tells me that baby seals need saving. A man and woman in a boat stop by where the baby seals are trapped in some kind of enclosure. I rip it open and one baby seal falls out and into the water. All the rest fall into the boat. Through snow covered water, we take the baby seals to their mother. I am still concerned about the one that fell into the water. I hope somebody saved that one.

Now I’m helping my daughter in her upscale consignment boutique and one item of clothing gets separated from the rest of the group. I ask employees to help me find the group where it belongs, but they aren’t paying attention. More and more items get separated and I am concerned that my daughter has hired a bunch of uncaring, incompetent employees.

Suddenly I find myself visiting a home that belonged to a former neighbor of my parents, but the home doesn’t look at all like my former childhood neighbor’s home. As I walk through the home, I see kids playing in a different part of the house – a very large room. Toys are all over the floor, lined up like soldiers on a battlefield or dominoes ready to fall. Because I am in a very playful mood, I begin playing with the toys, kicking them all over the place and laughing. The kids love it. 

Photo of Robert DeNiro by David Shankbone

As I leave the house, I tell everyone sitting at the large kitchen table that I have to kiss them all good-bye. The table immediately fills with lots of men, including some celebrities, though the only one I can remember is Robert DeNiro. Again, I am in a very playful mood. One guy, a former boyfriend, tells me he has always been attracted to me, as he passionately kisses me good-bye. I practically dance out of the room, feeling like a little child.

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Saving baby seals has never been on my radar. I care for them, but I don’t see myself rescuing them in any way. I’m neither equipped with the physical stamina to do so, nor am I financially capable to help them, so baby seals must represent something important to me. Maybe the fact that baby seals are vulnerable and I’ve always hated people in power who take advantage of others who are in vulnerable positions, I hope in some way to rescue those more vulnerable than I am. I’m not sure who the man and woman represent, though they could be the masculine and feminine parts of myself.

The employees in my daughter’s shop represent people who take advantage of nice people. Like hating people in power who take the trust of the vulnerable and abuse it to their own advantage, people who take advantage of nice people also irritate me. I suggest that those vulnerable people stand up for themselves, but they often don’t.

As far as the playfulness is concerned, I admit that one part of myself I have always loved was my ability to let go and play – to have fun! I lost that part of me during my second marriage and hoped to reclaim it one day. In moments when nobody is watching me, I play, but the memories of getting criticized for having fun my way never left my mind. When I sang to my kids, for instance, I’d get a look of disgust that seared into my soul. I allowed somebody else to dictate my moods. Perhaps now, nearly thirty years after my divorce, I’m giving myself permission to play again.

Afterword: A few days ago, after I had this dream, a Chicago television news station reported that people shouldn’t swim near seals, because seals can be dangerous.

Dream of Confusion, Trust, and Gullibility

I was in a foreign country with a family who decided to take me to the store with them to show me how they bought fresh vegetables in their country. I don’t remember ever talking to them, though, and I had never before met them. 

The “store,” however, held no fresh vegetables and the only way to get them was to pay for them ahead of time, receive a coupon for the items ordered, and then travel to a farm to get whatever items showed on the coupons. Not knowing the customs or the way things were done in this country, I allowed myself to believe them. They looked trustworthy.

I followed the family to the parking lot and then abruptly lost them. Not knowing where to find them, I searched everywhere and eventually found myself inside a building standing on the other side of a window where I saw them sitting in an interrogation room. Only a glass separated us. I could see sadness and confusion in the eyes of the mom. One of them saw me sitting there, but nobody told me I could come in and nobody let me know what was going on.

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Other than going to Canada for a very short stay, I’ve never been to any other foreign country, and Canada wouldn’t be my first choice for buying fresh vegetables. I have always been gullible and want to believe people are honest and trustworthy. Even when things don’t make sense to me, I try to creatively force nonsense to make sense. Obviously that tactic never works – nonsense literally means, “no sense.” 

So maybe the dream was telling me to be wary of trusting people who were trying to sell me something, physical or metaphysical, and that I should think twice about buying anything, even if the produce (idea) is fresh (new). Time to trust my inner guides.

Dreams of Death and Dying

Dreams of dying don’t always mean the death of the person who died in the dream. Sometimes the loss relates to someone special who doesn’t actually die, but is a loss on another level. 

In the following dream, I felt profound loss, but after I calmed down from the devastation (dreams really can have a profound effect on the dreamer), I realized why I had this dream:

My youngest daughter and her husband had gone on vacation, something they do frequently, and they left me in charge of their three children. In the past I have cared for all of them for as often as three weeks a year. Recently I watched them for a full week. 

In this dream I am caring for them yet again, but I’m living in a home that is gigantic. A lot of people are in my home and my three grandchildren are sleeping in an attic bedroom while the people in my home (can’t remember any of them, and I wonder if I even knew any of them – why were they in my home?) are discussing the tornado that is approaching. I see cloud formations that indicate that three tornadoes (destruction) are probably imminent, so I rush to the attic to grab the kids.

The only way to get to the attic in this dream, though, is by climbing shelves in my linen closet (obstacle that seems absurd to me). I rush up the shelf stairs and then realize I would have to hand them down to somebody (in my dream state it never occurs to me to wonder why I allowed them to sleep in an area that requires climbing shelves to access them). 

While I’m at the top of the shelf stairs telling the kids to wake up, a woman approaches me at the bottom of the shelves and blocks me (is somebody or something blocking me from doing something in my waking life?) from getting the kids down the stairs (Why didn’t I initially see her as someone who could help? Why did I see her as intrusive and bothersome?). I tell her she has to move because she is blocking me, but she continues to ask me questions unrelated to what is happening and I’m getting frustrated by her incessant questioning and refusal to listen to me or understand the peril of the situation. 

After asking her politely several times to please move because a tornado is coming and I have to get my grandchildren out of the attic, and because she continues to be oblivious to the oncoming disaster, I scream at her to MOVE!

By this time I’m frantically and desperately trying to get the kids downstairs, but the tornado has now come, and along with it, flooding. The woman grabs and then drops my youngest granddaughter, who gets washed away in a drain pipe. My other two grandchildren get swept away in the flood, too, and I see one of them fighting the flood. I feel helpless and powerless. I can’t get to any of them. I don’t know how to swim, and I realize that nobody will get to the youngest one in time, but somehow I know the other two will be safe. 

The anguish I feel in having to tell my daughter and her husband about the death of their youngest child is overwhelming. That I, too, have just experienced such profound loss fills me with so much anguish that when this dream ends, I am so overcome with grief that I find myself thanking God it was only a dream, but how do I interpret it? I can’t. I can’t even think about it. Not until two days later can I devote any time to it, because it affects me so strongly.

And it will take me a month before I can even publish this dream.

Over the years I have had the honor and privilege of caring for most of my grandkids, and I have developed a very special bond with them. For the past several years, I have cared for my youngest daughter’s children and while the two older ones have been in school for some of those years, I spend about 3 days a week with my youngest granddaughter. 

But now I’ll be moving to a new town (actually an old one since I used to live there) to care for more grandchildren, and I think that the loss I feel, knowing that these three are so far away from the rest of my grandkids and that nobody else in my family lives near them, has spilled into my dreams.

Maybe a lot of my feelings come from the fact that these three little loved ones feel the loss of me strongly too, because when they were told I would be moving, they told me they were very sad. On the one hand, I’ll be close to all of my other grandchildren; but on the other hand, I’ll be so far away from these three (and my daughter) that I wish we could all live close together. The loss I’m feeling translated in this dream to a kind of death, the death of time spent together.

Today, thanks to FaceTime, Skype, and other online opportunities for connecting with people, I plan to connect electronically and, more importantly, get together frequently!

Afterword: After writing down this dream, I noticed that the number three appears often in this dream. In numerology, the number 3 signifies creativity. It also relates to the Trinity (Father, Son, Holy Spirit). On a personal level, I was part of three sisters, and my birth day number, 21, translates to the number 3 in numerology. I may have to revisit this dream to figure out why the number 3 figures so prominently in this dream.

Attics generally mean the mind in dreams. My mind is obviously cluttered with thoughts of impending doom (three tornados) and an inability to access it without climbing over numerous obstacles, AND dealing with incessant chatter from … (did that woman represent me? I have a tendency to sabotage myself by interrupting my own thoughts).

Another part of the dream that wasn’t obvious until after I’d written it, was the attic and the way I had to get to it. In my childhood home, the only way to reach the attic was through the linen closet. I had forgotten about that. I remember, even as a child, when my father told me that the way to access the attic was through the linen closet, how absurd I thought it was to place an attic in an area that required you to take everything off shelves and then have to climb those shelves to reach it. 

The youngest granddaughter in this dream, the one who was caught in a drain pipe, shares the same birthdate as my youngest sister. I once had a dream that my sister died too, and I was just as profoundly affected by that dream as I was by this one. In that dream, though, even though she died, she still looked alive, but only one of her sons and I could see her. I wondered if I should tell her she was dead, because she obviously didn’t know since she was still acting like she was alive. At the time, she and her sons were living with me temporarily and my sister was about to undergo a life-changing transformation.

Both my youngest sister and my granddaughter, I’m happy to report, are alive and well. 

A 38-Year Old Attracted to a 64-Year Old? In My Dreams!

You can tell you’ve been watching too much of something when that something seeps into your dreams. My antenna limits my television viewing so Netflix rescues me with binge-worthy programs like those that appear on the HGTV channel. The Property Brothers is one of those programs and I think my binge-watching is what prompted this dream (all comments to what I dreamed are italicized):

I am helping Drew and Jonathan Scott renovate a home, but it doesn’t appear to be just any home – the home belongs to them and is in need of major renovations. I see Jonathan and am immediately attracted to him. I hope to get near to him. I see a small blonde running around who appears to be part of the crew. I later discover that she is Jonathan’s girlfriend. Disappointed, but moving on, I continue to help the brothers.

While I listen to instructions, and as I lean against a wall, Drew comes behind me, so close I can feel his breath on my neck  (which is weird considering he’s about 6’5” and  I’m about 5’6”). He flirts with me (funny how dreams cause age differences to disappear), and while I find him attractive, he seems too intense for me. Jonathan appears to be more laid-back, and I find myself not wanting to invite Drew’s attentions, though I’m flattered by them.

We move to what appears to be a future kitchen and somebody mentions that the Scott brothers’ father will be coming shortly, so I help out in the kitchen. Drew appears to soften his intensity and I wonder if I might be attracted to him now too. Maybe I should give him a chance (laughing here).

Post note for those of you who haven’t heard of The Property Brothers: Jonathan Silver Scott and Drew Scott are identical twins born April 28, 1978. Drew Scott finds homes for prospective buyers while Jonathan renovates them. I wrote a comedic blog post about the show earlier this month: Cruelest TV Show EVER

My X’s Worst Nightmare

Before you read the following dream, I want you to imagine yourself and one of your ex-husbands/wives or boyfriends/girlfriends, somebody with whom you would never, repeat never, engage in a relationship again – ever. OK, read on.

My youngest daughter had the following dream: 

Her older sister looked at a home next door to where my X and I used to live during our marriage and where my X continued to live years after our divorce. My older daughter considered moving there.

When they pulled up, though, they noticed lots of bridal mannequins in the driveway, all of which were replicas of me when I was younger!

For obvious reasons, I thought this dream was hilarious. Just imagining my X walking out to see his driveway lined with mannequin replicas of me when we first met prompted me to ask my daughter's permission to post her dream. I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed reading her text telling me about it.

As always, thank you for visiting!