Recurring dreams dictionary?

One of my fluffy hobbies is interpreting my dreams and other people’s dreams. Mainly mine, of course, because I’m the one having them, eh?

It seems like there is certainly a common language of dreams across individuals. For instance, it has been a weird relief to learn that other grad students have had the full spectrum of class and exam-related dreams. Projects due and we have no idea how to do them, papers that should have been written weeks ago . . . You get the idea. They still haunt us years later.

In particular, anxiety dreams are so common it is amazing. I mean, the fact that “my teeth are falling out” is common dream strikes me as amazing.

But I feel like within the common themed dreams that each person has an individual vernacular. Repeating dreams that are specific and utilized by the subconscious to tell their owner something about what they are feeling but perhaps not confronting. Here are some of my common ones:

1. Tornadoes (things that are out of my control).
2. Spiders climbing around all the walls (I get this sometimes when I sleep in a new place).
3. The incredible shrinking pet. In this one, I have a pet that gets smaller and smaller as the dream goes on, as though they are regressing back into embryonic form. They become so tiny and slimy and raw that I inevitably squish them or injure them beyond help. (I have become fixated on the details of something).

Last night I had what feels like only the second time I’ve had this particular dream. A new bit of lingo perhaps? I dreamt that I was pregnant and in late term. Like the last time I had this dream, I couldn’t recall the months leading up to this. A lot like my wedding dreams where it’s the day of the wedding and I can’t remember anything leading up to it. I spend a lot of the dream holding my belly and pushing the baby to be head-down so that it will not breach. Even after waking up, that feeling of pushing and wiggling is still with me, and it does kindof creep me out a bit, but in the dream it didn’t. I keep waiting around it to be time to go to the hospital, but it just never happens. I feel happy but impatient.

Suddenly the baby is already in a crib and I’m trying to figure out what to tell everyone at work, and my parents. I can’t just pretend it didn’t happen, although somehow I’ve hidden this fact for months. I decide I’ll put the baby up for adoption. I walk over to the crib and a toddler hops up and says “I’m four years old!” The toddler is aging before my eyes, becoming an adolescent. She dances around and I feel like I have no control over it.

Reading online, the pregnancy and belly metaphors come across as signs of potential things being released soon. Also of doing a lot of soul-searching and general looking inward. As for the magical fast-aging baby. . . . I think that’s my grad school career. It is an odd detail that the baby is immediately 4 years old (the number of years I’ve been in grad school). Could reflect that feeling that my years of grad school have already gotten away from me, and suddenly I’m left with this big responsibility to take care of it and use it to get a real job. Oh well, weird stuff that makes my tummy feel quite weird. . . .