Progressive Dreams or Stand-Alone Acts?

[Kosjitov]

This is fairly long. Consider yourself warned

I have had the same/similar dream on multiple occassions, more than four times in the last 6 months; I call it recurring, since certain core features stay the same and others mutate as if different paths are taken. Unfortunately, because certain aspects stay the same I find it nearly impossible to sort out whether they are all connected and should be read as one progressive dream, taken individually like stand-alones, or some omitted altogether- hence why I'm seeking second opinions

Some details to note:

- I once worked in a pet store for a friend of the family.
- The pet store is now closed and has become a nail salon.
- I/my family have owned multiple cockatiels in the past, but my most recent was 1 white cockatiel, which I have left with my ex in another state. I still consider it "my" bird. She is sound in health but does not have a mate.
- The hamster... could be my first hamster, Cindy. She got hurt after having escaped from her cage and died soon after, though she was smaller than the one I saw and did not have children.

++++++++++++++

1st Dream:

I have entered the old pet store, though it has long since been closed and boarded up. The old owners are still dealing with things here though they don't own the property. I go downstairs and retrieve the key and open the door to where the pets were kept. Everything is covered in cobwebs. I go to the old rat cage and begin to clean it out- but there I find "pinkies", fresh babies, in all the feces and sawdusty chips. I begin to clean it out and start to look for more signs of life in cages that are otherwise piled to the brim with old disgusting chips and feces and find others.

2nd Dream:

The dream above repeats, exactly the same, except that the cage has hamsters and the babies are past the pinkie stage.

3rd:

I return to the pet store and am cleaning the old bird cage room. I find two white cockatiels somehow alive, foraging in the old chips. They have babies. I proceed to clean the cage and move everyone to a new home with proper food. The parents refuse to return to the babies and they die.

4th:

The old cage is in my parent's old house, in my room on the floor. I find the same pair of cockatiels and again proceed to clean the cage, but this time I do not move the children. Somehow in the process of my cleaning, I squish them.

5th:

There is a flood and a sea serpent is visible under the water, as well as when its head emerges. I see it and do not want to go near the water. A coworker says there is a cat in the water. It's somehow not breaking the surface. I think it is dead. She does not and proceeds to go out and try to rescue it but cannot. I swim out, grab her, and grab the cat. When I get to shore with both of them, the cat is suddenly a white cockatiel. It caughs out water and I realize it is missing an eye on the right side of the head. I try to take it inside and find it room, but the two cages I have are occupied- one with a mated pair and the other one is my bird; neither cage will welcome the new bird. It continues to stay near me, by my neck. It FEELS like a cat's fur but looks like a bird and does not want to leave me, which I feel is a problem as I will have to find its owner and give it back.

(dream 5 occurred on 6/16/12. #6 happened last night, less than one month apart)
6th:

I dreamt about the same white bar cage, the same mated pair of white cockatiels. There were babies again, freshly hatched. Except this time I found them near a book case or shelf of some sort. Again, I begin to clean it and somehow injure one of the parents while moving it. The parent (I suspect it's the male) kind of winces, closes its left eye and hops away

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Short List of Details I've Noticed:

- The animals always have white about them, except for the hamster which had a white belly only, but a grey top with a black streak down the back
- There is always a situation that needs fixing
- There is an aura of compulsion rather than choice. I never feel like I have "any other choice" but to clean the cage, or like when my coworker was in danger to go out and help
- I only *know* my bird is involved in dream #5.

My questions:

Should this sequence be treated as a progression or each dream is a stand alone?

Do you believe every dream I've listed here is connected? And if not, which would you remove from the list for analysis?

How would you interpret what you've chosen to include from my list of dreams?

[frac_ture]

Fascinating stuff, Kosjitov! Here are my uncensored first impressions:

I see the dreams as neither progression nor series of different stand-alones...I see them as variations on the same message. The specific details vary each time (a little or a lot), but the gist is the same in each one.

The dreams all seem to unfold with the following core underpinnings:

1) You come upon fragile/young life that's been forgotten/left behind/submerged/buried.
2) You feel compelled to attempt to help.
3) You fear or even witness the possibility that due to the extreme vulnerability of the life in question, your intervention itself is a source of potential danger to it, and can cause injury or death (in other words, you helping might be just as perilous to the recipient of your help as you not helping...).
4) These dramas play out in environments that are either drawn from your own past (the pet store, your parents' old house) or are archetypal (the waters of a flood).

The sea serpent dream would seem to share the least amount of commonality with the others, but I think even that one adheres to the bullet points I just listed.

So what do the dreams mean...?

My first and fairly immediate thought was that somewhere in your mind is the notion that there was something in your life that you "left for dead" or feared had died -- maybe you arrived at this conclusion yourself (ie., that the something was dead), or maybe someone(s) else convinced you that this was so. This something may have been important to you or intrigued you, too. It could have been a possible relationship, a field of study, a line of work, a hobby, or something else entirely, I don't know...but my thought was that you gave it up and mostly moved on, but a part of you never forgot about it or let go of it, and is, in fact, holding forth this dream every so often to remind you that this something is still there, still hanging on despite having been buried/submerged and left to fend for itself. I further would guess that you have possible resistance to going after this something at this point, whether due to fear of failure or fear of success (some of us have this!), and that's why you feel you're being compelled to help in the dreams, rather than pitching in freely because you want to do so.

I'd suggest casting about for any ideas as to whether you have some "something" that fits what I just said -- something you once were drawn to, but which you gave up on for whatever reason(s) -- and see if a part of you is still refusing to let go of that something...then try to figure out why, and whether returning to that something is a pathway truly doomed to failure, or whether that's just some other part of you trying to talk yourself out of even trying.

And please take all of the above with a nice, big grain of salt: I've hardly gotten out of bed yet, and am under-caffeinated, so this was all very "from the hip," and possibly way off the mark. Thanks for sharing, though! I very, very rarely have recurring dreams, myself, so I'm always interested when other people share theirs...

[tarotbear]

Frac_ture said it much more succinctly than I can, but I agree that this is not a progressive dream at all, but a dream that presents itself as 'variations on a theme.'

[frac_ture]

Originally Posted by tarotbear

Frac_ture said it much more succinctly than I can, but I agree that this is not a progressive dream at all, but a dream that presents itself as 'variations on a theme.'

Thanks, tarotbear! It's so rare for me to to have something that I've written -- be it a message board post, an e-mail, a work of fiction -- be deemed succinct! I'm cool in conversation, but in text, I'm a bit of a windbag...

Cool to see that you agree that the dreams seem like variations on a theme, though, as you put it. I'm curious to see if any of what I wrote earlier resonates at all with Kosjitov.

[Kosjitov]

I wanted to sit on your reply and think about it, frac_ture, as you had quite a bit to say and to a point ALL OF IT applies. The problem comes from trying to filter it down to "what could it honestly be?"

My original instincts were somewhat in line with you, though I did feel it was progressive as things began to deteriorate and start to involve death. Movement from discovery to intervention to harm. BUT, as time went on, I started to feel the repetitive theme more and more.

I'd like to rephrase on the compulsion. The truest form of it happens in the serpent dream. In the others it's like there isn't a choice, there's only one road to take, like a train on a track. It's preset and you aren't in control, you just watch as your body works.

What it probably isn't:

Hobbies- I had given up on two of my hobbies, both writing and drawing, but have since returned to them. Both are showing amounts of improvement in different ways. This happened more than a month ago, so I don't believe it could qualify.

What it could be:

Work - This of course is a constant problem, I've walked away from jobs that I did not feel were right for me, though the one I'm currently at took a turn for the worse.

Friends - An old flame of mine, my first, whom I've kept in somewhat contact with has sort of... dropped off the face of the earth. There's a few other "friends" who I've known online for years that have done the same and decided not to chase after them. Friendships are both ways but these have been very one sided and I've pretty much given up on them.

Something I thought of:

House - Self sufficiency in spite of lack of freedom and a constant need to clean reminds me of my living situation. I constantly feel like I'm stuck in a one room section of the house I live in. It's falling apart around my ears due to its age and every so often you have shelves falling in the middle of the night, wires/electrical problems shorting out in the house, leaky pipes, toilets that don't work, ect... =\ Moreso, the atmosphere is poisonous/draining. In order to actually have peace and quiet to do my artwork, I went to my job 6 hours early just to sit and get work done. It was the best thing I've drawn to date, according to a friend of mine.

Appreciate the help. I still have more to consider but at least I can settle on a few directions.

[Mulya]

Each time you are approaching an important decision you want to make a commitment and go from start to finish. Each time somewhere in a process for different reasons your lose interest in this and right after that things start to fall apart.

[frac_ture]

Hi, Kosjitov -- I'm sorry I haven't responded sooner to your own response -- super-busy with stuff here this week, and not so much parked at the computer...

I hear all that you said about the various possibilities (that is, which things in your life might correspond to the elements in your series of dreams), and obviously, it will ultimately have to be you who determines what fits properly when interpreting...but I have to say that from everything you wrote, I feel like it's your hobbies that might be represented by the various frail little creatures you keep coming upon in these dreams!

I do realize that the dreams continued on even after you picked up your writing and drawing again (and congratulations to you on both counts there!), but I do wonder if maybe the dreams mean that you still harbor some inner doubts about maybe being unable to properly nurture and sustain your talents sufficiently such that they'll be able to "survive" and flourish...? Maybe some deep part of you fears that they really are fragile, and while they might have finally perished if neglected for much longer, your trying to "resuscitate" or "resurrect" them now could prove equally damaging to them (like, if, for instance, you start to produce work and then feel it's inadequate, that might deliver hits to your spirit and morale -- the old, "Until I know for sure that something definitely won't work, I can at least go on holding out vague hope that maybe, in theory, it *could* work...").

I also noticed something else, which maybe does show more sense of progression than I'd seen the first time around: the first two dreams only reveal that you came upon fragile life...but the concept of you harming or endangering it by intervening didn't appear until the third dream. Then, in the fifth and sixth dreams, you don't kill that life, which had happened in two dreams in a row, but you now damage it...and there's the interesting bit about the eyes of the creatures involved being missing or damaged (sort of forced to close in the sixth dream). So here's another amateur guess -- would it fit the actual timeline of your life to say that the first two dreams happened during a period in which you first thought about your previous attempts at writing and drawing (there they are, little sparks of tiny life among the old matter), the second two occurred when you began to seriously consider returning to those pursuits (part of you fears that you might realize beyond doubt that you can't make a go of it at these art forms...translating as you killing the poor little creatures you're trying to save), and the final two -- from the sound of what you said about timing, including calendar dates -- came about after you'd started writing and drawing again. I think that could account for why the fifth dream (the sea serpent one) is so different from the ones that preceded it (ie., working on your crafts was no longer speculative -- you'd actually started), and it might show why the creatures in those last two dreams don't end up dead, but rather damaged -- in other words, your early efforts at writing and drawing soothed your fears somewhat, as you started to relax a bit and feel that you do have talent and things to say, but maybe you still worry that you might not have the overall chops to pull off the work you envision (that's why the creatures' eyes are taking hits in the last two dreams: literal/symbolic interpretation of the notion of impaired or insufficient vision)...

I don't think any of the other possibilities you listed fits as tightly with at least my own take on your dreams (which is just that: my own individual, very subjective take, and by no means The One True And Right Interpretation!). What keeps jumping out at me is the core dilemma of happening upon fragile life, and realizing that it might or probably will perish without your help, but also that your help will also endanger that life, just because it's *so* very vulnerable -- even touching it gently could harm it. I feel that this pattern fits your hobbies like a glove, but the other possibilities less so, that's all.

Just some follow-up thoughts. Meanwhile...since the last few posts, have you had another one of these dreams...? I was wondering if talking about them might either encourage more, or instead might frighten them away...

[Kosjitov]

Good day, frac_ture. I just wanted to let you know I have read your post. I will try to reply after work today if I can.

[frac_ture]

Originally Posted by Kosjitov

Good day, frac_ture. I just wanted to let you know I have read your post. I will try to reply after work today if I can.

Hi, Kosjitov -- thanks so much for the post! No rush at all -- please mull at your own pace. I had just been thinking about your dreams again, and upon re-reading, had those additional ideas. Even if they're way off-base, though, I hope considering them was an interesting exercise, at least... And I do think a basic truth is that having a series of such similar dreams means that a part of you has something to say to the rest of you, and it considers the message to be pretty important!

[Kosjitov]

As promised, I return!

Frac_ture, I do try to keep some time in between the posts. I'd like to think I'm level headed for the most part and I attempt to digest the information and give it a fair chance to sink in and rethink my original reactions.

Unfortunately, I'm not thinking that it's my art or writing. I honestly wish I could pin it on that but I'm content and confident in my writing. If the dreams had ended... oh, two or three months ago, I'd be more willing to agree with this due to the case of writer's block I'd had. But in light of a REALLY good burst of creative energy I have a hard time wrapping my head around it. BOTH talents have seen some serious productivity, which actually BUILT my self esteem a bit in the last weeks.

I'm still trying to see if it fits OTHER hobbies of mine and one did come up. It may possibly my gaming past, which I've had other dreams about- though they have different formats than THESE that I've listed. I used to be an addict to one of the popular games but quit cold turkey. There was ALOT of resentment directed at what it did to my life, and the people that I dealt with-- and was part of why I ignored my hobbies. Every time I dream about it, I wake up angry about the dream and it's subject matter. It's actually a forbidden topic amongst my friends; when they talk about it, it makes me really f***ing angry. I've thought about going back and then inevitably flare up at myself for that kind of weak thinking and go back to ignoring it's existence.

Food for thought.

And no, no other dreams about pets and cleaning cages