Recurring dream

Back when I was studying in my youth (long ago now, *sigh*) on Monday mornings, Triple J radio used to have Quentin Watts on to do dream interpretation. People would phone in with their dreams and she would interpret them. It was fascinating to hear dreams interpreted and to hear what the things you encountered in dreams were symbols of.

Teeth falling out dream? That’s a sign that you’re lying. Maybe not out and out lying to someone, but maybe there’s something in your life that you’re lying to yourself about.

Water dreams? Water represents the emotions, so if you’re drowning or in rough seas, you’re going through an emotionally turbulent time.

Pregnancy dream? You may not be dreaming about having a baby (although you could be!) but you could be dreaming about starting a new project, something big and new that you will need to devote a lot of energy to.

These days I dream a lot about travel. I’ve been to Istanbul in my dreams a few times but dream-Istanbul is not a lot like real-Istanbul. The other night I was in Moscow trying to take the metro but the metro was also a cable car which wasn’t working because it was so windy. But I don’t see these dreams as symbolic dreams, more as a form of somnolescent entertainment. Message dreams I think you know are message dreams.

There are a couple of dreams I have regularly, and there was one in particular I always woke up angry and frustrated by.

In this dream, I was approached by someone from my high school. They found out there was an error in the grading of one of my year 10 exam papers, and because of that, I shouldn’t have got the year 10 results that I did. And because the results I got were wrong, I shouldn’t have been eligible to study the subjects for years 11 and 12 that I did. And if I shouldn’t have taken those subjects, then I shouldn’t have got the high school certificate results I got, and I shouldn’t have got into the university course I did.

And of course, the rest of my life since then would have been very, very different.

The way they proposed to fix this was to send me back to re-do year 10 again, and then I could go on to repeat years 11 and 12. They were proposing that I quit my job and go back to high school.

And so I would find myself back in a classroom in my high school, a grown up amongst teenagers, angry and upset that my whole life since year 10 had been built on wrong assumptions and that had all been taken away from me.

I had this dream several times over a period of years, until one day, when the person from my school came to take me out of my adult life and put me back in year 10, I said, “No.”

“No, I’m not going. This wasn’t my error, it was yours, and it’s not my responsibility to fix it, it’s yours. I don’t care what you do to fix it, but you have to fix it, because I am not going back.” I remember having a giddy feeling of release as I said this.

And I never had that dream again.

I wished I’d paid attention to what was going on in my life at the times I was having this dream – there must have been something triggering my subconscious to try to make some kind of life reset.

But I also wonder why my subconscious picked something as specific as an exam in Year 10 – what happened in that year for my subconscious to pick that place as the best place to go back to?

I guess I’ll never know now.

Now I just have to get rid of that dream where there’s a house on fire and I have no voice to shout for help.