February 17th, 2008
Years ago I started having a recurring dream. Not an exact dream, but a recurring theme that kept popping up. I would be driving, but when I hit my brakes they didn’t work. It’s not as though the brake lines were cut, but more like they didn’t totally finish the job. I would slam them down but only slow down without coming to a complete stop. It was as if I was driving on ice and I kept drifting even when my wheels weren’t moving, although there was no ice to be found. It was an unpleasant feeling and therefore an unpleasant dream. It happened every couple months or so, which was manageable even if it was annoying.
But then it started happening more frequently. The dreams would come only a month apart, and then only a week. At one point I had this dream three times in a single week. It was starting to really bother me and stress me out a bit. So I began reading about thoughts and theories on dreaming and recurring dreams. This wasn’t unfamiliar territory for me, as I’ve had a strong interest in learning about dreams and lucid dreaming for years. But this was the first time in my life that I had experienced a recurring dream whose persistence began affecting my waking life, forcing me to take dream interpretation theories more seriously.
Although no one fully understands the meanings and implications of our dreams, many psychologists and scientists agree that they contain symbolic representations from our unconscious. In this way, they can often include personal meaning from a place buried deep within us that uses dreaming as a way to communicate with our waking mind. While there are some universal “archetypes” in theory, the true meaning of a dream is best left to the dreamer and not a dream dictionary.
With this in mind, I decided that the next time I had the dream I would write down everything that popped into my head immediately after waking, when the details were fresh in my mind. Maybe then it would reveal something to me.
