I have very vivid dreams; a lot of the time my dreams are like movies in my head where I’m not represented in them at all, and there’s no deeper meaning. I can tell the ‘mouthfeel’ of these dreams are different. I watch fictional characters react to situations and I wake up thinking ‘damn that would make a great story’. I’ve even tried to write those stories, but there’s never enough meat to flesh them out.

Other times my dreams have very overt references to my life. The kinds of dreams you wake up from and know exactly what they mean, why those themes would have been on your mind, and what (if anything) you’re supposed to take from them.

Then there are others with meanings that are older, deeper, harder to pick apart. Recurring themes that keep popping up in my head; my brain’s way of communicating the issues I struggle with chronically.

One recurring theme I have is around houses and possessions left behind. For example:

• I will dream I left behind an apartment in the States with a lot of stuff in it (I actually did leave things behind when I moved, and have no idea what happened to it all or even what exactly I left behind), or I dream I am in the US trying to locate or gain access to the apartment I had when I was there last.
• I enter a building where I used to rent a room and suddenly can’t remember if I got all my stuff when I left, but can’t find which room I used to have so I can check. Or I’ll remember that I DID leave stuff behind, and gain access to the room, but the room will be empty.
• I’m at my parents’ house which has a granny flat or large garage where my stuff is stored. Sometimes there’s urgency because they’re moving / have moved out of the house. If I go in the granny flat/garage, it’s either too dark to see what’s in all the boxes, or I can see it but it’s all so jumbled up that my mind can’t really process the actual things in the room.
• I’m renting a new house, when suddenly I realise I still have a lot of stuff at the old house that never got moved across. Or I have access to an old house that I used to rent, and I go there but it’s empty and everything’s different.
• I’m renting an old house that is literally falling down around me (ceiling caving in, walls with huge cracks in them, water damage and flooding, etc). This is slightly different in that there’s no element of owning material things, but I still include it in my ‘house’ dreams.

In most of these dreams there’s a sense of things that have been left behind but not a clear sense of what those things actually are, so no real way to tell if I’ve lost something valuable or not. And it all revolves around housing, and usually family. Houses in dreams often represent your ‘self’ or how you view yourself, so to me these dreams are about how unresolved issues from my past impact my current sense of self or areas where elements of my past are holding me back.

A therapist would have a field day with me, haha.