Tidal waves, evil houses and kinky sex games…

Nothing is as revealing of the darkest recesses of a persons psyche than their dreams and here I guess I’m going to be brave (or incredibly stupid) and expose some of my recesses.

Recurring dreams in particular serve to give us a message about something important – they are powerful and won’t go away. The frequent repetition of these dreams force us to pay attention and confront the dream which is trying to tell us something. In my experience, these dreams aren’t usually very happy or comfortable dreams.

I have a whole catalogue of dreams with recurring themes. One of these is about waves. Either tidal waves, or really big and wild surf. These dreams terrify me every single time. I’m always at a beach, obviously. I might be swimming in the surf, I may be on the sand, or I may be on a promenade. Usually they are the beaches of the eastern suburbs of Sydney, like Bondi, Tamarama and Bronte – my old stomping grounds. Or random beaches that kind of look like one of those three. The tide comes in fast and the surf is wild, and growing higher, and higher. The surf comes all the way up to the cement walls and cliffs and keeps getting bigger and higher and wilder. If I’m on the beach, the surf will come all the way up to the wall and there is no escape. If I’m not on the beach the surf will get so big it comes over the top of the promenade/road/cliff and slams down on me. I always wake up just before the water envelops me. I wake up in total fear.

A variation of this dream is dreams about flooding. I’ll need to get from point A to point B but there is a great big flood inbetween the two points and the only way is to try and drive, or walk, through it over a bridge which is covered in water, and there is no way of knowing how deep it is. In fact, a lot of times I can’t even see where the bridge is in parts. I’m terrified that I’ll be swept over the edge. I am terrified of drowning in all of these dreams. Absolutely pants-wetting terrified. Thankfully I haven’t had one of these water-overcoming-me dreams for a long while.

Some particularly horrifying dreams I’ve been having since I’ve been a teenager is about houses. When I was younger it was more about haunted houses. Now as a mature adult these houses, or more specifically rooms within the houses, are more evil than haunted. In these dreams I’m in a house, obviously. Usually a house I’m going to live in. Years ago it used to be that the whole house would be run down, rickety beyond belief, ugly as hell, built like a rabbit warren with unstable wooden stairways leading here there and everywhere, secret rooms, scary rooms. Such scary scary rooms. This progressed to it being more about particular rooms than the overall house (always different houses). Never the same dream over and again but the recurring theme. The rooms … the floor would be uneven, sloping. The rooms would be dark, with a feeling of blackness, oppression and unimaginable evil. They would be shabby and filthy. These particular rooms, which I want badly to stay out of, are bedrooms. No … you don’t want to go in there. They are dark, dank and dangerous. Fearsome rooms. Always bedrooms. I am scared of these rooms, and I don’t even want to walk past them with their doors closed. It used to be that in these dreams I’d have to spend time in one of these rooms, and the sense of impending doom was thick. The tension was palpable. Brrr. Something was going to get me. The latest batch of these dreams … I haven’t had to, I just prefer to stay right out of them. Lately, if I have these dreams which thankfully isn’t TOO often anymore, there are beautiful parts of the house as well which I try to get too, but am usually distracted somehow. More recently, I am very much more comfortable in these houses and looking forward with excitement to spending time in the beautiful parts of the house.

In fact, these dreams have another ‘morphed’ version too. Where I’d be in a building, a great big office building or a hospital – these ones are creepy because I get lost in them, hallways after hallways and elevators and dark stairways. And someone is chasing me, after me, with a gun. It’s not me in particular they are after but everyone in the building. He is going to kill me if he finds me.

Other recurring themes within dreams but way less scary ones … shopping. This is the most frustrating theme of all. I’ll be in a shop, shopping for clothes usually, I am being fussy and looking for something but I never find what I get and I spend ages shopping, but never get to buy anything as I never find exactly what I want. I always wake up beforehand. Except my last dream of these types – I did find what I wanted — a groovy sixties corduroy coat lol! But I didn’t have the money with me so I had to come back later to pick it up (but of course I woke up before I got my coat *sigh*).

Another one, much weirder, happier, and I’ve had these ones since I was a little kid, is my version of a flying dream. I don’t fly, but I am able to run about a foot above ground, or maybe just a few inches without my feet ever touching the ground. It’s such a cool feeling. This feeling is SO real that I often have woken up thinking I can actually do it lol!!

So. There’s a big peek into my psyche. Broadly speaking water/waves is supposed to be about emotions. And the house – self and rooms – aspects of self. Supposedly. That tells you a lot doesn’t it. But if you want something really whacky to try and interpret check this next one out. It’s a doozy.

A long time ago I had a dream of a type I have never had before, haven’t had since, and I pray to Almighty God, Buddha, Krishna, Allah, The Universe, whoever … that I never have again. It was during a particular time in my life which was one of my lowest, when I was going through a tremendous amount of emotional and mental turmoil.

I was in a rural area. I was with my boyfriend … a nameless, faceless somebody, at a large block of land, an acreage, that his parents had bought. It sloped downwards from the road, long dry native grasses and at the bottom of the slope, trees, eucalypts of course this being the Australian bush. Within these trees was parked a caravan which the boyfriend’s family was hanging around.

My boyfriend and I decided to go on an exploratory walk and started walking up the paddock. In the paddock next door was a brick house. Not a huge house … just your average single story brick house. As we were walking in ‘our’ paddock, we heard lots of squealing and laughing going on. We looked over to the paddock next door and saw a strange sight. Two women and a man … the man was chasing the women. They were all, even the man who sported a black beard, wearing sexy lingerie … stockings and suspenders and the like. We looked away and smiled, pretending we hadn’t noticed. We assumed they were playing some sort of kinky sex games out there in the paddock.

Suddenly I noticed the squeals of fun turning to screams of terror. I looked over, and here was the bearded man in stockings and suspenders hacking into one of the women with an axe. My gutless faceless boyfriend took off down the hill to his family, leaving me there alone. I wanted to hide as fast as I could rather than run … I didn’t want to risk the bearded man seeing me, because if he knew that I had seen what he did … I would be killed too for sure. So I dropped to the ground and lay down in the long grass, plugged my fingers in my ears and squinched up my ears real tight.

And here’s the very weird part of the dream. All of a sudden it was so real. I felt like I lay there for hours, waiting for it to be safe. I actually felt the passage of time. I could feel my fingers in my ears and I could feel the muscles in my eyes as I squinched them. I never had such a feeling of realness in a dream before. It was, again, horrific. I lay there forever, while the bearded man hacked the two women to death. I lay there playing possum. Eventually the noise stopped … and I waited … and I heard footsteps and grass rustling around me. I knew, as I lay there pretending to be asleep, that he was standing there looking at me, watching me, with his bloody axe dangling from his hand.

He left me alive – went back to his house. And I stayed there for hours yet, waiting for him to be long gone so I could get away safely. I got up finally, and turned to look at his house. Here came the man out of his front door. He had changed into jeans and a red and black flannelette shirt. I think he had a gun. He looked over at me, and started after me. There was no way he was going to let me live as I had been a witness to his crime. I ran … ran as fast as I could toward the road, clambered through the barbed wire fence and on to the road, which was a tiny, dirt country road. I ran until I found another house, set closer to the road. It was a shack … one of the typically dirty, run down unpainted ugly and evil feeling shacks of my dreams. I ran in there to try and gain refuge. There was a fat man sitting in a chair in the middle of the room. He was slovenly and everything about me, every hair on my body, told me this wasn’t right. Nevertheless I ran to him pleading for him to save me, hide me, a murderer was after me. A beautiful wave of relief washed over me as this dirty slovenly fat man in this ugly dirty shack told me not to worry, I was safe now, and to hide behind his chair. Which I did.

Just as the bearded man walked into the shack. With a six-pack of tinnies (beer) in one hand and a gun in the other, he smiled at the man in the chair. The fat man in the chair greeted the murderer and it dawned on me, with terror, that these two were great friends, and I wasn’t safe in the slightest … oh no, far from it, not at all…