Themes in Dreams

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Yes on dreaming city scapes. Sometimes real cities, sometimes real + fantasy, and sometimes complete fantasy.

I often revisit the same cities. Like I have this one city where almost all the houses are works of art, giant artistically designed human heads that are houses for instance, and they have personalities and some speak. The different houses are 'drawn' in different art styles and the area across the river that runs through the city I know is dangerous, with lots of bad houses and graves and mausoleums between the houses - who are usually more Goya and Geiger, unlike the other side. Safe side houses who tend to be more Dali, Romantics and various ethnic styles. It's pretty similar every time I go there, though what I'm doing there varies from escaping the bad side to running errands to it to solve murders. Oddly there's not a lot of people in the city, and most of them don't matter very much and tend to avoid me.

That's a common theme as well, most of the cities are deserted. Either because something (often the city itself) has devoured all the people, sometimes it gets way more David Lynch with the time-line and mystery involved. When I do meet other people they're usually either family and friends and we're trying to escape together, or cannibalistic shells that have been taken over by whatever evil eliminated all the humans in the city. Sometimes they'd be undead, though rarely zombies for some reason. Sometimes they're what the city is built of, which makes escaping them a lot harder.

Any time I dream of deep water, that's not good. It means I'll wake up absolutely terrified for some reason and too scared to move for a good long while. It also usually puts me on edge for at least half a day and I have no idea why it affects me like that. Thankfully I rarely dream of it. Streams and pools are fine, oceans or being submerged in deep water just... I dunno, but I don't like deep water when I'm awake either and I'm not really sure why. A bathtub or stream I'm fine with, swimming pools or oceans I just can't enter. I think that dream thing must be specific to me though, the reaction is too strong for it to be any general thing.

Anybody else had the one where you've got to be somewhere at a certain time, and you get distracted, until you don't stand a hope in hell of making the appointment, and you keep getting lost, not knowing where the bus stop is, etc? I have.

For me it's Christmas. I almost never have them around Christmas time. But I have dreams where Christmas is coming in 1 hour, I haven't bought a single present for anyone, I keep trying to get people to come with me to help me buy presents because I don't know what to get anyone but everyone is really mad at me because I'm ruining Christmas. I used to have them a few times about school, but not so much any more. I like to think of them as my social pressure dreams, because the recurring theme seems to be to disappoint people due to some inability, and they then respond to my panic and confusion with anger or derision. Kind of like life but amped up as only a dream can be.

Interesting imagery: houses as human heads.
Maybe its really the other way around: people-as-houses. Different personalities of people in your life with differing backgrounds and personalities symbolized as differing art styles and differing archetecture. The difficulty of getting "into other people's heads".

Just a suggestion.

Haha, well the first time I went to art town as I call it was after I'd gone on to an art museum on a trip, and seen MirrorMask a few days earlier. So I blame Neil Gaiman for the weird visuals! Or possibly thank him, even when that one goes all nightmare on me it's still a such a uniquely visual place it minimizes the fear.

Although when you mention it like that, I guess we do anthropomorphize houses just as we sometimes do cars, or other inanimate objects. After all people talk about a house having a soul, or a good vibe or that it looks happy. It's certainly another thing to I'll try to explore there if I should manage to lucid dream (I'm not nearly as good as that as I used to be sadly).