Ever since High School I’ve had recurring dreams about being overcome by water. Usually it’s tidal waves. Either they are crashing down on me and dragging me back as I try to run forward, or I know they are coming and can’t get way for some reason. There was one particularly vivid dream I had when I was in school where I couldn’t leave town to avoid the oncoming tidal wave until I found a purse to match my shoes. I have no memory of the shoes but to this day I remember exactly what the purse was supposed to look like. It was brown leather with a wooden handle was shaped like a wave.

I puzzled over the dreams for years, but once I figured it out it was painfully obvious in hindsight. When I was in school they would arrive predictably before midterms and before finals. I was either feeling overwhelmed (waves crashing over me again and again, unable to run away) or filled with a sense of impending doom (tidal waves coming but can’t escape).

The theme mostly vanished after I left school. I’ll still have them occasionally, but they’ve mostly been replaced by finding myself in a large, complex building I’m somehow in charge of. Often it’s a bookstore, although lately it’s art gallieres. As the dream progresses the building gets larger and larger and more complex until I can not cope and no one will help me. Different venue, same dream. Now when I wake up from one of these I can take one look at what’s currently going on in my life and say “yeah, I’m stressed.”

There was another series of dreams I had right around the time Katy was born where I kept forgetting her and leaving her places. Or I’d go somewhere an only realize later I’d left her home by herself. These didn’t require any particular powers of deduction on my part to figure out. I bet lots of new mothers have nightmares like that.

I’ve had a few “what the heck was THAT” dreams, but I can’t recall any of them at the moment.

Pam

In traditional dream interpretation, giving birth to a daughter is an omen of happiness/health or a symbol of creativity or a fresh start of some kind. Maybe I’ll be birthing some new songs soon. I hope.

Not sure about the second half of the dream, but it all felt positive.

This perfect little girl baby arrives in your dreams… was this before or after I completely dumped on you about the horrors of raising a teenage daughter? Think there could be a connection?

I often dream of being pregnant. I categorically do NOT want any more children. But I was never pregnant. It’s an entire experience I missed. I never got to cross it off my bucket list. So it’s an unresolved issue that’s going to stay unresolved, and it bubbles up from time to time. I know you wanted a little girl at one time. For you, this is the issue that will stay unresolved. Even though you don’t want more children, you never got to cross “raising a girl” off your list and wonder what it would have been like for you (as opposed to me) when the reality of it is thrust in your face, as I did to you last week.

At the other end of the spectrum we have Alan. I think it’s reasonable to assume that Kanji, complex mathmatical symbols and games all represent symbols of who Alan is. This whole tableau with Alan in friendly interaction with friends and with you, are a powerful symbol of your success as a parent. You’ve navigated the waters of parenting a teen, through some extremely difficult times, and emerged triumphant on the other end. You have before you a healthy, happy adult child engaged in a very positive way both with you and the world around him.

That the two halves of the dream are related is obvious, since they both have to do with parenting, but the nature of that relationship is harder to define. Perhaps this tableau at the end is a representation of how you think it would have worked out if you had raised that daughter. In the dream you had to play a mysterious, unfamiliar game and you were unsure of the rules, but you played and your instincts led you to get by, if not perfectly, at least well enough to work out just fine. You believe that even if you faced challenges, as I’m a facing right now, you would have risen to the occasion and your daughter would turn out well, just as Alan did.

Of course, A lot of interpreting dreams depends on how the dream made you FEEL. How did you feel during the dream? How did you feel when you awoke?

Pam