Do Android Cats dream of Electric Mice?

Mostly this post is for my friend Stephanie (if she even catches it) and anyone who used to read my blog a really, really long time ago (when Stephanie and I used to work together and would sometimes chat at work or here at Snarkland about dream interpretation).

I have recurring dreams a lot. It’s not necessarily exactly, literally, the same dream; but I have… “theme dreams.” Dreams in which similar things happen each time, in a similar setting. Now, I don’t really truck with those dream interpretation books that tell you “dreaming of carrots always means [ insert random thing here about carrots ].” But I agree with something that Stephanie and I were talking about years ago, which is looking at the things you’re dreaming about and interpreting what they mean, individually, to you (rather than a general world-wide application). When you think about it, that makes sense, from a cultural standpoint – what’s important to my culture might not be important, or even matter at all, to someone halfway across the world – so why should a book tell me what [ insert symbol ] means for everyone?

So through talking things out with Stephanie, writing in my journal, and just contemplation… I know when I have a dream that I’m at the ocean and the water is rising and/or there’s a huge wave coming towards shore, that I’m feeling overwhelmed about something. I know when I dream about being in a car that I’m dreaming about the direction in which my life is going, and the person who is driving the car (be it myself or someone else) is the person who I feel has the most influence in that direction. I know when I dream about still working in a bookstore that I’m not doing the right thing for myself at the moment (as an aside, that’s not to say that “working in a bookstore” is the wrong thing – but the dreams are always about horrible customers and people knocking books off shelves and coming in before we’re open and/or refusing to leave, and nothing in the bookstore works right… it’s one of those “this job would be great if it weren’t for the fucking people” sorts of things). As another aside, I have only had, I think, one bookstore dream since opening HaldeCraft.

I know when I dream about being in a car on a flooded or collapsing bridge that the direction in which I’m going isn’t effective. I know when I dream about working in a theme park that my life is getting too crazy. I know when I dream about living in a city that’s exactly like Gainesville (but the roads are a little longer, or a little shadier, or houses are a block different than what they really are) that I’m in the right place in my life. I know when I dream about still living on the farm that there’s something bothering me that I need to examine and let go of.

But lately I’ve been dreaming about two new things… being in a rocket ship, and Victorian houses. (Not at the same time.) In the rocket-ship dreams, everything is hunky-dory until re-entry, when we can’t come back because we know there’s something wrong with the ship and it will explode and kill us all if we try to come back to Earth. And in the Victorian House dreams, there are a bunch of people living in the house, each one of them on a different floor. If I live on one of the bottom floors I am afraid of a vampire that lives on the top floor… but if I dream that I live on the top floor, I’m the vampire.

So I say to y’all — WHAT THE FUCK.

I can kind of get the rocket… going where no man, etc; I’m at an exploration stage in my life (HaldeCraft isn’t even three!) and perhaps I’m subconsciously worried that it won’t work and I’ll have to re-enter the “real” work force. But vampires? Victorian houses? The heck?