Do Recurring Dreams Have to be Nightmares?

Zombie movies freak me out. I sometimes have zombie nightmares, and sometimes a zombie will gratuitously appear in an otherwise zombie free dream. I watched a zombie movie the other day, “Land of the Dead” or some such thing where people lived in a city where zombies were excluded, partly by a river. But then zombies figured out how to wade and got into the city and started noshing on the living. I had a zombie nightmare that night.

I hate zombies. They make no sense at all. How do they digest the flesh of the living while they are decomposing? Do they poop and pee? Why are none of their organs vital except for their brains?

I have another recurring dream theme. I have a house that turns out to have multiple basement floors with lots of luxurious amenities but lots of water damage and plumbing problems. Sometimes, the bottom floor turns out to be a warehouse. In exploring the house, I will be delighted to discover an indoor swimming pool but disappointed because it has a big crack in it and the filter doesn’t work. That kind of thing.

I also find myself in the same dream city which has a confusing transit system, and I need to get to the airport across town. I know the city well since in my dreams it seems that I used to live there in a dense neighborhood where the topography matches the farm I grew up on. I never get to the airport on time.

I sometimes find myself at a weird theme park that is part public aquarium and part amusement park. Another recurring dream has me trying to make my way through a building only to find that there are no exits and that I am hopelessly disoriented. In another, I live in a dormitory where the bathrooms are disgustingly filthy and unusable.

In the worst recurring nightmare, I find myself in a university of some sort, about three quarters of the way through the semester, but for some reason I haven’t attended several of my classes and haven’t done any work in the others. I am going to flunk, and I am desperate to find a way to get out of my situation. I have to beg the faculty for a reprieve, pleading amnesia, but the faculty finds this implausible. I am screwed.

I have never really tried to get to the bottom of why I have the same or similar dreams over and over again. I reckon I am afraid of what they might mean about my innermost self. I don’t have any idea how to interpret dreams. I just wish I would stop having them.

When I was kid and up until my twenties, I had a recurring nightmare in which I found that I could fly by flapping my arms. I fly around gleefully for a while but tire and look to land. But I can’t land because the ground is completely covered with snakes. I have to rest on the branch of a particular dogwood tree that my grandfather had planted by one of the tractor trails. The snakes start climbing the tree, and I wake up. That one stopped a long time ago.

In childhood up until about age 8 or so, I had nightmares about a six foot tall carnivorous hot dog who lived in a cave and who ate humans in revenge for all the wieners they had eaten. I attribute this to my mother’s tactic of using ventriloquism to make my food talk in order to get me to eat it. I was a very picky eater as child, and I found the talking food disturbing instead of enticing.

In my preschool days, I had frequent nightmares about a demon whom I called “The Blasted Thing”. He lived in a tree most of the time or under the bed, and he would try to eat me. As long as I was entirely under the covers, however, I was entirely protected. I would also screw up my face into what I reckoned was a monstrous appearance so that any monsters who came by would mistake me for one of their own and pass me by.