recurring dreams

my dream posting from the other day prompted an email exchange with my cousin about all kinds of dreams. we got on the subject of recurring dreams.  as i said in the previous posting, i have more of a recurring location (that giant and partially abandoned mall) in my dreams, but there are a number of recurring dreams i've had over the years.

in high school, i played annie oakley in annie get your gun. for years afterwards (and now it's been 24 years), i have dreamed that i had to perform it again with no rehearsal...just jumping into costume and going directly onstage. it is always a bit rusty at first, but then i warm into it and do ok. "anything you can do, i can do better..." 

i've had some pageant-related dreams for years after my pageant phase as well--that as recently as in the past couple of months. they usually involve embarassment over suddenly having to wear a swimsuit and high heels in public.

apparently my recurring dreams are related to being onstage. that's a bit weird.

my cousin's dreams are work-related. she spends lots of time on cruise ships and has lots of dreams about them. like me, she also has flying-related dreams where the plane crashes (and she is as unworried about it as i am), but where she's usually in the cockpit. i'm never in the cockpit in my plane crash dreams.

she and i were both denied comic books as children on the grounds that they were a waste of time and money and had to illicitly read them at other people's houses. she still has dreams about that. i must have less guilt over it, as that topic doesn't show up in my dreams.

talking to her made me remember that i used to have a recurring dream of losing my teeth during college and usually i was somewhere with her father, my uncle red, at the time. he was a veterinarian, not a dentist, so i'm not sure what sense that made, but then, dreams don't always make sense.

the person who was my best friend through most of high school, but who turned on me at the end for some reason still unknown to me and called me "miss king bitch shit" while we decorated for our graduation, showed up as a recurring figure in my dreams for years. she was never a central figure in the dream, nor even someone i interacted with, she would just be there in every dream, standing somewhere on the sidelines. i got so i even looked for her. but she hasn't been there for years, so i must have gotten over it.

i have a lot of dreams where i'm precariously balancing beside some yucky water of some sort. i almost always fall into it and it's thick and sludgy and hard to trudge through, but strangely never as bad as i feared it would be. my cousin has a similar dream and thinks it's when she's not getting enough exercise. mine is no doubt that too and it simply never occurred to me! either that, or i feel i'm on the verge of a problem and that it won't be as bad as i fear.

in any case, it's fascinating thinking about dreams and what they mean. i'm still convinced i'm living a parallel life over there.