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Dream a little dream of me.

2009-12-14 - 4:16 p.m.

Why do themes recur in our dreams over and over again? When I dream about getting my hair cut I usually go out and do it because I figure that if it�s been in my subconscious enough that it pops up in my slumber, I must want to do it. When I have to pee I often dream about endlessly searching for a bathroom � there�s no mystery behind that one. But what about things I don�t really want to do or have?

I�m not sure when it started, but for a good while now I�ve dreamt almost weekly that I�m moving back to Waterloo to pursue my Ph.D. at the University of Waterloo. Do I want to get my Ph.D.? Nope. I mean, it would be cool to be called �Doctor�, but it�s not worth four years of my life to me, forget the fact that it would financially ruin us to go without my salary for that long. I�ve said to more than one person who asked if I wanted to do it when I finished my M.Sc. (which would have been the time to do it, really), that if I ever got a Ph.D. it would be as an honorary degree. And yet there I am, house hunting in Waterloo, looking for an advisor to study under, or orienting myself on campus once again.

Likewise, it�s been a recurring theme, off and on, that the dream Shawna has elected to return to high school to do OAC (grade 13) calculus in her spare time, never mind that grade 13 doesn�t even exist anymore. I totally know the reason for this though; I missed an 80 average by one stinking percentage point in my top six OAC courses (yep, 79.83%) and calculus in particular rankles because we had a teacher other than our regular one mark our exams and, like most of my classmates, my mark in that course plunged; in my case from an 84 going into the final exam to something in the 60s. Grr. The irony is that if I�d known that I was going to miss the 80 average by only one mark I could have easily have called in a favour and had a teacher give me an extra percent; I taught part of his class for him when he fell seriously ill for about a month for pete�s sake. But I digress�

Nor is it unusual for me to dream about a particular ex-boyfriend. Yes, we were very serious and yes, I almost married him, but do I want to still be with him? No. In fact, I strongly suspect that if we had gotten married I�d be a divorced woman by now. It was with him that I learned the lesson that loving someone is not enough when you�re just incompatible on a basic level. Our 3 years together were filled with misery and angst and clinging together against it, without twigging to the fact that being together probably generated a good 80% of it (the other 20% could probably be blamed on the fact that we were both in university programs we didn�t like but were determined to see through to the bitter end).

I�ll be honest here: I think this one is because of guilt. I�m not going into details but let�s just say that things blew up spectacularly in the end and he got really hurt by me, and no matter the fact that we worked on getting past it and, in fact are still �Facebook friends� 10 years later, I cannot shake the fact that I am happily married to wonderful man with whom I have two beautiful kids, while the ex still hasn�t settled down and started a family. This despite the fact that we both wanted kids over a decade ago. Did being with me make him �gun-shy�? Did I break him?

So what about you? Are there any recurring themes to your dreams? If so, do you know where they come from? Are they things you want? Things you wish you could do over differently? What lurks in your subconscious until night falls?

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