Elaborate dream last night that had some recurring themes.

As I have mentioned many times before I regularly dream and remember a lot of what happened. They say that almost everyone dreams but most people have no memory of the dream when they wake up. I don't know how a scientist could possibly come to such a conclusion other than to say "i'm a scientist and I said so!"

I do remember a lot of my dreams though and in some cases I even have control of my dreams in the way that I can wake up IRL, do whatever it is that I woke up to do and then go back to bed and rejoin the dream right where I left off.

The dream I had last night had a lot of re-occurring themes that appear in many of my dreams but overall it took a very different theme that I find kind of amusing because the major setting was something I hadn't though about in a long time.

src

We start the dream out in me living somewhere very basic. I believe that there wasn't electricity, at least at first. But then I took stock of where I was and realized that I was in "Little House on the Prairie" which if you are not my age you may have never heard of. It was a popular tv show back in the 70's and 80's based on the life of Laura Ingalls Wilder. I recently read that is was VERY loosely based on the books so what that means is that almost all of the TV show was probably not at all in the books. It was a wildly popular and very family friendly show that had a life lesson that was taught in most of the episodes and it was very Christian in nature. It was wholesome and was one of the shows that parents wouldn't mind letting their kids watch.

So I found myself in this setting and to a certain extent had my choice of which house I was going to stay in. My father was in the dream as well but even though it was my actual father and I treated him as such, it was also Michael Landon from the series. This doesn't make sense at all but that is just the way that it was.

src

I suppose Michael Landon and my actual Dad have a lot in common in that they are both brown-haired, quite tall and also kind. Another thing that they share is the the character of "Charles" played by Michael Landon and my own father were very kind people, but could become very strong and even violent if he or his family were threatened in any way.

This is a minor part of my dream but I thought I would point it out because while I did watch a lot of "Little House" 40 years ago, I haven't seen it or even though of it in decades. The houses that I could choose to live in were spartan but for whatever reason I didn't mind in the dream. The thing that I did mind that happened in the dream was one of the houses was a bed and breakfast of sorts but it was being basically attacked by insects. These insects were two of the ones that I loathe the most, cockroaches and centipedes. They were rushing towards the house in an antlike way in that they were traveling in one long line. I started out by simply brushing them away with a broom and they would die and become shells immediately after they were touched by the broom. Then some other kid who I cannot identify came out of the restaurant with a can of bug spray which of course didn't exist in the olden times scene where the dream was taking place.

src

Insects, and in particular cockroaches and centipedes are frequent visitors to my dreams and they always appear in vast numbers almost like we are under attack. The restaurant and hotel of sorts springs from past jobs in restaurants and in particular from the fact that I owned a couple of small hotels in Thailand years ago. One of the things that we were constantly battling was potential invasions from insects and one of the main ones was roaches. Customers would freak out about the presence of insects even though we were doing so much to prevent them. In a way this constant invasion kind of became an obsession of mine as I tried to combat them by any means necessary.

This is where the next part of the dream is a ridiculous but very real representation of something that really did happen in my time when I owned the hotels. If you treat an area with too many pesticides, you can bring upon a rather frightening display of exactly how many insects actually are living among you at any given time. In the dream the kid with the bug spray all of sudden started spraying it everywhere including in holes in the ground. When you do this the immense number of bugs that are living in there will frantically all come out at once and it can be a rather terrifying experience in real life.

In the dream i was in bed and all of a sudden insects were coming out from everywhere including extremely large insects that don't even exist and kind of resembled lobsters. They were fleeing the onslaught of what I thought was the excessive bug spray, but as it turns out they were actually fleeing something else that is also a recurring element of my dreams: The town was flooding.

src

When I was in college there was a flood that happened while I was attending and it was so extreme that the entire city had to be evacuated for weeks. It wasn't something that happened super fast like in my dreams, but it was still a pretty frightening time in my life and it pops up in my dreams on a regular basis. The insects are a fear of mine and so are the floods, so therefore it makes sense to me that they both appear at the same time. I have no idea why the insects became lobster-like creatures that were fleeing the flood waters towards the end.

In the next phase of the dream I had to hit the road for some reason and I think it was because the home area I started in was now destroyed. My father in the dream gave me a gun for protection on my travels but just like it is with most guns that I have ever had in my dreams, the thing barely worked. The magazine was filled with screwdriver bits instead of bullets and it was completely useless. When I went to a gun shop to get it worked on it was discovered that the stock of the weapon was extremely valuable and my fake father in the dream as well as myself were completely unaware of this. I negotiated a trade for a 9mm semi-automatic handgun which of course wouldn't have existed given the time-frame of the dream. But dreams aren't supposed to make sense are they?

It wasn't long after acquiring the functional weapon that my dream came to an end and I woke up. I guess my brain just has it out for me that the tools I acquire in dreams aren't meant to be functional and my brain "blue screened" at that point and forced me to wake up.

So what can we take away from this very strange dream. A psychologist might say the following

• According to psychologists dreaming about insects means that you are repressing emotions or an experience in your own life. I can't point out anything specific that I am repressing. I suppose it could be the uncertainty about my future here in Vietnam or the fact that I have lost interest in having a romantic partner. Maybe?

• According to science website practicalpie flooding in dreams "can be a precursor of major life changes in the offing and a sign from the universe inviting you to wash away your past and seize the opportunity for a fresh start." This once again could pertain to my uncertainty about continuing to live in Vietnam.

• I don't need a psychological reason to know why my Dad was in the dream. He was there because I haven't been overseas to visit my family in over 5 years and I feel really bad about that. The dread that I feel about delaying this trip longer is something that weighs heavily on my mind because I frequently encounter films and articles about people having great regret about not spending more time with their parents before they die. My parents are not young so I need to get my ass in gear.

• Psychologists suggest that guns appearing in dreams indicate anger, violence, and probable danger in one's life. To me that just seems like astrology predictions because it could apply to almost anyone. I have virtually no anger, violence, or probably danger in my life. Maybe the fact that the gun never works in my dreams indicate that I don't feel as though I have the correct tools in my life to do something or that the tools I have are not sufficient.

I don't know what to make of dream interpretation: To me a lot of it sounds like mumbo-jumbo that psychologists spit out to justify their high salaries. I think I just dream about stuff that scares me or that interests me.

Regardless of why these dreams are happening I welcome them. I don't take them as an omen of things to come or my brain presenting me with clues on how to fix my life. I think sometimes people just dream about stuff and there doesn't need to be any real reason behind them. I simply just welcome them into my life and am happy that I can remember them.

The dream was actually much longer than I presented above but for the sake of this not being 2000 words long I cut out some of the minor details.