Abraxas: Thanks for your kind words. I was fueled by contempt and rage for him at that time, and vowed that he was not going to destroy me. I was blessed with what I consider to be the world’s greatest financial planner (for me, anyway). 🙂 (Not to say that any of it has been easy.) So now, 30+ years later, “the worm has turned”, “what goes around comes around”, and he is now 80, helpless/unwell, pretty much alone, and dependent. I say this not to gloat, but perhaps to encourage someone else in a position similar to mine. Narcissists tend to self-destruct, one way or another.

Neo: if asked (and I haven’t been), I would interpret your drawer dream as evidence that you are a highly conscientious person, subconsciously worrying that you might have been responsible for someone’s/something’s death. Glad to see that life showed you otherwise about that.

huxley: I have a degree in literature and have read many wonderful short stories. Thanks for writing some. 🙂

I did write fiction – short stories – for a while. But maybe I was going in the wrong direction and should have written science fiction or creepy Kafkaesque stories. Mine were more conventional. Back then, I was aiming for a certain more general market and came very close to succeeding but in the end no dice.

The student anxiety dream – very common. Although I doubt I’ve had that one in years.

As far as the shrunken-creature-in-a-drawer dreams go, I think they pretty much stopped after I managed to have a child and raise him to maturity. I had a bit of a revival of the dream, I think, when I was dealing with my mother in her old age.

I hope things worked out for you. I don’t think I’ll win the lottery, though.

I agree that dreams are sometimes about wish fulfillment but maybe more often about problems; maybe our subconscious is working on the problem or problems while we sleep. I had a dream that I still remember, at the beginning of what turned out to be a bad divorce. I dreamt that I was in a rowboat with my two daughters, who (in the dream) were very young (baby, toddler) and I was responsible for their lives. I had to keep them from drowning and was petrified. It’s pretty clear what that dream meant. I had been a stay-at-home mother and my ex was a narcissist who turned out to be vindictive beyond belief. (Of course, I knew nothing about narcissism at the time, but my “gut” knew.)

I have always been able to cope with life through grit and perseverance, but at present I feel both personally (to a degree) and in terms of the world situation (for all of us) that there really may be no solutions or escape this time.

Things thawing out from the
permafrost will spread as they are able and there are more people up there than just scientists. Folks dig up wolly mamouth carcassas routinely. The barn door has been open for quite a while.

I found your dream interesting. Dreams are fascinating stuff!
Sounds like you are struggling with something in life, perhaps feeling lost?

Like Disney says, “A dream is a wish your heart makes, when you’re fast asleep,” but are dreams usually about things one wants or wishes for? Are they more usually about problems that make one panic? The impression I have is that dreams are about problems, but all the running around trying to solve the problem isn’t usually terrifying, because the dream takes me back to places I’ve been and people I’ve known, and that’s enjoyable.