Dream a little dream with me.

I have three very different recurring dreams. One is about apartments and houses, one is about love, and the last is about fear. Laying them out like that I can see how logical it is that these are the three things my subconscious fixates on. It always seems weird, though, when I have one of them, because each time the dream is so similar to the times I've had it in the past.

In the house dreams I am either in my own apartment or my mother's house, but there are extra rooms. Rooms I didn't know existed, or knew but never explored. Sometimes they are filled with furniture and things and other times they are empty and I start planning how I am going to rearrange my furniture to take up the extra space. Sometimes there is a backdoor in my mother's current house and I walk outside and there is this whole other house behind it, bigger and more beautiful, with rooms filled with antiques and beautiful rugs. My mother is surprised that I am surprised. Other times I am in my apartment but it's somewhere different, like on the top of a much taller building, and there is a huge roof garden or a secret back stairway that leads somewhere else... always, something new, a new possibility. That's how I've chosen to interpret these dreams: that I am hopeful of new opportunities and new possibilities that I have not yet imagined, but are right here, waiting for me to discover them. Either that or it's a reflection of the obsessions New Yorkers have with real estate.

The lover dreams are also very consistent, although the man himself changes. But he and I are always part of a group who are doing something together: working, making a movie, vacationing - sometimes it's not even defined. There is a sense of camaraderie, though, of a team of people who are sharing an experience. When he and I are in the larger group we are drawn to each other and I gain comfort from just standing beside him, and knowing that there is something between us. Our romance is secret - not purposely hidden, but not yet exposed. It's in an early stage, still our private thing, and yet I am happy when I see him in this group setting (he's usually doing something that impresses or inspires others) knowing that he and I have a special bond. Now that all sounds overly sentimental, but it doesn't feel that way in the dream: just happy, and loved, and excited and hopeful, with a dash of the thrill of having a secret thrown in. (Once, years ago, he was Michael Jordan, and the excitement was watching him on the basketball court knowing that nobody knew yet that he'd fallen in love with me.) Usually when I wake from these dreams I try to fall asleep again and reclaim the happiness I feel in them.

The last are the nightmares. Some kind of danger is coming, usually from the sky, and there is no place to hide. I wrote about one of these before. I know I had them before 9/11, but I think their nature has shifted since, so that there are more often low-hovering airplanes involved. When I was younger I was always able to fly in my nightmares, to pick myself up and whisk up into the sky to escape a threat, but now I can't because the sky is where the bad is. I don't think it takes a PHD in psychiatry to analyze these. Thankfully they don't occur very often, but I suppose they do when I'm stressed or worried about something.

I almost forgot about the fish dreams. When I was younger, they were nightmares similar to now, only instead of danger coming from the sky it was fish swimming through the air at me. And I still do dream about some harm coming to my fish - I wake up and the tank has sprung a leak and the fish are lying on the floor gasping for air and I am helpless as to what to do. No longer are they harming me, but the fear of my inadvertently harming them is as frightening.