always the same

[amber]

I have dreams that repeat the same basic scenario but with different plots, over and, and over, for sometimes years at a time. Currently, and for the last year or more, I have had dreams about being haunted. I am always in some sort of house, I know right away that there is some type of evil presence, I can feel a heaviness. Sometimes it attacks me physically, throwing my body across the room, or cutting me. Sometimes I am just wandering through the house waiting for something to happen. Knowing that there is something not alive, and not good there with me. Objects get moved, and sometimes I can hear voices, and growling. But I never know what they are saying. I have seen faces of the "ugly" ghosts in mirrors, or just out in the open, face, to face.
Before this the dreams were always about some type of impending doom. Like the worlds coming to an end. The entire sky will be red, and raining fire, and I can see people dying in lava pouring up from the earth. I always seem to be far off, but close enough to feel it, watching, and waiting for it to reach me. Some have tornado's in them hundreds of them, I am always watching, and seeing them coming towards me. The fear is knowing that it is coming closer, and closer, and all I can do is wait. I dreamt about these doom dreams for a very long time, a couple of years, with no change in theme of the dreams.
Why do I have these nightmares that repeat themselves, differently, for such long periods of time?

[Tony Crisp]

Amber – Theme dreams are quite common.

Part of the action of dreams is to do your ‘housework’ to keep your house – you – clean. And what causes such long term themes is that the situation that needs attending to have not be done. They can carry on for a life time is not dealt with. A woman in her 50s told me that she had been troubled since childhood by a recurring nightmare. She would be walking down a street she’d known as a child, and pass some railings. There was nothing obviously awful in the dream, yet she always woke up crying and fearful. When she was in her early 40s she told her sister about the dream. Her sister said that when the dreamer was about three they’d both been attacked by a group of boys while near those railings. To stop them, the sister had said not to hurt them because their mother was dead. At this the boys had left them alone, but the dreamer had been badly shocked.
The nightmare stopped as soon as she learnt about the childhood incident from her sister. This suggests that her troublesome dreams were an attempt to make her aware of a part of her past that held unconscious pain or fear.
The ghost and devils are a recognised part of early childhood fears put into the images of demons and haunting. But to understand why you are troubled by them I think it might help if you read http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/what-we-need-to-remember-about-dreaming/.

As it says in The New Dream Dictionary - In the world of dreams our most intimate fears and longings are given an exterior life of their own in the form of the people, objects and places of our dream. Therefore our sexual drive may be shown as a person and how we relate to them; or given shape and colour as an object; or given mood as a scene, something that haunts our memory shown as a ghost or demon. Our feeling of ambition might thus be portrayed as a business person in our dream - our changing emotions as the sea or a river; while the present relationship we have with our ambition or emotions is expressed in the events or plot of the dream.

Tony