Do you believe that dreams mean something? I always wonder what other people think about that stuff – because I believe they don't mean anything. I think dreams are just jumbled up pieces of your consciousness that get all mixed up in your sleep. For example, I dream about the short stories I write – in beginning when I’m trying to figure out my characters and how I want the story to go – or in the middle when I’m stuck. But those characters are mixed up with people in real life that are just in my head. Like right now, I’m writing about this doctor who is killed in a mob hit and then brought back to life with some science fiction gizmos. The other night, I was working on that story before I fell asleep and I dreamt that my sister was on a roller derby team and she got hurt. The doctor was in the crowd and came to her aid, acting all MacGyver. I get the reference to him and even my sister since she was staying at the house – but roller derby. Hmm, I don’t know where that came from. I think my sister can stand upright on roller skates, but that’s about it.
I’m bringing all this up because I have reoccurring nightmares about mice and water. Not at the same time, either I dream about mice or I dream about water. I’ve been having them for years – all different scenarios: Mice in my bed. Mice in my dresser drawers. Mice attacking me. Mice dying because I or something else killed them. Mice as my friends – like the little people or something similar. Then water flooding my house, water overflowing in the bathtub, living under water (which might have something to do with a story idea), drowning in water, etc…Ugh.
Let’s talk about the mice thing. I don’t have a good track record with rodents. The domesticated ones that live in cages are kind of cute. I had a gerbil as a child. He was cute, he loved it when I rubbed his head and fed him sunflower seeds. I used to let him run free in the living room when mom was at the grocery store. He would sit on my leg when I was practicing my piano lessons. I loved watching him run around his cage and tear up Kleenex boxes. But, after he died, I never had an urge to get another. I just look at them at the Pet Store. That’s enough for me.
Other than my gerbil --- rodents and I aren’t friends. Mice scare the crap out of me and I don’t even know why. I never had a problem around my little gerbil. But other mice, the unwanted ones – yuck. Maybe it’s a left over farm thing because they were everywhere… in the haystacks in the barn, in the corn crib … all the places I would play. I’ve probably touched a lot of mice and never even knew it. Eww. When I lived in my townhouse in Waukegan, a bunch of mice lived in my garage and storage closet during the winter. I think it was because our units backed up to a forest preserve. Shoot if I was a mouse and I was freezing, I’d rather live in a nice heated garage over the cold forest too.
My first winter there I used Decon to kill them and I got in trouble with the homeowners association because it was apparently against their laws to use poison to kill mice. Like how I was supposed to know that? I didn’t own the place and there wasn’t any bold print in my lease that said …oh, by the way, don’t use poisons on the mice because you might kill the neighborhood pets that roam freely through your yard, try to bite you when you go to get the mail and pee on your porch. Look, I get the whole pet thing … and luckily, I didn’t kill any. But, my neighbor tattled on me to the board after he found his cat playing with a couple of dead mice outside my garage door. Why he couldn’t have just told me that I wasn’t supposed to use the decon, I’ll never know. He tried to be my friend afterward – after I had to pay a $100 fine. Yeah, I think not, dude. Anyway, after whole HOA incident, my only recourse was to set about 25 of those stupid snap traps with peanut butter in them. I delegated this task to my roommate. Set the traps and get rid of the dead ones. He was quite good at managing the population. They never made it past the garage.
When I worked in Merrillville, during construction of our store – we had a small rodent infestation. They were everywhere and because the place was full of holes, we couldn’t get rid of them. I walked into the break room one Saturday to get a piece of pizza and I caught two rats sitting in the middle of the table chowing down. Yeah, and they were definitely rats and not mice. In retrospect, it reminded me of that Orkin commercial that’s on TV now – with the rat band playing in the living room when the family comes home. Both rats froze when they saw me. One took off through a hole in the wall - and how he fit with his fat stomach, I'll never know. The other didn’t move - probably because he ate too much. He just went back to his snack. It was almost as if he said... Oh, hey, want some pizza? Gross. And in case you were wondering – yes the pizza went into the garbage and the rat was smashed. (But not in front of me).
My next bad experience with rodents was when I worked in Hillside. I had heard some rumors about mice in the building, but never saw any. Then, during a store review, when all the big wigs were there – the management assistant brought some food out of the storage closet for one of our meetings (staples such as pop tarts, chips and such) and one of the boxes of pop tarts was definitely chewed on. The regional team freaked. The GM wasn’t that surprised and tried to act as if it was no big deal. Needless to say, the exterminator was called ASAP. So then, the rodent thing went back to being just a rumor until I was on a conference call one day and a little mouse ran across the top of my desk.
He crawled down the cord from the mini blinds and then ran under the door into the main office all the while I was staring at him in awe. He was quite the gymnast. As fascinated as I was with his abilities, I was freaked. I’m no dummy, where’s there one, there’s a hundred. So I sent someone out to buy mousetraps and before they even got back, another tiny mouse was captured in our office. A baby mouse that one of my associates caught in a Styrofoam cup – she wanted to keep it as a pet because she thought it was cute. Umm, yeah, no. I told her to go to Petsmart if she wanted a pet. Within a couple of days, we caught about 10 mice total. Then, finally, the exterminator showed up and thought it was rather interesting that we were catching mice because they hadn’t eaten any of the bait. Well, I wonder why? Why eat nasty bait that’s going to kill you when you can just eat the pop tarts that we store in the closet.
I never saw any mice after that, but I always knew they were lurking. Like lurking in my storage unit, living in my wingback chair. Bastards!
They’re living in our garage, they’re out on the trail, running across the road in front of my car … and invading my dreams. UGH!! So, a few months ago, I brought my mice nightmare issue up to a co-worker and she suggested I do some research about it because it might have some underlying meaning.
I finally got around to doing this last week after I had yet another mouse dream. This time I was carrying a box of mice into a car dealership to buy a new car, I dropped the box and they all escaped. Some of them ran up my pants legs. Others got away scott free – I watched someone step on a couple. I woke up, jumped out of bed in a complete panic and flipped the light switch on in my room. Realistically, I knew I was dreaming and there weren’t any mice in my room – but I needed visual confirmation before I could get back into bed and go to sleep. So I threw all the covers and pillows off my bed and shook out the comforter. After a few minutes of staring at the mattress, I finally decided that it was safe to go back to bed.
Before I get into the meaning of the mice dream, let’s touch on the water issue. I have bad track record with water too …I almost drowned when I was little and since no one was really watching me, I probably would have if it wasn’t for my collie, Goldie, rushing to save my life. I tried to take swimming lessons over the years, but it never really worked out. I’m like a brick in water for the most part. It doesn’t matter whether I’m wearing a life jacket or not. If I can’t touch or see the bottom – I'm going down.
My latest water dream occurred just a few days ago. I dreamt that I was housesitting in someone’s condo and was trying to get out of doing some volunteer work that was roped into. I was playing sick – except that I wasn’t really not sick – I had a killer headache. So I decided to take a bath. I turned on the faucet and then left the room and forgot it was running. Then the neighbor downstairs came banging on the door to tell me that water was dripping through the ceiling. And not just any neighbor, mind you, but this really hot fireman that I used to have a crush on. I ran to the bathroom to shut the water off only to discover that there was a huge hole in the side of the tub and water was flooding the room. Then I woke up – because the dogs were barking at god knows what … which irritated me because I really wanted to see how that was all going to play out. Hot fireman, flood – major rescue brewing there, crap, guess I’ll never know now.
So here’s what the dream dictionary said about mice and water dreams. Mice:
· Indicates fear, meekness, insignificance and a lack of assertiveness.
· You are experiencing feelings of inadequacy and fears that you are not measuring up.
· Symbolizes minor irritations and annoyances -- letting petty problems or insignificant issues eat away at you.
· To dream that you kill or trap a mouse, suggests that others are making a big deal out of certain aspects of your life.
As for water – everything I found said water means emotions, like emotions running over, your heart breaking, your heart filled with emotions, etc.
I always felt the mouse dreams were stress related, so I guess it’s confirmed. I do feel at times that I’m not measuring up to other people’s expectations and I let little things get to me. Usually it’s the stuff that happened in the past and I can’t do anything about, like I keep reliving it – the emotion and what I did or didn’t say to defend myself. I don’t think I feel inadequate, but occasionally I wish I had to balls to write an original story and attempt to get it published. I found the final bullet point funny considering I had that dream on a night where someone made a comment about my employment status this summer.
So I kill mice in my dreams because I can’t legally kill the people making those comments in real life. Huh, interesting analogy. Guess that falls along the cliché statement that I’m going to kill you. I’m going to kill the phone, the stoplight, the idiot in the car in front of me …etc. Since I can’t really do that, I’m just going to dream about killing insignificant mice instead.
As for the emotions with the water – a couple of days ago, a person that I care a little too much for, managed to hurt my feelings. I can buy into the water and emotions thing a little bit – but how does a flooding bathtub with a hot fireman related to my heart getting stomped on - again? Maybe it’s just the affirmation of my mid-life crisis. t could be a sign that I’m not going to be able to get out of this volunteer work that I got roped into – against my will. (That's another whole blog topic -- coming soon)
Water and emotions doesn’t explain all my water-like dreams. Like when I dream about needing to use the restroom and being unable to find one that works or has a door that closes all the way or locks … or a toilet that isn’t plugged up. My own thoughts tell me that’s my unconsciouls shot across the bow to tell me to get the hell up and go to the restroom before you wet the bed.
As for the whole dream interpretation thing, I haven’t decided that I buy into whether or not they mean something. Who decided that mice in your dreams means you’re stressed out about petty things? Or that water equals emotion? I hardly think knowing that is going to stop them from happening. It doesn’t make me feel any better to know any of this … and to keep thinking about it is going to turn me into a worry-wart like my father, so I think I’ll just let it be. I have enough of his characteristics as it is.
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