Recurring Dreams

I have only experienced recurring dreams once. When I was a kid, and remembered my dreams with more frequency, and in greater detail, I had a dream that kept coming back for a few weeks. It was very detailed, and in hindsight, I'm not sure if it was exactly the same, but it had many of the same features. I  remember being confused that I kept having it because it never had before. One funny thing about memory is that you believe something happened in a specific way, and it might not have. Remembering a dream is even more challenging because nobody but you remembers it, so you cannot ask them if it really happened that way. 

Visually, the dream was striking, memorable, and very strange. It was like I was trapped in a Scooby-Doo episode, except the animation was crisper and more bizarre than the Hanna-Barbera cartoon. There were two witches that looked like they had escaped from The Wizard of Oz that flitted in and out and a sled race that led me back to the beginning of the dream. I saw the witches and tried to avoid them even though they were not scary. The sky was bright blue, and there was snow on the ground. I had an equally blue Flexible Flyer sled that I unrolled and jumped on to evade the witches. I sledded down a hill, narrowly avoiding the wreckage of many sleds at the bottom. It looked like fifty people had crashed and disappeared. The sleds were scattered every which way around what appeared to be ground zero for some type of explosion. A kid from my class was walking away from the scene, and I had to avoid him. I do not remember who he was, but at the time, I woke up thinking that he didn't look quite right. He looked like someone else, but I knew it was him. I've had this same realization about other real people who have appeared in my dreams over the years like they were stolen from real life and replaced by imposters. I kept sledding down a big hill until I saw the witches again. I swerved to avoid them and woke up. 

At the time, I was happy when I stopped having the dream, but there have been others over the years that I wished I could have again. It has never happened; however, I do have more control over my dreams than I did when I was a kid. I'm glad those dreams and many others are gone, but I will always be confused about why I had that dream more than once. For all I know, I have had many recurring dreams and do not remember them, but there must have been something in my childhood psyche that made that one so important. Of course, I wonder if these dreams were actually recurring or just similar dreams with similar witches. Do I remember bits and pieces from other dreams I have weaved together to create a narrative?  I wonder if I had this dream as an adult if I would understand it better. Incidentally, I have never had another cartoon dream, either. I wonder why. 

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