Ever had one of those dreams that just sticks with you, all day? As in, you'll be going along, all fine and dandy, and suddenly you get a flash of the dream you had the night before? That's been happening to me all day.

Last night I had, for the first time in a long time, an odd amalgam of the three recurring "nightmares" I have identified as recurring over the last 10 or so years. I'm not a huge one for dream interpretation or that sort of thing (more due to laziness than anything else), but I have recognized patterns surrounding when I have a particular dream and what's going on in my waking life. The first (and most frequent) recurrent nightmare seems to surface whenever I'm feeling trapped.

In the dream, I am in a large building with long corridors and I'm running away from ... someone. The building is often different in each dream: sometimes it's a school, other times it's a hospital, still other times it's a large mansion a la the mountain-top getaway seen in The Shining. In the dream, I'm running down the halls, trying to get away from someone who is chasing me. And in each dream I manage to lose my would-be assailant briefly, just long enough to duck into a room and hide somewhere. (In one of the instances, I ended up hiding in a laboratory cabinet. How's THAT for subconscious creativity?) The dream always ends (or I wake up) just after said assailant enters the room where I'm hiding but before he is about to find me. Always a man chasing me, he always seems to want to do me some kind of harm, and I always wake up before he finds me.

The second recurrent dream involves being in a class (or a meeting, sometimes) for which I'm completely unprepared. I'm rarely sure of where or what the subject of the class is, but usually I'm aware of a certain panicky feeling as a result of having no idea what I was supposed to learn.

The third dream is usually brief, but is always in the same place: the high school I attended, and always involves my not being able to remember the combination to my locker. In the dream, I go running through the halls looking for someone to help me get into my locker and am berated by the mean secretaries in the office for failing to remember my combination.

I suspect both these dreams have something to do with fear: fear of being unprepared, fear of being inadequate, fear of inciting the wrath of irrational people, fear of being stuck or the inability to make the choice I really want to make. That sort of thing.

Last night night's dream was an odd combination of the second and third dreams: I was in my old high school but in this case had two separate lockers, to which I could remember neither combination. I was forced to go to the principal's office because, clearly, I was a very bad student for not knowing these combinations! And then, somehow (as often happens in dreams), I was showing up late for a class being taught by my high school health teacher. And, of course, I was not at all prepared to discuss what was being taught: