Recurring Dreams

While on the phone with a friend the other day, I randomly recalled a recurring dream I had as a child.

My family and I were evacuating (a place I understood to be, but looked nothing like) home. But we had to drive through flooded plains and strange, desolate, almost war-torn environments. It was like the National Forest had been burned and then flooded.

There were ravenous starving animals lurking, stalking the car. All kinds of animals -- things like cougars, alligators, bears. They had no shelter, so they were all out, exposed on the plains.

We were driving a station wagon (?). A very low one. Each time we ran out of dry ground, my parents had to decide if the wagon would make it through the giant puddles of flood water of if they were too deep to drive the car through. At which point, we'd have to find another route.

We had a bunch of our stuff piled on the roof of our station wagon (?). At one point, a piece of luggage tumbles off the roof and gets mauled and devoured by alligators. This is usually where I would wake up.

It's a weird dream and until this conversation with a friend, I hadn't thought of it in years. And thinking about it, there's no obvious reason this conversation should have sparked thoughts of that dream. I think searching for a reason that it suddenly came to mind is bothering me more than searching for a definition of the dream.

I don't always wake up analyzing the actual dreams I've had, but I do wake up wondering where particular dreams have come from.

Hear me out. The abilities of the human brain and the capacity of it are currently incomprehensible, unfathomable. The brain is the well-spring of human feelings, creations, experiences, memories, actions, and discoveries. There have even been theories that our brains, our thought, are all connected -- the collective conscious, they call it. I like that idea.

What made me dream about evacuating a home I did not recognize and traveling through a shattered and desolate land with predators threatening our every turn?

Well, C.G. Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist, suggests we inherit part of brains from our ancestors, much like we inherit some of our physical features. Could memories be hereditary? A sort of collective unconscious??

If that's the case, who knows where my dream comes from. Perhaps my ancestors had to make this trip that recurred in my mind throughout my youth.

Maybe it's not the National Forest burned down, but rather the Great Plains of the United States after a devastating fire? And maybe the station wagon we're driving was a Conestoga wagon my ancestors drove across the Oregon Trail. It's entirely possible. The Great Plains and a Conestoga wagon would not be items my active brain recognized as familiar, so it's perfectly understandable that I would unconsciously translate them into being a recognizable location and a modern vehicle.

Maybe, thanks to my collective unconscious, as a child, I was remembering a journey my ancestors made.

If that is true, imagine the possibilities and discoveries of history I could make if I were able to harness and control my collective unconscious!

If you want more science and less whimsy, perhaps dreams are just arbitrary misfires of the brain. But how can my brain misfire something I've never experienced?

Answer me that, please.