This week’s questions over at thefridayfive@DW is about dreams.

1. What was the last dream that you had about?

I’ve been seeing a lot of dreams again the last week or two. Usually 6-7 different dreas per night, but the only one from last night I remember is one about quicksand. The setting was a farm or a small community or a village in, like, the middle ages, and one day we suddenly realized that the quicksand nearby by the had dried up. While we were circling the quicksand area, trying to figure out why it had happened, people and animals drowned in the quicksand started to emerge from the sand, right as rain. One of the first was a pig which run away. At that point I woke up.

2. Does it hold any significant meaning to you?

I don’t think so. I’ve never seen it before (I have several repeating dreams). It’s also not a sequel or a prequel to any other dream.

3. Do you dream in color or black and white?

Color.

4. What is the most frightening dream you ever had?

I’ve never been scared by my dreams. They’re like the action/adventure/scifi tv shows and movies I love to watch and I never get scared by them. Some dreams are weird and don’t even have that dream logic, but none have frightened me.

5. Is there one dream that stays clear in your mind despite the fact it was more than a few years ago?

I have 4 or 5 such dreams, but the oldest of them is the elevator dream. I dreamed it many times in my teens… so 30+ years ago. In it, I enter the apartment building I lived the majority of my child/teenhood until early adulthood, step into the elevator and press the button for our level which is 3. But the elevator doesn’t stop at 3 and I think, oh okay, somebody’s called it to the top floor (5) – I’ll just get off there and walk two stairsways down to get to our level. But the elevator doesn’t stop at level 5 either – instead it goes through the roof of the building and shoots into the sky and keeps rising and rising and I can’t do anything. I wake up at this point.

I’ve always figured that dream meant I felt out of control in some way of my life. Later it occurred to me that it might have been to do with that my father was ill (brain cancer), and for about a year before he died, we knew it wouldn’t get better and he would die, that it was just a matter of time. It’s just that I can’t remember exactly when I started having this dream – was it before or after my Dad’s death? Because I can’t think of anything else in my life at that age that would make me feel out of control of my life.

The other dream that sticks particularly clearly with me I dreamed repeatedly in my early 20s and is a sort-of-but-not-really superhero dream. In it, I’m in my grades 3-6 school with other the other kids, when suddenly the teachers hurry everyone inside from the rocky play area, and lock all the doors and windows of the school. Teachers don’t know why, just that a general threat alert has been given and that everyone should go inside. A long time is spent waiting for what happens next, and guessing what is going on. Then a red poisonous mist descends outside, and the teachers tell us that the X-Men are fighting an enemy – it’s never clear whether it’s aliens or other mutants or what – and that only mutants can survive in the red mist. I wake up around this point of the dream. I kept seeing this dream maybe a dozen times throughout my 20s. The X-Men are obviously inspired by my reading the X-Men comics a lot in the 1980s/90s, and the red mist by the original tv series V and V: The Final Battle.