childhood dreams

i was inspired by deepfry's childhood food meme to recall some memorable dreams from my childhood.

1) recurring-and-eventually-lucid dream
this one was from when i was maybe 7 or 8 or 9 or 10 years old. i had a recurring nightmare. it always started with the image spinning in circles until it slowed and finally stopped; it seemed like an appropriate beginning of a bad dramatic tv series from the 70's. when the image stopped spinning i would find myself on a large spaceship. every single time. in one such dream i was in a waiting room (on the spaceship) with racks of magazines. when my turn was called i entered a room (all the walls everywhere, in the waiting room and this new room, were shiny silver). in the room was a boy--older than me, probably a teenager. i remember him being a little pudgy but not fat, fair skin and reddish-blonde straight hair. he had a gun that shot invisible bullets and he kept shooting it at me. i didn't feel a thing but from his evil laughter i knew the bullets were hitting me and i was scared.

the other versions of this dream were equally nightmarish. i eventually learned to wake myself up at the spinning image before entering the spaceship nightmare. it was a struggle to open my eyes, but i learned to do it. this was my earliest experience with lucid dreaming.

2) mom and dad?
i was in the family room of my childhood home (which of course is where we lived at the time, being that i was a child when i had this dream). my parents walked in through the back door (the door we always used to enter our house). i think they had just returned from grocery shopping. i happily greeted them, and they headed back out to the driveway to get more groceries from the car. just as they exited the back door, another set of identical parents entered. what?! there were two sets of my parents, completely identical to one another. each set claimed earnestly to be my real parents. i couldn't tell the difference, i knew one set was lying, but which one? it was awful.

3) not a nightmare!
finally, a childhood dream that was not frightening! i was standing at the top of our stairs with a balloon in my hand. i don't know if i realized i was dreaming or not, but i was determined to fly down the stairs. i could not quite get it to work, but i think the balloon played a role in helping. wheeee!