Since dreams are the creations of the subconscious mind, they’re all about emotions. There are very few logic-based dreams. In fact, lack of logic is a defining characteristic of a dream. Illogicality and absurdity are how you know you’d been dreaming when you finally wake up and your logical, conscious mind takes back control.
Dreams are very much like arguing with an overly emotional person. Such a person, when they argue, doesn’t make coherent arguments. Their subsequent sentences don’t logically follow from prior sentences. They’re all over the place.
What they’re really doing is expressing a dominant emotion (usually fear and anger) with no regard to the logic of what they’re saying. Similarly, dreams convey our emotions in the most absurd and illogical ways. There’s usually a dominant emotion or dream theme guiding the dream imagery. And figuring out this dominant emotion is the key to interpreting dreams.
Recurring dreams
Dreams are mostly a reflection of our emotions, concerns, and feelings. Emotions are signals from our subconscious minds that help us navigate life. If you’re concerned about something all day, that concern can ‘spill over’ to your dreams. So, you’re concerned about the same thing in your dream, too.
If you suppress an emotion because you’re too busy to deal with it, that suppressed emotion leaks out in your dream. Your mind’s like:
“No, no, no. You can’t ignore this emotion. Let’s deal with it in the dream.”
If you fail to deal with an emotion, despite your mind sending you dreams about it, your mind takes it to the next level by sending you recurring dreams.
“Hey! You HAVE to deal with this. Here! Here! Take it! Take more!”
If you don’t resolve your issues, the dreams will continue to recur. They’ll only fade away when you resolve your issues or life renders them irrelevant over time. This is why most recurring dreams have negative content.1Zadra, A. (1996). Recurrent dreams and their relation to life events and well-being. Trauma and dreams, 231-247. Most recurring dreams are nightmares. What’s turning our life into a nightmare is what becomes a nightmare in dreams.
That said, you can get positive recurring dreams, but they're rare. For instance, recurring dreams about your crush.
Why do you keep dreaming about the same place?
If you’re having recurring dreams about the same place, the first thing you should do is figure out what emotion is tied to that place. What emotions does that place invoke in you?
When you visit your hometown or the school you went to, you not only get visual flashbacks of what you experienced there, but also emotional flashbacks. You feel again what you felt there. It shows that places can be tied to emotions.
The following are the likely reasons you keep dreaming about a place:
1. Unresolved issues in the present
There’s something about the place that invokes an inner conflict in you. Pay attention to the emotions you experience when visiting the place in your dream. Also, pay attention to what’s happening and how you and others are behaving.
For example,
Issue in waking life: Stressed out at work.
Recurring dream: Failing an exam in school
The stress you now feel at work reminds your mind of the stress you felt when you failed an exam in school. The recurring dream is unlikely to subside unless work-related issues improve.
In ancient times, life was short and fraught with threats. From an evolutionary perspective, dreaming about stressors and threatening events could prepare us to face these threats effectively.2Revonsuo, A. (2000). The reinterpretation of dreams: An evolutionary hypothesis of the function of dreaming. Behavioral and brain sciences, 23(6), 877-901. This is supported by the fact that people often get important insights or solutions to the problems they face in waking life.
2. Processing negative emotions from the past
When people face a traumatic event, they’re likely to compartmentalize the painful emotions associated with it. But compartmentalization isn’t processing. Those negative emotions still need to be processed so you can learn and move on from the experience. Recurring dreams about the same place allow you to process any negative emotions and memories you might have about that place.
For example, soldiers who witness bloodshed in war are likely to suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). They get flashbacks from the war when they’re awake and when they sleep. It’s their mind trying to make sense of the trauma- trying to integrate it.
3. Meeting unmet needs
Again, think about what feelings are associated with the place you keep dreaming about. For many people, the house they grew up in evokes feelings of comfort, security, and stability. If your current life is making you uncomfortable and insecure in any way, your desire for safety and security may be expressed in recurring dreams about being in the house you grew up in.
The place you keep dreaming about could be a place you visited once and want to see again. Your prior experience at this place was good. So, you want to re-experience those emotions. This would be a wish-fulfillment dream.
4. Symbolism
Your mind may be using the place as a symbol for an abstract concept, such as freedom.
Say you moved from City A (Job a) to City B (Job b). You feel trapped in your new job ‘b’ in city ‘B’. The previous job ‘a’ in city ‘A’ gave you more freedom. Your mind associated ‘A’ with freedom. So, dreaming about A, again and again, is your desire to re-experience that freedom.
The mind readily uses more accessible content, such as people and places, to represent more abstract concepts through symbolism. Symbols can be both culturally and individually significant. Symbols, like memories, are based on associations.
Dream déjà vu
Experiencing déjà vu in waking life is common. But have you ever experienced it in a dream?
Recurring dreams about the same place can trigger what can be called dream déjà vu. You’re at a place in your dream, and you get the feeling you’ve been here before, in a previous dream!
This happens because, subjectively, there’s no difference between waking and dream experiences. They’re both registered in memory in the same way. The rules of memory that apply to waking experiences also apply to the dream world.
Like waking life, dream life can also be a playground for our creativity. In the real world, we modify our environments as we please. We build buildings, make cars, and grow plants. We wake up the next day, and those things are still there.
Recurring dreams can be the same.
You can repeatedly visit a place in your dream that doesn’t exist in the real world. It’s entirely your mind’s creation. Your mind used bits and pieces of your memories to fabricate this place. Now, when you make changes to this place, those changes can stick.
