Do you find that there are certain places you dream of long after you’ve lived there / worked there / visited there? Have you had multiple dreams of a place that feels familiar in the dream, but you can’t identify in waking life? The place or setting of a dream can be very evocative in and of itself, even when there are no other dream characters or little narrative to go along with it.
As I’ve written about before, our dreams invite us to engage differently with our surroundings than we would with our environment and people in waking life. In fact, sometimes our dreams are less inviting and more forceful in their attempts to wake us up to something we’re not quite getting about ourselves.
Dream researchers may not agree on the cause, purpose, or function of dreams, but many of us are aligned in that dreams provide us with an opportunity to witness how we react to certain types of situations that surprise us. We can learn a lot about ourselves as a result of this surprise or confusion — especially about parts of ourselves that are typically hidden to us — if we reflect on our dreams and our dream ways of being after waking.
Being dropped into a particular place or setting at the start of a dream is one way our dreams prime us for feeling. If dreams are purposeful, the place in which dreams begin are purposeful, too.
If our dreams are trying to get across a message to us (from somewhere very deep inside) or show us something about ourselves we need to know, place can be very effective.
Often when people dream of recurring places they know from the past (such as high school or an old workplace), they express confusion or exasperation — why do I keep dreaming of this place I long ago left behind?
The answer is that something about that place activates a mood, belief, or way of being in you that’s still alive in you today, and requires attention, even if you think you’ve changed.
Consider a recurring place in your dreams. Take a few minutes now that you have thought of a place and try to situate yourself in a dream moment in which you were in this place,
Close your eyes and imagine the setting.
Have you ever noticed how dreams help bring a place alive for us? Often dream memories of a place (real or imagined) are even more vivid than our memory of an actual place we’ve visited or lived in.
Once you’ve spent a few minutes situating yourself in the dream place and checking out the surroundings, ask yourself some questions to tune deeper into how it feels to be there.
Some sample questions include:
How old were you when you knew this place? How old do you feel in the dream?
Is this a place that makes you feel safe or vulnerable?
Is the dream setting one in which you start off confident or one in which you feel insecure?
Does this place make you want to stay or leave?
Are you curious about the place? Confused? Excited? Afraid?
These questions are simply prompts to try to help you sink deeper into the dream moment and place. Ultimately, you will want to just be in the dream place or setting without the questions, and try to notice how it feels to be in the place.
More specifically, how does it feel to be you there right now?
The dream is trying to alert you to a feeling you may not be aware you’ve been feeling in waking life. Or it may be trying to activate you to remember a feeling you used to feel but don’t anymore. Places are meant to catch the attention of our senses, but when we associate a place with a time of life or when a place becomes so attached to a belief we have about ourself or the world, the place itself almost has a feeling quality to it. Often in dreams, we don’t meet places as if they are new to us or as if we haven’t been there in a long time. We meet places the way we often meet people in our dreams: with stories, judgment, and assumptions.
(Bonus homework: The next time you believe you’ve had a dream in which you are in a familiar city, ask yourself how you know you are in that city as compared to a new city you’ve never visited. What inside the dream itself makes you certain?)
Perhaps a high school dream is trying to show you some difficulty you still have with feeling like you belong. Perhaps a work dream is trying to remind you how creative you felt at your last job compared to how bored you feel at your current one.
However, where it gets a little tricky is that the same setting (ie. high school or the office) might be there to activate you in one way in one dream, but a different way in a different dream. This is why standard basic dream dictionaries aren’t really useful, because not only is a setting for one person going to be different for another, but the setting may be trying to evoke a particular feeling for you in one dream, but a different feeling in you in a dream years later. Dreams are very particular to the individual, and even particular to the time of life of that individual.
Sometimes dreamers report finding themselves in familiar places in dreams they can’t identify in waking life. Sometimes these places seem mundane — a playground, a mall, a beach, a house. Sometimes these “familiar” dream places are alternatively very exotic — futuristic buildings in a city never visited, barren locations that appear to be from an earlier era — yet feel familiar to the dreamer in the dream, as if they have been there before. We could look at these dreams from many different orientations (ie. this imagined landscape could be a place from a forgotten memory or from a past life even), but still my advice would be the same: how does landing in this place in this dream make you feel?
We often don’t take the time in the dream to orient to how we feel in a place before “the action” begins. Or if we do noticed how we feel to be in that place, our feeling may not be based on what we perceive with our dream senses, but rather emerging from a story we have about “that kind of place.”
For instance, I landed in a dream recently in which I was in a large, empty house. There was nothing in my environment that indicated the place was dangerous.In fact, the place looked brand new and clean; nice even. Yet almost from the beginning it felt unsettling to be there alone. Then, there was a knock at the door. Do you think I met the person at the door with ease and a friendly greeting? No, I didn’t. I approached the door with trepidation because I already had a story about what it was like to be inside that big empty house alone.
Perhaps that particular dream setting was there to alert me to how I am feeling about some newness in my waking life. Or perhaps the dream is trying to show me that as much as I may think I want something new in my life, I may have some fears that need to be made conscious and addressed before I will be able to enjoy it.
Did you ever have a dream about a house that had rooms you never knew existed? How does it feel to be in such a place?
Did you ever have a dream about a house that you believed was haunted?
Compare how it feels to be in the dream of the house with extra rooms versus the dream of the house that seems possessed by bad spirits.
How does it feel to be “housed” in either place?
In the dream in which you discover new rooms, I imagine you may be actively engaging with what’s there in the dream.
Is that the case in the dream in which you believe a house is haunted?
What stories or beliefs about the place do you bring with you inside the dream? Could those beliefs be changed if you were more attuned to your actual environment around you?
Often times dreams will give us very unfamiliar places in order to try to extract us from our stories and our beliefs, and making them conscious to us. Dropping us into a completely foreign environment may be what’s needed to get you to see just how much your experience is driven by stories and beliefs, compared to actual experiences in the moment or what you sense around you.
This, too, can be the purpose of a recurring place in dreams.
Once you have spent some time in the dream moment and place, allowing whatever feelings in you to arise and come to your awareness, journal a bit about those feelings. It’s good to concretize those feelings, while also remembering those feelings aren’t all of you, all of the time; but rather a part of you. You might find that the feelings from the dream moment and place are in conflict with some belief you have about yourself or your life. Journal that as well. The practice here is to give attention and voice to a wide range of your feelings, knowing that this might create tension or conflict inside you.
The exercise here is simply to know ourselves better. It’s not to fix or change ourselves or our lives in response to one dream.
This is also a general purpose of dreamwork: to know ourselves better.
This article, of course, is very generalized because as I mentioned above the setting of a dream is unique to not only you, but you at the time of life you’re dreaming the dream. But I hope that the prompts above enable you to work a little with your own recurring place dreams and gain some insights as to why your dreams continue to drop you there.
If you’re interested in working dreams of recurring places more in depth, you can try working one-on-one with me for a few sessions. Check out my introductory package for details or read more about dreamwork here.
I also discuss this topic more in depth on my recent Patreon audio chat (“Recurring Places and the Purpose of Place in Dreams”). You can listen to that heree
