I have recurring dreams of a Venice that doesn't exist. There's a neighborhood that I always want to get to, that requires taking just the right combination of turns from Piazza San Marco. I know I'm getting close when I pass the Moorish church with the reflecting pool, then I look for the open-air restaurant that always has at least one or two old Italian men drinking coffee under the wooden rafters. I think there's a cafe farther on, and then the church I want to get to, which has an enormous dome painted inside with deep deep blue and golden stars, but I can never quite find it before I have to run back to the Piazza in order to catch my ride out of town.

When I was young I dreamed a museum. There was an ice cream parlor and an aquarium, and I think they were connected by one of those old-fashioned bank vault doors, so that you could see the fish through the round part of the door. There was a submarine, too.

Most of that, I think, was based on bits of the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, which I loved, but my mind connected them in a new way and I would go back there again and again in my dreams. It got to the point where I actually knew I was dreaming when I was there, and I'd be happy to get to visit again.

I absolutely do. Glad it's not just me.

There are two or three houses that I live in in my dreams. I could draw you a floor plan of each of them. None of them are real, but they keep coming back.

I also dream regularly about this big field near the house where I grew up (and where my parents still live). The field was always rumored to have a lake and a creek back in the trees, but it was always fenced off when I was growing up and I never got to see either of them. This big plot of land is a recurring character in my dreams, where it stars as a huge hill overlooking a bay. (Yeah, an ocean in inland Texas. Why does it keep coming back?)

Anyway, when I went back to TX a few weeks ago (for the first time in almost two years), I saw this field that my subconscience is so fond of. They're turning it into a housing development, and a new highway bypass runs right through it. It was very disorienting.
(Except that the lake and the creek are accessible now, and it turns out that they both do exist.)

Yes. I seem to have quite a few recurrent dreams. In fact, most of them seem to fit into one of a dozen or so themes. I have versions of Ithaca, NY and Salem, OR that are regulars in my dreams. My dream Ithaca is at least a little like the real one. The Salem one is entirely fictional. (I also have a dream house that appears often, in which the doors, annoyingly, won't stay shut, and a hallway that connects to someone else's apartment.)

Yeah, I occasionally dream of a huge hotel that I've never been to. I'm half-convinced it actually exists somewhere and that I'll stumble onto it.

Tangentially, I'll often dream of a familiar neighborhood (real or not), which becomes less and less familiar as I wander through it, until I am completely lost. I try to turn back, but I can't find my way.

I've had many 'location-based' dreams, with several recurring locations, some in parts of L.A. I haven't frequented (but always connected to known areas by a familiar freeway) including an isolated mountain just south of L.A. (I don't mean the Matterhorm at Disneyland - everyone knows the local mountains are North or East); also a beach resort area between Orange County and San Diego, and a quiet hilly area near San Luis Obispo which has been overruled by reality since I moved to the hills south of SLO.

Usually, when my dreams take me to one of the 'familiar' places, I know exactly where everything is. Sometimes the locations turn weird, like a tall building where each floor is shorter than the one before it (and me with an appointment on the 24th floor), an entire university in a downtown tower (admin offices in the basement, library on the top floor), or a massive shopping mall with parking at one end, and at the other, windows overlooking an alien landscape with spaceship landing pads. Still, there are some more normal landmarks to my 'dream places', like an Orange Julius stand, an old single-screen movie theater, a toy store across the street from the university, a funky gift shop and seafood restaurant at opposite ends of the beach resort...

And that area near my current home? It had a dirt road that led to a giant office complex half-buried in the side of a hill (in some but not all of my visits there, they had dormitories for the workers). But now that I live here, it doesn't come up any more.

The geography of my dreams has been fascinating, but one of my most common storylines has me unable to find where I park my car...

I have a "set" that very epic dreams of mine center around. It's one-half diner/greasy spoon and one-half chi-chi upscale restaurant. The hostess is always the same vivacious red-haired lady, and she performs hostess duties for both eateries. She is also sometimes the owner of both, but not always. This is a storefront that is on a very busy downtown metropolitan street in what I can only assume is New York City. I've had probably 20 dreams in my life that center around this location, and as I said, they are all absolutely epic in the fact that the plot is long, complicated, messy, and usually ends with me waking up from the dream either joyfully laughing or crying my eyeballs out.

Last time I had a dream that started in this "set" a "war" broke out between the drag queens that seemed to take up "my" side of the street and the (also in drag) hookers that were on the "other" side of the street. It was very odd.

Our brains are weird!

I dream alot about a fictitious airport that's a cross between LAX and the Jetsons, with slanty ramps and skyway things, and I can never find the place that sells dramamine.

I have a recurring dream that takes place in a World Trade Center that doesn't exist. I'm being pursued, and I have to run down services stairwells and crawl through filthy access shafts; eventually I am forced to take increasingly rickety and wall-less elevators, until eventually I am clinging onto a girder 2000 feet above the ground in a 150 mph wind, or something cheerful like that. Occasionally I get to spend some time in a 90th floor elevator lobby with really unearthly beautiful views through floor-to-ceiling windows, I guess as a consolation prize.

Had it again last night. Thankfully I usually forget about it in a couple of days.

Third floor apartment above a shoe store on East Main. It's the last place I lived with my birth mother. I can smell the fresh paint. The habachi on the fire escape. We stay up all night watching Creature Feature. My mother twists wet strands of my hair into pincurls. I hand her bobby pins.

Our brains are very weird indeed. If my 'home' is ever featured in my dreams, it invariably is my childhood home. And specifically, the living room on which the other side was the kitchen. It doesn't matter what age I am in the dream, my 'home' is always that few square footage, all exactly as it was. Strange strange strange. I sometimes wonder, if I am supposed to go back and buy that house.

I do, the imaginary places. But not often, and not frequently. I'll note to myself while dreaming, "I've been in this dreamscape before" and continue with the dream.

Some of my worst dreams take place in public toilets. Not always the same one, but if I end up in a public restroom, I know I'm headed towards waking up in a cold sweat.

Chewie reminded me that I forgot about the airport. I have a dream airport that I think is in Japan and/or Paris. The waiting areas look like Charles de Gaulle's international bits, but there are enormously long escalators and catwalks between terminals and gates; to get to the flights, you have to walk along the catwalk to your gate, then you swoop down through a manhole/slide thingie that lands you at the plane, way down below. To get off planes, there's some sort of teleporting feature that sucks you back up onto the catwalks.

I always seem to be getting on the wrong flight at this airport, so the dreams always involve a great deal of anxiety as I try to make the elevators move faster, or realize as I'm falling/sliding into one plane that it's the wrong plane.

I have an entire alternate peninsula. Starting from San Francisco to San Jose. What I like are dreams in specific places that you've never been to. I have dreamed myself in Hawaii and Brazil and I've never been to either one.

Couple a times a year, near morning, I find myself laying over my tank bag again, on my old R100RS, barreling down the A10 autostrade, west of Genoa, heading west towards France, flat out, passing Fiats like mad, and dancing with Ducatis. In the dream, it's evening, as it usually was when I was making the real journey regularly, one summer, and the smell of the Mediterranean is as pungent as it ever was. I am tucked in behind my fairing, relaxed into the long distance rider's easy crouch, alert, dancing into sunset ahead of me, and deep tunnel shadows cut through mountains dropping to the sea on my left. But the howl of the wind is only dimly remembered, and eventually, too soon, drowned out by music from the clock radio.

But for a minute, again, between dream and reality, until the dream clears, I am fully alive, and perfectly content, as never I have been, since.

I occasionally have these wonderfully detailed dreams of being on the scopes in the sonar "shack" of a Los Angeles-class fast-attack submarine. The product of reading waaaay too much Tom Clancy.

(Conn, sonar, aspect change on Sierra three seven, possible target zig...getting some warbling on one screw...Crazy Ivan to starboard!)

I also have dreams of bopping around in a city that's an amalgam of Austin, Milwaukee, Columbia, Dallas, Columbus, and (I think) Rocky Mount. Kinda neat how I'll see familiar buildings, highways etc. in the wrong places and still feel like I know my way around on foot, on bus routes, and driving.

I do. What a great question!

I have many places that I revisit over and over in my dreams, that, as far as I know, do not exist.

One is an isolated, somewhat shabby but comfortably rambling house somewhere in the U.S. south. It has a large front veranda, and there's almost no trace of paint left on its weathered wooden frame, once white. It lies at the end of a twisty, very overgrown and pothole-ridden dirt road, barely wide enough to slowly maneuver a car along. A couple of hundred yards before the house comes into view, there is a standard mailbox on a post, also old and crooked. It is always early springtime, and the vegetation is very lush, but light, bright green, not deep, foresty green. There is bright sunshine, and everything is gold and green except for the weathered gray house. There is no noise except for the chirping of the cicadas.

All my other regular dream places (perhaps up to 10?) are more exotic than this (some quite amazing), but this is one of the most persistent, and the mundane nature of it makes it the most curious to me.

My "regular" place, is like an underground tunnel. It's made of brick, very old, very big - the ceiling is like thirty feet high. It's not scary, it's strangely beautiful. And one of the times I "visited", it was full of racks of clothes!
Otherwise, my childhood home features prominently in my dreams. It's a shame it was torn down in real life.