Oh yes. This happens for me as well. I have several dreams (3?) about past times in my life. They're about buildings, and they never match up with the real layout of the school/city. (One's about a campus where I used to teach, and the other is about Barcelona, where I lived 10 years ago).

Yes. I call them dreamscapes. Freaky.

Yep. I've had many dreams (spread out over my lifetime) that happen on the shore of a lake. On the land is a pine forest, and there is a flooded city in the lake, with rooftops and buildings sticking up out of the water. I feel like I know the place every time I dream about it, but I have no idea where this image comes from.

Yes, I've had these before. Dreams about dreams (or at least with elements of previous dreams). Makes sense -- whatever dreams are, they get encoded as memories, and dreams are generally all about memories.

Sometimes I have these freaky meta-dreams where I'm describing the dream I just had to someone -- but I'm still dreaming, and then at another point, I think I'm awake and start describing having described the dream . . . and sometimes these dreams involve descriptions of previous dreams (but of course the line between describing something and experiencing it in a dream is pretty blurry).

I have these themes as well -- every time I fly, it's only four feet off the ground. Houses often have mysterious networks of rooms. My grandma's house is always open to me, no matter who lives there now.

For years, I dreamed that my parents' backyard was full of a jungle of tall, fetid, vaguely evil weeds and that they begged me to hack them all down because my parents weren't able to (check out the marvelous symbolism THERE).

Lately, I have been dreaming of having to go back to teach where I used to teach in upstate NY -- I think because my department head is retiring this month.

Yep, I have houses and locations that show up over and over, and none of them exist in real life as far as I know. It's very odd.

Yes, I have these too. Mostly based on school/college and places I lived in my 20s. The sub-sub-sub-basement ones are freaky. Creepy people live down there.

The house I grew up in features regularly in my dreams, even though the house itself was torn down three years ago. And for a long time, I had a recurrent dream of a huge underground brick tunnel, with enormously high ceilings. It wasn't dark or damp, and in one dream it was filled with racks of clothes!

I have a recurring dream in which I have a hole through my hand. Not a wound, a neat round hole that is about the diameter of a pencil. If I make a gun with my thumb and index finger, the hole is located where my second finger touches my palm, just above the pad of the thumb. It doesn't hurt, it doesn't even seem remarkable. Usually the dream consists of me wondering, "Have I always had this hole in my hand? Why have I never noticed it before?"

I have these dream landscapes, in at least two variations:

- actual places from my past or present, but with alterations that recurr from dream to dream. Lately, I've been dreaming about my grandparents' house, which became my home during my teens. The real house had four cramped bedrooms in a tiny second floor, but the dream house has a largely expanded upstairs, and the hallways are lined with ballet-barre-style railings. The railings keep me from getting lost (uh, somehow) in the winding new layout, and they proved handy in one dream when the whole place was tilting and swirling like an oceanliner in a vast storm.

- unknown but recurring dreamscapes, usually of a city. I think of them as "dream Toronto," and I figure my unconscious finds it cheaper to film there than in the real city where the dream is set.

treepour, I have meta-dreams, too, but they usually take the form of a series of vignettes linked with a framing device, like in the movies. That is, they are explicitly displayed like a movie in the context of the dream.

Wow. Uh, between "dream Toronto" and "framing device", it looks like maybe I watch too many movies, huh? Did I mention the dream extras, those people who appear in dream after dream, but never as the same character?

Oooh, Elsa, you have dream extras?! I don't. That would possibly flip me the freak right out.

I definatley have dream only landscapes/settings that are not variations on places I know, but peculiar to my dream life.

That's freaky enough.

Come to think of it, lately the dream extras have been on hiatus, and my dreams revolve around either people I know or movie stars, who are often thrown together by my mind without regard to their timeframe.

Last night, for example: Shelley Winters (the 1970s version) was having an extramarital affair with Paul Rudd (from roughly 2000) very much on the hush-hush, and any gossip about this torrid romance would endanger the nonfictional world, and especially me and The Fella and our friends, who were observing this and several other plotlines from the overarching framing narrative.

So. Yeah.