This one was kind of fun but also started out with a really strange edge that didn't make much sense. This dream was also a "2-parter" in that I woke up in the middle of the night and left the dream, only to go back to sleep for a part 2, so to speak.
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It began with just one member of my family coming to visit me at my house somewhere in Asia. It was my father that was coming to visit me at my home. However, the home that he was visiting was not any home that I have actually ever lived in. It was a rather enormous house with security cameras and multiple swimming pools as is frequently the case with my "houses" in my dreams but I can't recall any dream that I have had that was ever of a place I actually ever lived in. Except for the villa operation that I briefly managed around 8 years ago I have never lived anywhere that had multiple swimming pools.
My father in this dream wasn't really my father although I treated him as such. The man who was playing the role of my father was actor Paul Reiser and this is a very strange choice for my brain to make since I never really think about this actor and he looks nothing like my actual father. However, in the dream I knew he was my Dad. Other people were visiting me as well including a distant ex girlfriend who is Thai that I dated sheesh, probably more than 15 years ago. There was also a couple of very good looking and tall Russian women that were visiting and I don't know what to make of these two seeing as how as far as I know, I've never met or seen either of them in real life.
The dream sequence began with everyone doing typical things that people do when they first arrive in SE Asia such as getting their bearings and everyone was talking about problems with renting motorbikes. Me, being the one that has lived there for a long time went through the process of navigating getting all of this done for them. This is something that I actually have done for visitors in the past and in the dream just like I would do in real life, I was encouraging them to not rent motorbikes and to instead use taxis because the roads are quite dangerous here compared to their home countries.
Once all that was settled we started to hang out in the house. I remember it being a place with very high ceilings and everything was white. It almost seemed like the mansion in the "Scarface" movie.
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Things were going great until for some reason all of my guests started to turn on me like they didn't want to hang out with me and were trying to lure both my girlfriend (again, who hasn't been my girlfriend for many years) and my Dad to go and do things but not include me. At one point I looked at a security camera to find out that the 2 Russians and my girlfriend were all topless in a hot tub with my dad and they were wearing stockings... well, my Dad wasn't :)
I suppose a psychologist would look at this and say that I have an irrational fear of betrayal from friends or perhaps that I am over-protective of my family. I dunno. That was the end of part 1.
The second part of the dream included the rest of my family visiting but now we had a different conundrum as far as accommodation is concerned: We had rented several rental properties in the same city but they were on opposite sides of town. We started out in the one that I had rented which despite the fact that it had 2 swimming pools - a common recurrence in my dreams, it seemed kind of dumpy compared to the other one. So we decided to make our way over to the other one but I insisted that I needed to jog to the other one because I was working on my physical fitness. The dream became frustrating when the app that I was using to track my progress selected a location that was in a different city and kept turning me down the wrong streets. Kind of like you entering the wrong destination in Google Maps or something like that.
As is usual in my dreams, I was incapable of running at any sort of speed like I was walking in molasses again.
Then there was a blur and we ended up at a large beachfront corner bar which actually does exist in real life and it is in the city of Ao Nang, Thailand. There was a ton of other people there that I know and we basically filled the place up
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This place is called The Last Fisherman and it really does exist in Ao Nang so if you are ever there I recommend going to this place for sunset drinks.
This part of my dream was frustrating as well because the service was almost non existent and me wanting to keep everyone happy ended up working there for a while only to discover that almost everything is not where it is supposed to be and this was a real pain. I would imagine that this part of the dream stems from my extensive background in food service and how frustrating it can be when you can't find something that has been ordered. Panic set in and i noticed that a lot of my friends and family were simply wandering to minimarts to get their own drinks.
When it came time to leave the manager of the place was really upset with us because people had brought in drinks from the outside and this is when I started speaking Thai in the dream to him. I am capable of speaking Thai in real life but not with the level of confidence that I can in my dreams. If there was a recording of what I said in the dream it would probably sound like gibberish or at best "broken Thai" but in the dream, every word that I said was understood and my now massive group was on our way to the other villa that my family had rented.
A new worry had been introduced into the group paradigm now though because I kept running around to all of these people and telling them that they cannot stay with us and most of them were just shrugging it off and kept following us anyway. A psychologist might interpret this as me feeling as though I have to take care of all those around me even when I don't want to. Something like that. It could also mean that I don't want to take care of the people that I am charged with taking care of in reality or some deep meaning.
In my dream we never did make it to the other villa because of problems with the GPS again and that is the point where I woke up.
In relation to my own life my entire family has never come to visit me as a whole over here. Several of them have visited at various intervals but the one person who has not even entertained the notion of getting on a flight for 20 hours to visit is my father and perhaps that is why he was featured so prominently in the dream. As far as him getting a sexy time in the hot tub with all my other visitors is concerned, well I hope virtual Dad enjoyed that.
There's a few things that I think we can take away from this dream:
- I miss my family as I have not seen them in over 5 years. Covid is to blame for a lot of that but there are other reasons as well
- I genuinely do feel a need to take charge in situations where there is a group involved and get frustrated when my plans don't work out or when people don't do their part to help out. The weekly bowling even that I organize here in Da Nang is evidence of that
- Perhaps I actually do have a distrust of girlfriends or even some friends as far as betrayal are concerned. I haven't tried to have a girlfriend in many years at least in part because of this
- I think renting motorbikes in SE Asia as a tourist is a bad idea
- The need to run aspect of the dream is something that I actually do feel in my own life because as I get older I am getting out of shape
So there you have it! I remember far more of my dreams than most people do and a lot of the people that I speak to don't remember any of their dreams or they say that they don't ever dream - which is unlikely. How about you? Had any really strange or memorable dreams lately?