Very interesting, Shoe. I always think that to really understand the dream you have to know quite a bit about the person and their circumstances. Symbols can be so personal. Some of my dreams are so obvious that I know immediately what they mean. Some are nonsense. Others - like the house dreams - seem significant to me, but I confess I don't spend a lot of time trying to work them out. Seems like it would do the dream violence in some way. I guess I think if my subconscious is trying to talk to me in symbols I shouldn't try to force it into some kind of logical narrative.

I can only remember one tiny bit of my dream last night. I was walking around the lake I live at (which I had been thinking about doing before I fell asleep). Just as I got to the dam I saw a large reptile - a crocodile or alligator - running up the spillway toward me, but then it stopped. Then I looked down and saw a wild cat (a cougar?) walking next to me, just like a dog heeling. Then it disappeared. There was another wild animal in the same sequence, but I can't remember what. The funny thing is I was trying to remember what that third animal was in a later part of the dream. Reminds me of porcupine's totems.

P.S. I just checked wikipedia. It was definitely a cougar in my dream. And the reptile was an American alligator. Neither animal lives in my area, of course.

What's funny is how clearly I saw that alligator. Even though I have no interest in alligators and haven't studied them closely, I somehow had a very accurate alligator image stored in my mind. Yet if you asked me to describe an alligator when awake, I doubt if I'd be able to do as well as I did in the dream.

That's the real reason I want a lucid dream. My dad died 18 years ago, and I miss him. I'd like to talk to him in a dream, because I know that if I could see him in a dream I'd have access to parts of my memory that I don't have access to while I'm awake. I'd like to "hear" his voice and have him tell me some of his stories of his childhood that he told me while he was alive but I can't remember the details. I'm sure the details are locked away in my memory - just like the image of the alligator was - but I don't have conscious access to them.