One of my recurring anxiety dreams consists of remembering suddenly that I own rodents.

[brown_betty]

I dreamt I was in my Grandparents' old house. (And, alarmingly, owned both a ferret and a rabbit, in a horrifying flouting of all natural law, but this isn't about that.) In my dream, my Grandparents' house was a) utterly unlike it actually is, as is always the case in my dreams, and b) seemed to have been built based on the verbal description of

Comments

[ratcreature]

Heh, I'm sure if you get them young and have some with a sweet temperament you could get a ferret to live with a rabbit. I mean, the breeder I got one of my rats from had a very laid back cat and both the young ones and the adult rats would climb all over the cat, and run around in front of it, and the cat was very sweet and patient with them.

Though what is it about rodent ownership and anxiety dreams? During the time when I had no rats I actually had anxiety dreams about having forgotten about some of my previous rats who then had gone feral and multiplied by hooking up with some outside rat, and at one point I noticed them again, and my original rats were happy about that and grateful, but their offspring was all distrustful not having had enough human contact in their formative period, and then as I noticed them I set out to catch them and sort them into sex separated groups so that they wouldn't multiply yet again, only they resisted and the ones I caught kept escaping and didn't want to be separated and I got increasingly panicky about the number of rats I had to manage... Horrible dream.

Worse than the ones I sometimes have about cockroach invasions and monster lice (though those at least tend to get me to clean my kitchen and bathroom in a vermin worry panic, so they do have an upside).

[brown_betty]

Yes, but at least cats and ferrets are both predators, you know? I just don't see getting predators and prey to live together to work out very well.

I don't know! I have had recurring anxiety dreams where I suddenly remember "Oh, right! I own a whole bunch of rodents! And I haven't fed them" And it's often hamsters and mice, and rats, and bunch of different ones, or something.

I haven't owned rodent since I had a mouse when I was twelve!

[ratcreature]

Well, the cat in question was living with many rats though, not a ferret, and the rats were running around freely with the cat in the room and played with it, and yet normally cats will catch and eat rats too. I mean, I don't think that kind of thing would work with every cat, that one was very laid back, but that one had no problem to live with the rats.

[brown_betty]

Oh, right. I think my brain is not fully engaged, because I did not quite make sense of what you said, sorry.

I don't know. I've seen videos of those mice that they removed smell receptors from interacting with this incredibly placid cat, so I suppose anything is possible. But in my dream, the ferret attacked the rabbit, and I was all "noooo!" and attempted to pull the ferret off, and it sort of stretched itself and elongated and - Yes, anxiety dreams. Bad!

[ratcreature]

I actually wondered about the smell thing, because I had heard that the fear of cats by smell is instinctive as well, but maybe they were smart enough to recognize that particular cat as harmless. I mean, when I had rats who grew up with a dog and played with that as babies (the cutest thing, it was this Golden Retriever and the rat babies would kind play sliding down his back while they chased each other), those rats were still afraid and really alarmed when my sister's dog showed up once for a visit, and even though they were safe in their cage, the dog had to stay in a different room.

[brown_betty]

http://www.pinktentacle.com/2007/11/scientists-create-fearless-mouse/ is the story, in case you haven't seen it. Apparently, the mice weren't afraid of the cat unless it meowed, in which case they suddenly realized OMG CAT!

[persephone_kore]

I've never had rodents, but I've dreamed about problems with my honeybees.

Granted, at least one of those dreams also involved explaining to Lord Voldemort why my shoes were not in line with the school dress code, so... um.... Yeah, never mind.

I think I also once dreamed this whole exchange in which I had offended someone with my LiveJournal icon, but I can't remember whether it was because I used one they thought was too cheerful, or if I'd used this one and they thought it didn't look cheerful enough.

[brown_betty]

You keep bees? That's pretty cool.

The weird thing is, I haven't had a rodent since the one mouse I kept when I was twelve; this seems to be some sort of displaced anxiety over one of my dogs.

Hee, lj dreams. Oh, lj.

[persephone_kore]

By this point it would probably be more accurate to say that my parents keep the bees. I initiated it, but I currently live under a municipal ordinance against having bees within the city limits, not to mention I have no idea how they'd fit into the apartment complex's pet policy. So the bees live with my parents, who have really gotten into it.

In the event of one's bee colony absconding, it does not help to throw oneself bodily across the open hive, as my dream-self apparently thought. This seems especially pointless, if somewhat less risky, if most of the bees are already gone.

[ratcreature]

Hee. Thankfully Lord Voldemort has not yet appeared in my anxiety dreams. My worst are anxiety dreams about bureaucracy where the others appear all reasonable and seemingly polite and "helpful", only it is actually impossible to meet the requirements, like say it starts and I just have to fill out some form, only to get that form I have to go to this other employee the first refers me to, only then I can't find the room, and so on in an endless byzantine bureaucratic labyrinth, with some deadline coming ever closer, even though at the outset I thought I was plenty in time. I sometimes wake up from these all jittery for *hours*, half-convinced I have forgotten to comply with something important.

[persephone_kore]

Oddly, the Lord Voldemort part actually went relatively well. I remember thinking he probably wasn't really buying the sob story, but he smiled and nodded and let me out of the classroom alive, which counted as a success in my book. I was more worried about the bees and why my parents seemed to have gone missing, although not particularly about the fact that the dream offered at least two alternate explanations for their missing-ness.

My actual anxiety dreams occasionally involve critters I'm supposed to be responsible for (there was this fish once), but the more common ones are bugs, (I still don't know what was up with the conservation-of-mass-defying-termites that were apparently doing some sort of marching-band exercises on an unfamiliar kitchen floor...), school (even though I'm no longer in it), and driving.

Yours sound horrible. Gah.

[ratcreature]

My vermin nightmares at least tend to result in frantic cleaning afterwards like I once dreamed I had cockroaches and well, my kitchen actually was in a really bad state with dirty dishes and such, and I spend the next day getting over my inertia and cleaned, for the first time in ages even beneath and inside the cabinets, behind the fridge and so on. I didn't have any actually vermin besides some moths that had infested an old package of tea. Another time I somehow dreamed about mutating dust mites, and afterwards for the first time in a long while I actually took out the mattress, cleaned the bedframe and beneath the bed and such. So these dreams suck (and thankfully I don't have them often), but they are great motivators.

[persephone_kore]

I actually meant the bureaucracy dreams sounded horrible.

For some reason the bugs in my dreams don't seem to be very directly associated with cleaning. In the latest one, for instance, I stepped on what I thought was merely a rather large ant), and it inexplicably turned into a much larger, writhing mass of gray things that (in the dream, anyway) I thought were termites. And then they all lined up in strange formations on the floor. Other times it's been glowing mosquitoes or something, or digging a colony of sea anemones out of a hole in my arm.

The academic-related ones usually imply that I've done something really idiotic, like forgetting I had signed up for a particular class until it's time for the exam. The driving ones seem to be a mix. Sometimes I just don't seem to be able to get things right; other times I barely survive these really nonsensically designed roads, but with no sense of triumph. Occasionally there are strange combinations, such as the one where I got clipped by a tractor-trailer, spun out, survived, got out of the car, and was invited up some sort of dead-end exit ramp (where there were a bunch of other wrecked cars just around the bend) by a cheerful woman with open arms saying "Welcome!"