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on 1/16/02 6:42 AM, Jill Jones at [log in to unmask] wrote: > There's a series of recurring 'dreams', or something, I've had before the > time I wrote that and since - but also a part of my 'story' ever since I was > a kid. Perspectives in rooms change and a faceless person is near. I > actually never think of them as dreams. I have no name for them at all. There's actually some psychoanalytic material on this, although I'd be hard-pressed to recall where I read about it. If I'm remembering right, Freud had a theory about the fact that many children report similar dreams, but some are of a female figure (invariably wearing white) and some of a male (usually in dark clothing, sometimes robed) appearing at the foot of the bed. He thought the female apparition signified a ghost and the male a murderer, but how those gendered apparitions related to the child's gender, I don't recall, nor what it meant to dream of a ghost as opposed to a murderer. Both variants on the dream are reported as nightmares by children, so the theory presumably has something to do with what we fear in particular and why (presumably for some sexual reason, among others, since this is Freud!). Anyone else know any more about the theory and/or subsequent psychoanalytic twists on it? Candice P.S. Mine was male, too, Jill--and could have been the same guy! (I once wrote a poem called "The Prowler" that began "There is only one of course/and he circles the world toward your house," which I now think was tapping into that childhood dream.)