Reoccuring Dreams

Ah, dreams.  They're always fascinating to the dreamer, but they don't make much sense to anyone hearing the recitation of the dream's events.  I like to wonder whether it's a dream that I should be "listening to," as in whether it is providing me some kind of divine understanding or direction, or whether it's just a confluence of scattered neurons doing their thang, yo.  Some dreams I decidedly want to be the latter, that they're touching on areas that are difficult for whatever reason or are just the wrong kind of weird.  Every now and again, I'll get a stretch of mundane, hyperreal sort of dreams, the kind where for the rest of the week I have to ask for clarification on whether X really happened or if someone said Y or it was actually one of those dreams infiltrating my memory.  

Brains are weird things.  A grouping of mostly fat with some water and electricity thrown in, that has even worked to naming itself and designating itself as the most important thing--which is pretty damn clever, evolutionarily speaking, when you think about it.  

Dreams come and go for me, in the sense that I have swatches of vivid dreams and then swatches of nothing worth remembering in them for a time.  I have yet to sort out the pattern, whether it's the timing of my body, certain events, the phases of the moon, or something else.  Sometimes they're that weird, mundane pattern; sometimes they're just weird; there's a handful of nightmares out there.  However, I have noticed that I have a pattern of some reoccurring dreams.  

One was a series of dreams that had an Invasion of the Body Snatchers kind of vibe, where people looked "normal" but were...off somehow.  These were odd in that parts were almost the same as other, previous dreams, or I could remember within the dream that they happened before.  It was a series, I suppose, and it evolved for some time but does not seem to have been renewed for another season.  

Now, though, I have two strongly reoccurring themes, where about once a month I get one or the other: going back to school and being trapped on an inescapable haunted structure of some kind.  The going back to school part is in the vein of being late/showing up in one's underwear, but these tend to be more toward the idea that, for some reason, I'm returning to high school or Knox, but as myself now-ish, where I recognize that both of those periods of my life are complete, so to say, but part of me is intent on reliving them.  It's not about learning new material, but just somehow re-doing classes and how I went through, not to advance with a new degree or some such thing, really.  And I never have a printed copy of my damn schedule, for some reason.  Most of the dream I stay in a heightened since of anxiety, trying to figure out when my classes are and whether I've missed them and where they're at.  I don't have any major regrets from either of these times in my life, with what courses I took and the experience I had there, particularly Knox.  I've retained the experiences and people that I can, so I'm a little confused as to why these dreams keep happening in some ways.  In other ways, though, it makes a bit of sense--I knew the structure of my life at these times and my health hadn't hit that particularly critical point of terrible until post-Knox.  Is this a bizarre longing for simpler times?  If so, what's with the anxiety of trying to get a copy of my schedule (because I definitely wake up heighted from that stress)?  Is this more about fear of the unknown?

The second one has had a few different iterations, but the idea is that I'm stuck in some kind of horror themed ride or experience that is more dangerous or terrifying that it ought to be, with something going wrong with the track to go into dangerous areas or the attraction's premise turning out to be real, that the ghost/monster/demon is actually there.  I spend those dreams either trying to wait out the end of the ride while reassuring myself that I'm almost to the end of the track or urgently trying to find an exit with anticipation of the danger being the main component.  These make a little more immediate sense to me, why I keep getting them--my initial interpretation is that I am a passenger in my own disease process, that Crohn's pulls me through a series of horrors that are more real than I'd like and on a steady, worsening track that I cannot seem to get off of.  I had a particularly nasty one of these a couple weeks ago and some of the visuals stuck with me for a few days.  

Are these just me?  Can I go back to the flying dreams now?  I miss those.