I don't have recurring dreams anywhere near as often as I did when I was a kid. I had them all the time while I was a kid. They were nightmares. Most are so vivid I can still remember them, partly because the repetition made them memorable.

One was of being trapped at the edge of a cliff and getting on a series of handholds to climb down, getting so far down I could not climb back up again even if I wanted to face what was chasing me -- usually a riot or a stampede, sometimes people, sometimes animals like cattle or horses. I just kept climbing down and getting more tired and more weak, hurting myself. Sometimes a rung would break off and go clanging down, down, down like it was heading into the Grand Canyon. I never reached bottom but also never actually fell off the ladder. Sometimes it was a ladder, sometimes just rungs bolted into the stone side of the cliff. I would have to stop and rest sometimes and do things like sticking my legs through the rungs so that I wouldn't fall. It was terrifying and sustained, not so much a screamer as so continuous a scare that I didn't scream at all. Some of it was not wanting to be heard screaming by what was chasing me lest they start dropping rocks on me.

That one has never shown up in any dream lexicon or anything, no one else seems to have ever gotten dreams of climbing down slowly toward solid ground and not falling. Lots of people get falling dreams. I even had a few falling dreams but not that endless cliff and ladder, or the pain that came into it, the constant pain and small injuries I'd get. I think some of it was the way I'd overexert so often in gym and the pain pursuing me even into my dreams, just like occasionally now I'll dream and have all my pain and limits even within a dream -- if I have a really bad day even my sleep doesn't make it go away.

The other was of being shot in the head. I'd be in the living room of my parents' house and people would drive past on the street, stop, aim with a rifle and shoot. Or I'd be at school and they'd be on an upper floor and shoot. Or I'd be in a store and they'd be off out on the sidewalk and shoot. Or I'd be on the schoolbus and they'd shoot. Some of those continued weirdly. I wound up turning into a ghost sometimes and following them around. This one would combine with others. Sometimes the shooter would have a pistol and do it at short range at a party. There were usually people around wherever I got shot and they mostly didn't care, other than being afraid they'd get shot of course. But it was always a clean shot between the eyes on my forehead, very little blood, not even much of an exit wound sometimes though other times the exit wound was big and I could feel my head mushing as I hit the floor, squishing out. I usually died fast. You can die in your dreams and live through it. I sure did enough times with that being shot in the head one.

But I also had good repeating dreams that were more like a serial, a story. They weren't about me. They were my early plotty dreams, I'd dream I was someone else, usually someone heroic, or dream about a bunch of people and float along in a third person point of view getting chapter after chapter of story. The stories weren't always that great now that I look back at them but they were a start, they were vivid and intense and my ability to remember them grew as I wrote down some of them in my journal. If I wrote it down I didn't get the dream again. But at that age I wasn't really able to carry on and write the rest of the novel. Now if I get a plotty dream it doesn't repeat because I'll be writing it after the first waking and that's what those are about. Story starts.