I have this recurring dream where I’m in the grocery store with my mom and I’m running down all the aisles screaming for her. The dream feels black and white; I can feel myself losing my breath from running, my throat getting sore from screaming for her and the tears burning my face. When I finally find her, she’s waiting for me in the ice cream aisle as she opens the freezer door and points, as if I hadn’t just lost her for what felt like a never ending nightmare.

Honestly, I’ve felt lost my whole life. I make “baby adult” decisions, I set goals and pay my bills but I have imposter syndrome where I feel like I shouldn’t be allowed to have so much power over my own life and make what feels like incredibly scary life altering decisions. I can buy a house, live off my own on a little island, I can basically do whatever I want with my life but I find myself incredibly annoyed at my own indecisiveness. I wish I could just have my mom make all the hard adult decisions in my life like what career I want and I can just stress about the fun decisions like what ice cream I want. 

Over the years, this recurring dream stays the same but less frequent. I’ve Googled and over-analyzed this dream but I think it’s simple, I need my mom and I love ice cream. In the more serious analytical analysis, I’ve learned as an adult I get this dream whenever I feel lost in my life and I have too many decisions to make that will lead to too many unknown and possible outcomes. I’m an over-thinker and I’m indecisive which is why you can find me in the ice cream aisle for legit, ten minutes trying to decide what kind of ice cream I want even though I went in the store knowing what I already wanted. Most of the time, I end up buying something completely different from what I was intending to get.

What I realized is that my subconscious is deciphering these thoughts and choices and I need to decipher my dreams if I want to have a better understanding of why I have had the same stress dream since I was a kid.