Tortoise Dreams, Part 2

Yes, I have the dream about being back in high school or college, not having studied for the math test (or ever having attended the class, for that matter). Yes, I have the dream about being in a public place with important items of clothing missing.

But the dream I have the most often, my real recurring dream, is of being in a house and realizing there's a room in it I've never seen before, often wonderful in some way -- spacious if I need space, light and airy if I need light and air, once it was full of beautiful toys. I have this dream a few times a year, every year. I've been dreaming it for decades. It's always a little different, but the basic idea is the same. I assume it means that I have untapped potential of some sort, but I don't understand why I have to keep dreaming it over and over.

Last night, for the first time, I had the tortoise version of the dream. I dreamed that in addition to our awful barren tortoise pen and burrow in our awful barren backyard here in Ridgecrest, we also had an extra tortoise pen and burrow in a section of yard I'd never noticed before, full of leafy green plants. It reminded me of the little garden area in the backyard of the house I grew up in, in Palo Alto,

and in fact I think the tortoise in the dream was the tortoise we had back then too.

In the dream, our tortoise was spending each night in its burrow in the leafy green part of the yard, and each morning when it woke up and came to the surface, we would put it in the barren awful Ridgecrest tortoise pen. And I suddenly realized that we should just leave it in the leafy green pen. If we had this wonderful section of yard, why didn't we use it properly? (This is always the question in these dreams.)

However, the leafy green pen didn't have high sides (unlike the photo above), and the tortoise could have just walked out and escaped. So I decided to dismantle the yucky tortoise pen (i.e., the real one) and move its cinder blocks over to the (dream-world) leafy green pen. I went to do this, and the first cinder block I picked up had a huge, I mean massive, black widow spider under it. It was the size of a tarantula, and fortunately it ran away and hid. The next cinder block I picked up ALSO had a black widow spider, but this one was a more normal size. Unfortunately it jumped onto me and then I couldn't find it. I was swatting at my clothes, trying to find it or kill it. Then, of course, I woke up.