Greg Bernhardt said:
I usually am interested in insects and spiders, however I don't necessarily like them or like having them near me. The places are always indoors in like a room or basement.
If they don't bother you that much in real life, then one train of analysis to follow is to see if there's a common link to the places where they appear in the dreams. Could these places be somewhere where, in real life, you ever found yourself unwillingly pulled closer to, or underneath, something petrifying, ugly, gnarley.
Here's the sort of thing I mean: a woman goes to a therapist complaining of dreams of being in her aunt's house where the walls are studded with razors and knives which she must avoid or get cut. Thet therapist asks her about her relationship to that aunt, and finds out the aunt is always criticizing and insulting her, making "cutting" remarks. So the therapist says "the razors and knives in the walls obviously symbolize your aunt's 'cutting' remarks that you have to avoid letting get to you whenever you have to stay with her."
Elevators are fine with me, no problem, I live on the 11th floor of an apt. In the dream I'm not scared either. Also no problem with mass transit, I live downtown in a large city.
It's funny because I have a similar dream about riding up in the elevators of a kind of super-skyscraper. At the top is an amazing sort of outdoor mall with shops and reastaurants that is so large I never end up completely exploring it in the dream. In the elevator part, there is some procedure for riding up only so far then getting out and switching to another elevator to get all the way to the top.
It always ends up being a kind of powerful, overwhelming dream that stays with me a long time after I wake up.
I've never really tried to analyze it, but what I'd do if I wanted to is go through the dream and write down every place and incident in real life the dream reminded me of, however loosly. It would turn out there is something that all the entrys on this list have in common, a common mood maybe.
If you don't dream of a specific elevator it means it's a mixture of two or more elevators and buildings, in each of which, in real life, you had a similar emotional experience. Our brains store these together and they come out together in dreams kind of smeared into each other.
I once had a dream in which there was a woman who kept shifting physically into different women, and some times seemed to be a mixture of three different women at once. I wrote down a list of every woman in real life she reminded me of, and pondered it for a while utill I figured out what they all had in common. This was perplexing because they were all very different kinds of people, and different ages. But eventually I figured it out: they were all women to whom I had said something flattering at one point or another in order to seem like a nice person. The dream was "about" behaving insincerely for effect, and all the instances I'd done this had been stored together in my brain, and all came out together in the dream kind of merged into each other as one thing.
