My Anxiety Dream - Neglected pets in my home.
There is a particular dream theme that I have been having for many years. What I recount is not one dream but the common story that runs through all of my anxiety dreams of this theme. I am going through the rooms of a home and I open a door and discover this room is full of animals. Small birds, mice, ferrets, no cats, no dogs, no large pet birds, just small ones. They are in crowded cages and they are stacked on top of one another haphazardly. Most barely alive, many dead but no awful smells or no animals vocalizing in panic. I berate myself for leaving them in such a neglected state. I immediately know that these were mine to look after. I am overwhelmed and don't know where to begin to start cleaning up and helping these poor creatures. I move some cages around to only find more cages with half dead animals. I pull out the bottom of the bird cage tray to find more dying rodents. Talking to myself "Now why would I put small mice in a bird cage? What was I thinking?!" I stand up straight again to find another cage with an animal that appears on the cages that I just finished moving, that was not there before. I begin to sense that there is something amiss and I start to get suspicious. But I know I need to help these beings.
This dream is never pleasant, the room is always dark, there are always more half dead animals than alive to find. The more I try to clean up and organize the more I realize that there is so much to do. The dream theme always ends around this point. I never see a resolution. I never clean up the problem. The situation never changes.
The next step after journaling the dream, revisiting it over and over in the mind, is to externalize it.
Neglected animals are also a theme in my dreams. it is a very anxious and unpleasant dream and i am always glad to wake up and begin to forget it