When you have a recurring dream, a dream that repeats itself over time, its purpose is to bring up a recurring issue in your life that you need to address.     Even if you do not have recurring dreams,  if you track your dreams regularly, you will find that you are dealing with pretty much the same issue as it presents itself in the changing circumstances of your life.  Circumstances change, the issues stay the same until you transform them.  That is how the spiritual domain works.   Issues never go away by themselves by leaving them alone.   They stay and get worse the longer they are not dealt with.

Practically anything can recur in a dream.   The dream I have gotten the most in my life is about returning to my first university, that I quit after 3 years, and starting over again.   Since I went to a military university in the U.S. that was extremely rigid, authoritarian, and had a lot of restrictions and rules,  I tend to be trapped into believing that there was/is something I can do to have made the experience more successful.   In the end the smartest thing I ever did was leave the school and change my whole field of studies.   Nonetheless, my life keeps running into restrictive authoritarian leadership and then I keep trying to figure out what it is I can do to overcome them and be successful.     The solution always remains the same, either physically or psychologically leaving the restrictive leaderships.    What I keep hoping for is that the authoritarianism will go away completely from my life.  I believe sometimes that maybe it is like bad karma, that I am attracting the bad leadership.    What brings the most transformation for me is the strategy that worked in the beginning, to leave them.   They are not going to go away anytime soon in the world.

Similarly I have heard many dreams from people all over the world who reenter their university or high school to face an exam that they wished that they could have done better on in the beginning.    In the case of exams you have to face the reality that no matter how well you do on exam, even if you score a perfect mark with no errors, someone is going to find something wrong with you because the world is full of criticism and fault finding.  Everywhere you turn there it is.

Recurring dreams teach us about how to deal with negative realities in the world that are ever present.   If you live in a place where people have rigid and fanatical ideas about what their religion says,  your dream life will present the fears and anxieties of having to live in this kind of culture.  Likewise, if people in your country worship their cars more than they believe in the spiritual domain,  then your dream life will present you with a lot of issues around emptiness and dullness, and they will recur when you try to go deep into spiritual reality.

The stuff that recurs tends to be related to the big stuff in life and the problems we face in the world around us.   As you enter the new year resolve to transform your recurring issues.  Your family, friends, and the rest of the world will be happy you did.