vovat | Dream Themes and Tangents (Reply)

There are several themes that keep appearing in my dreams, including:

Being at some place I don't enjoy with nothing to do, and having no way to leave
Being at some place I DO enjoy, but either having it turn out to be a total bust, or my missing the fun part. I've had several of these involving Oz Conventions.
Packing. I apparently dread this so much that it keeps popping up in my subconscious.
Being in places I remember from childhood, like the first house we lived in, an old school, or my grandparents' old house
Taking a wrong turn and ending up somewhere a long way away from where I started. As disturbing as these dreams sometimes are, I kind of wish that could happen in real life. If I were to figure out how these instant transport roads work, it would save me a lot of time.
Having someone criticize my tastes, which I guess is actually somewhat realistic. While there's definitely some variety in, say, the musical tastes of different people I talk to on the Internet, but it seems like most of them are at least AWARE of the stuff I listen to. When I'm exposed to the outside world, it can be jarring how out of touch I really am. When I was working at cleaning out the toy store where I was employed during part of graduate school, we were allowed to bring in music to listen to. I remember bringing in Camper Van Beethoven, Frank Black, and Young Fresh Fellows albums, and my younger co-workers HATED them. Granted, I didn't choose their albums that I would consider best for a beginner, but I have the feeling they would have had the same reaction even if I had. They were listening primarily to the Offspring (and, to be fair, I don't really have anything against them) and the Dave Matthews Band (who are just boring, to my mind, even if you ignore all the frat boy associations). I know I listen to some bizarre music, but most of the stuff I brought in was, at least to my mind, pretty catchy and inoffensive. Come on, am I THAT out of touch? (The answer, by the way, is yes.)
Video games. I've noticed that, when I have a dream about The Sims in particular, it usually leads to my really wanting to play it in real life. In my dream last night, I wanted to play the game, but didn't currently have access to a computer. In real life, I actually have The Sims 2 installed (I know The Sims 3 is out, but I don't think I'm ready for it yet), but the last saved data I have are from before I installed the Pets expansion pack on my last computer. I still have the hard drive from that old computer, and I seem to recall once hooking up a disconnected hard drive to another computer without having to root around inside it, but I forget how I did that. Any advice is welcome, because there are a few other things I wanted to get from that old drive, too.