A Common Weird Dream

For whatever reason, I always find myself having a particularly odd dream. Sometimes it comes in different themes or settings, but it always comes up at least once a month. It involves me owning hamsters.

When I was younger, I had owned 3 hamsters at different time periods. My first hamster, Ninny (It was supposed to be Minnie, but I found out it was a boy) was gotten when I was about 8 or 9. I spoiled that things with all those plastic connecting tubes and mazes. I ended up accidentally dooming it when one time, I was trying to get it used to water in the sink. I'd just let the water run, and only the hamster's feet would get wet. Unfortunately, I accidentally turned it on boiling hot without realizing it and the hamster was running oddly fast. When I grabbed it, I burned my hand on his feet. His feet began to rot, and the vet said best to put him to sleep.

Second hamster was Speedy. She died right on her first birthday, no known causes. The more traumatic thing was I found her body, thinking she was asleep. so I poked her, and her body fell over stiffly, freaking me out. My last hamster I had for the longest, despite not taking the absolute best of care of him. 2+ years until one vacation, i forgot to get someone to feed him and he starved to death.

Needless to say, I was a horrible hamster keeper and was scarred from it

With this in mind, I'm always afraid I'm going to kill hamsters if I own any. So of course in these weird hamster dreams, I own a bunch of them.

Usually, the dream involves a pet store somewhere, but sometimes the hamsters just pop out of no where. I never have a cage for them, so I'm stuck holding them or stuffing them in my pockets. No matter what I try to do, I always lose them, so I go looking for them. I find them, try to find a really shitty way to contain them (one time was Tupperware, another was a glass mug), which they then escape or die from.

One time I was on a ship for whatever reason with 2 hamsters, and I dropped one into the ocean. Another time, I accidentally suffocated the hamster in Tupperware because I couldn't find an alternative cage in time. I've stepped on them by accident, held them too tightly, dropped from up high, had other animals kill them...

It feels like hamsters in these dreams have become the old Kenny death joke from South Park! I always wake up feeling horrible at first, but then relieved I didn't actually do any of these things. But holy crap, does it make me fearful of ever taking care of a small rodent!