Dreams

It often takes half an hour for everyone at our house to tell about their dreams in the morning, especially because we observe my mother's rule and don't tell a dream before breakfast unless we want it to come true. Eleanor has vivid and extraordinary dreams, so almost every morning she comes out of her bedroom and says "last night I had the strangest dream" (and Ron and I can rarely resist breaking into song and continuing "...I ever had before...").
At any rate, with such extensive interest in dreams at our house, we have had the opportunity to test an idea I read in fiction years ago and found intuitively true:
Pay attention to your dreams: when you go on a trip, in your dreams you will still be home. Then after you've come home you'll dream of where you were. It's a kind of jet lag of the consciousness." (Animal Dreams, by Barbara Kingsolver, p. 9)
With all the telling of dreams in the morning at our house, we've actually found this to be true.
Further on in the novel, a character says "people dream about what they do when they're awake." But even though one of Eleanor's friends keeps showing her a book that purports to tell what different objects in dreams symbolize, it's impossible for us to figure out what some of the crazy dreams that are told after breakfast could possibly have to do with the events of our lives, especially in February.