What does my dream mean?

Googling that phrase returns a whole bunch of mystical nonsense, but I REALLY WANTED TO KNOW. For the past 4 nights, I’ve had the same dream:

I’m an Amazon delivery driver out on a route. I see something in the road. Thinking it’s an injured animal, I pull over and get out of my van. As I get closer, I realize that it’s a cat-sized statue of a woolly mammoth. It’s very realistic. Almost looks like taxidermy, but there are so many things wrong with that idea (big, extinct). It feels special somehow, so I put it in the back of my van.

2 blocks later, another woolly mammoth in the road. Again, I pick it up and put it in the van. I notice a pattern. Every time I deliver a package, another woolly mammoth appears. Soon, I’m pulling up to my last delivery. I drop the package at the doorstep and hear a sound. I turn around, and my van is rocking back and forth. Then, all 4 tires pop. I slowly approach, open the back doors, and get trampled by a woolly mammoth and die.

Obviously, the delivery thing is because I just joined the Last Mile team at Amazon (doesn’t take a genius to make that connection). But the woolly mammoth? And dying? I’m excited about my new job! The project has the codename of a cute and furry critter, not a scary hairy extinct beast. So, what gives?

Back to Google.

I found a WebMD article that basically says that while dream interpretation is a helpful practice, there’s really no such thing as common meaning. Everyone’s experiences are unique, and even if we share similar themes, they may be appearing for completely different reasons. The theme that really bugs me is the dying part. I’m not afraid of death, in fact, I’m even a bit bothered by our post-humanist obsession with immortality (a blog post for a different day). But SOMETHING in my life is causing me to have dreams about dying and I want to know what.

A new search: “What does it mean if I die in a dream?” YOU DIE IN REAL LIFE. (Just kidding.) I found another article, this time in Psychology Today, which didn’t answer any of my questions (same stuff about individual interpretation), but DID make me think. Maybe the important part wasn’t the moment of death, but instead the cause - being crushed under the weight of something of my own making. Maybe the woolly mammoths weren’t significant because of their oddity specifically, but because they represented things I don’t quite understand. Maybe I should chill out a little, lest I risk being overwhelmed by my own obsessive curiosity and completionist nature.