I had this dream that I was playing sports with a group of people. This on its own was strange because I am hardly ever into sports. But this is only the beginning. We played for a long time. We played for a long time. We had a wonderful time. We bonded, we became friends. But something personal about me came out. I am very much fascinated with cartoon characters, even attracted to them. Somehow, the people I had been playing sports with found out about this and when they did, suddenly they turned on me. I was suddenly no longer the man they thought I was and these were no longer the friends I thought I had made. They had turned on me practically in an instant and started to constantly tease me and pick on me for it non-stop. The next day the teasing continued and would not end so I finally left them very upset and they could not seem to understand why. I believe this represents my fear of socializing. I constantly worry about revealing private things about myself. I think this dream also could represent part of my fear of moving to a new place like Russia or any new place for that matter. The “friends” represent this new world I know I should become a part of but I constantly worry things will go well until some secret of mine is revealed and everyone will suddenly turn on me and pick on me like I’m some sort of freak. I suppose the fear began in childhood. I guess I noticed early on that often the kids around me rarely talked about the things I was into unless it happened to be something really popular. There were exceptions to this. I had a few friends growing up that shared my interest but overall, it always felt like the things I was into, the things that interest me were radically different from the things others around me were into. But if I can only guess this happened when I was a child, I really noticed it in High School. I went to a pretty ghetto High School where all the kids around me listened to rap music. I however hated rap except for a few exceptions. Problem being, even these few exception lead me to be picked on because these exception while popular, were not the normal preferences of the other kids. All the kids wanted to listen to was the kind of rap music filled with hateful and angry lyrics, hard sounding background music, and constant curse words. The few rappers I liked didn’t do this and it always seemed like I was some sort of wimpy loser for liking such “soft” music. And then there was the music I normally DID like. While others had backpacks with CDs full of hard core rap music, my backpack carried The Beatles and show tunes. One in particular was a show based on the children stories of Dr. Seuss. One time I came back to class. I guess I left to use the restroom or something. I came back to see these people had gone into my backpack, pulled out the Dr. Seuss musical CD and was mocking me for having it. They mockingly recited Green Eggs and Ham at me, and picked on me for it. I guess for these reasons, I always worried that I would be made fun of and picked on if I ever revealed my true self to anyone so most of the time I kept quiet.