I've had two very similar dreams within the past two weeks. I had one of them the other night and it made me recall the first one. I've been having dreams about finding human remains in my yard and keeping their skulls and I remember them very vividly. The first dream consisted of finding the remains of people I knew in the creek outside of my house. Out of every one I saw I distinctly remember the remains of two people I knew, both of which died in car crashes 4 years apart from each other. I remember finding the victims in the middle of the night because the killer had badly injured a deer and threw it into the creek. The noise of it's gasping and wheezing while it struggled to keep it's head above water caught my attention. I found the skeletal remains of a construction worker and took it's skull from the water, keeping it in my room and hoping th police didn't find it. The second dream was much stranger. I happened to find the remains of two infant children while digging in my back yard, one of which had cyclopia (a condition where both eyes are conjoined into one in the center of the face). I remember taking their skulls upstairs and secretly washing the dirt and hair from them. For some reason I didn't care if my dad found them but I was afraid that my mom would find them (my mom and dad split up in March. In this dream they were still together). All of the colors in the dream were diluted and appeared in mostly shades of brown outside, shades of gray in the bathroom and shades of red in other parts of the house. I'm not sure what to make of these dreams due to their closeness of each other and their similarities. I'm hoping to figure out what they could possibly mean since they both disturbed me.
deer It sounds like the remains represent bad memories from your past, things that you have repressed. Since a skull houses the brain, I think this could be a message that you have to deal with these memories and not let your feelings (your fears?) get in the way. That you kept the remains of the construction worker could have to do with a need to build or repair something, maybe fix a problem that originated in your past. The injured deer could symbolize a vulnerable part of you. The children with cyclopia make me think of a loss of perspective (you need two normal eyes for 3D vision); the dream could be telling you to look at things in a different way. It's interesting that in the dream you are caring for infant children, after your mom and dad, who were supposed to be caring for you, split up.
I could not tell if the people you knew were people you knew in real life or in the dream. Also, did these people have a crash in real life or in the dream? By what signs did you identify the construction worker? Was it something you knew or did he wear a hard hat, etc.? Were the skulls underwater in the creek? In the second dream do you remember how/why you were digging in the back yard? Was there a shovel?
All of the people that were in the dream I knew in real life and the 2 boys were actually killed in car crashes in real life. One was not even a year ago and the other was when I was in 8th grade. I could tell the skeleton was the remains of a construction worker because the uniform was mostly there. All of the remains were either above water or in very shallow water except for the deer. I do not know why I was digging in the back yard but I was using a shovel and the hole was pretty deep.
First, these are not hauntings of the people you knew who have passed. They appear because those individuals made a dramatic impact on you, so your mind (your subconscious) recycled the images to add impetus to its metaphorical language. What I see here is an intellect struggling with emotion. The deer represents feminine energies (of a Jungian type), meaning intuition, empathy, compassion. The deer struggles in the water, another indicator of emotion. The fact that you rescue the skulls, symbolic of intellect and rationality, suggests that you are drowning in hurtful emotion and seek a rational, logical alternative. The construction worker is there to help you "build" that aspect of yourself. The second dream validates what I often tell dreamers, to pay attention to subsequent dreams for further clues. In fact, your second dream reinforces the message of the first. The "cyclopian" skull is typical of a metaphor provided twice in dream, sometimes in triplicate or more. The skull represents intellect, and the single eye in the middle is yet another symbol of the intellect, representing the 6th chakra or the third eye. The imagery is widespread in New Age culture, and whether you live in East or West of the world, you have probably seen one of the rainbow diagrams of the 7 chakras, even if you are not consciously aware of it. The shovel in the second dream is roughly equivalent to the construction worker in the first. It is an act of labor or building you require to unearth the intellect, buried (again) within a feminine substrate (the earth). A gray bathroom may indicate uncertainty (gray area) about natural inclinations, instincts. [Not knowing you, I can not say what those are, but it may be that you are naturally sympathetic, vulnerable, emotional, a warm individual and/or naive.] The shades of red you see in other parts of the house (your life as a whole) represent intensity of emotion/passion. Your fear of your mom (as opposed to your father) finding the skull represents again a negative or hurt attitude with respect to feminine energy. Though I hope my comments have helped, you are the best reader of your dreams. Good luck to you and blessings.