Three Dreams

I didn't have recurring dreams until I was in my twenties, but once I started having them they were all about the same thing: houses. The houses changed over the years but if, as I have read, architecture in a dream is a metaphor for the inner self, then change is what ought to have come. Even as I missed the old places that used to present themselves, serially, with such astonishing, and welcome, consistency.

The earliest one of these dreams I remember concerned a library. The situation was always the same: I was hosting a party in my home, a large and comfortable place, and the house was filled with guests, friends, people I didn't know but was glad to see, regardless. This is rather unlike my waking self, who is normally loathe to socialize at all, never mind gathering groups of people in my own space. In each of these dreams, however, there would come a time when I found myself walking down a hallway, looking toward some glass doors that fronted the house library--my library. And every time I walked down that hall, I had the same thought, that I couldn't wait until the party was over, the house was empty, and I would be free to explore what lay on those shelves. I knew that even though I owned it, I had never been in that room, and the enormity of it, and of my own anticipation in finally getting to be in it, left me giddy. In the dream I never walked through those glass doors, and didn't care--it was enough to be standing just on the other side of them.

That dream came to me for many years, and there have been many others that formed themselves after. One of the best of those concerned a house that my family and I had moved into--this dream started happening when I was in my mid-thirties, with small children, a horribly busy lifestyle, one of those phases that feels, at the time, as though it will last forever. (As it turns out, these phases never last forever.) This house was an enormous old ark of a place, and mostly it was neglected inside and in dire need of some paint, a thorough cleaning, someone to live in it and love it, too. We were pretty sure we were going to be who would love it. The inside was mostly gray, and all the cupboards were empty. As I wandered through these rooms I would eventually come into a secret, inner room of the house, which was somehow suspended between the floors or otherwise hidden, and which no one had thought to point out to us existed. This room, despite its position, was always sun-lit and clean, with yellow walls and a white floor. There was a piano. And there were several raised platforms around the space. I knew that one was for writing, one was for thinking, one was for drawing, and so forth. It was my room. I knew that mathematically, the platforms lined up with hours of the day, that they were divisible by task and that I would always have equal energy for each of them. There were doors on opposite walls, and staircases leading away from them. After the first time I visited this room I always knew to hightail it back there, whenever that house appeared in my dream again.

I stopped dreaming about these houses when my mother died of cancer, which was when I began to dream about the real houses we had lived in when she had still been alive. When my husband got sick next with cancer, I stopped dreaming about houses at all, because by then I had begun dreaming about the Underworld almost exclusively. Last week I had my first house dream in years. In it, I was standing with an elderly architect, and we were looking at a plan for a small house. He had drawn me extensive diagrams explaining the exact things I needed to do to make this place a prosperity house. As I watched, the building began to materialize on the ground below us, while we continued to discuss its nature from our vantage point somewhere in the air above it. It was a square, hip-roofed building, with a small capped chimney protruding from its exact middle. When I woke up from this dream I was still having it, and realized immediately that the house was not meant for me, nor was it even a house--it was supposed to be a studio, and it I was meant to build it for someone I had met a few weeks previously, someone who told me he once wanted to be an artist but who had abandoned that idea. His situation was not even the point. What was the point was the bolt of attraction I had felt for him suddenly, unexpectedly, one afternoon while we talked. It was the first emotion other than anger or grief that I had felt in all the long months--years--since my husband had sickened and then died. And there was something in me that was so grateful to finally be pushed awake, to be made to climb back up out of that grave where all mourners really go to live for a time. Of course I would have a house dream again. It's that grateful part of me wanting to construct a thank-you note, a little temple to house what's been awakened. My architect companion has evaporated by now, but when I look out my window to where I imagine the studio would be, I can feel him invisible beside me, nodding, nodding, manipulating the master plan this way and that. I feel desire coming to life in me again, manipulating my own thoughts this way and that. I think, is this what he meant by prosperity when he first dreamt of this building, and then put that dream in me?