Dream House

 Almost every night - and probably because I sleep so deeply - I have a series of intricate, detailed and occasionally disturbing dreams. I'm told that this isn't the norm, and that it's also rare to remember one's nightly visions in any great detail. Still, there aren't many nights that I don't dream, and not many dreams that I don't remember with the clarity of anything that happens during the daylight.

There are a few central, recurring themes in these dreams: Going on stage to perform in a huge auditorium with no chance to even look at the music beforehand; boats sinking, shipwrecks or submergence in water; seeing planes falling out of the sky, and houses. Someone once told me that to dream of a house or other domicile is to dream about your own mind. I do believe this is true. At many points in my life, houses, apartments and other dwellings have figured predominantly in my dreams. There are even a few specific houses or buildings that recur from time to time.

For example, during the worst days of my first major depressive episode in late 1998-early 1999, I regularly dreamed a small, cramped home with tiny rooms, all painted brightly, like Van Gogh paintings. The rooms were dim, with no apparent artificial light sources, but the walls were royal blue, gold, crimson. Each heavy wooden door led into another narrow room. A miniature, technicolor Winchester mansion, there was seemingly no end to the strange little house, despite its restricted dimensions. Some rooms were illuminated by smudgy windows that betrayed a white December sky stretched across the panes. Although I could never find the staircase, I knew that somewhere above me, in the dark, musty attic, the floor was littered with the bodies of dead birds who, exhausted by their frantic efforts to find daylight, had caused their own tiny hearts to burst. I could smell their sweet decay as I pushed my way past rickety wooden chairs and plush footstools, trying to find the door to the outside world.

In recent days, the home that I have been dreaming is a large suite in an old, stately building, in the downtown of a city I have never visited. I am living in this suite alone, but I am very conscious that its previous owner, an elderly woman of certain privilege, died there. In fact, I have left the suite largely as she had it at the time of her passing. I seem to have one main area, in the sitting room, in which I spend the majority of my time. I avoid the rest of the house, which is still decorated with an assortment of strange items and bric-a-brac belonging to the dead woman: yellowing doilies, dolls with glass eyes and bland, powder-white faces, delicate perfume atomizers and chipped Royal Doulton figurines. The old woman's furniture and brass bed are still where they were when she was carried away, and the bed is still made, with her white lace comforter folded daintily on top. I do not sleep in it.

There is no apparent reason why I cannot move these old relics, toss them away and make the place into something new. For some reason, though, I just "haven't gotten round to it". Not only that, but it seems that I haven't gotten round to looking at the place much at all. When I do venture into other parts of the suite, which isn't often, I find rooms that I never knew existed, spacious chambers decorated sparsely with only a few pieces of furniture. But again, somehow there isn't time to change it all. It feels better and infinitely easier to stay in my own little corner, disturbing nothing, and avoiding the blank stares of the porcelain dolls.

While both of these dream houses are different, they share several similarities of note. Firstly, the presence of clutter in some form, things that litter the dream landscape, that are in the way but have always been there. And of course, the idea of spaces that have yet to be discovered, rooms that lead into other rooms, a sense of infinite chambers with no certain end, is always the same.

 I suppose that, in the first house, I am trying desperately to get out, to find a way through the labyrinthine floor plan to the world outside. In the old woman's suite, I prefer to stay put, to not explore or disturb, to live as unobtrusively as I can in an unfamiliar space.

 Perhaps this is the difference of nearly twenty years: As we get older, we stop struggling like panicked, trapped birds, against the bizarre confines of our minds, and learn instead that we can survive if we quietly endure the space in which we find ourselves, leaving things we can't bear to face lying undisturbed in the shadows.