Like many people, for a couple of years I met regularly with a therapist to help me work through some confusing, troubling issues. Not all of that work was especially “heavy,” though, and some of my favorite memories of my sessions with Steve center around accounts of dreams I’d had — and figuring out what they might “mean.”
Now, as a rule, Steve stayed away from heavy-handed direction (“This is what’s wrong and this is how to fix it”). Rather, he came up with various clever ways of turning my questions back to me, of insisting “Well, what do you think?” without ever saying quite that.
But on the occasion which inspired this post, he volunteered something, a perspective so fresh and unexpected that it’s never left me. It involved a dream. I don’t remember the dream fully, but it went something like this:
I’m walking along the branches of a tree and I come to a treehouse. It’s sort of a ramshackle structure, apparently thrown together without plan. But it also appears to be strong, in no danger of falling apart or of falling from the tree.
I enter the treehouse. Inside, cardboard boxes and wooden crates lie about the floor and teeter in stacks here and there, especially in the corners. Many of these boxes are dusty, as though they haven’t been opened in a long time. A cat rests atop one of these stacks, watching me calmly, blinking slowly.
A sense of dread pervades the atmosphere inside the treehouse. Something unpleasant seems about to happen. I leave through a back door, which opens onto a different branch of the tree; a few feet further along, I turn and look back, still worried. That’s when I see the shelf. It’s a shelf over the door through which I just exited, and on the shelf rests a different cat. This cat, Cheshire-like, grins toothily at me. And for some reason, I am no longer worried. This cat reassures me. This cat has taken care of anything I might have needed to worry about.
(It was something like that, anyhow.)
Steve told me that when you dream of a building, especially one which you enter and move about in, it’s often useful to think of the building as a representation of your self — at least, your self-of-the-moment. A physical manifestation of your state of mind.
This made me think back to a dream I’d already reported to him, a dream which I’d had a year or so earlier, a time when I really was feeling in a state of crisis. In that dream:
I run from the nighttime street into a church — a big old Gothic cathedral, really, built of carved stone, the kind of cathedral with shadowy corners and dark recesses in high arched ceilings, its interior lit only by candles and lanterns and dim light filtering through the stained-glass windows. I’ve run into the church for sanctuary (outside, it is raining cars — which sounds ridiculous at one level, but completely terrifying at another). Panic-stricken, I am. Surely I’ll be safe inside the church. But then I realize that outside the windows, flashing lights announce some sort of police/fire emergency. I look up at one of the domed ceilings and there, hanging by a noose, is a nun…
(I’m not Catholic, by the way. As though that helps make any better sense of this dream!)
Have you had striking dreams of buildings that you remember? If not, given your state of mind at the moment, what sort of building would you dream of?
Update (Weds., 2009-09-02 12:20pm): When I wrote the above, I thought the question was about the sorts of places people haunt in their dreams. Based on the comments so far, though, it seems fair to say that the places haunt the people, not the other way around!
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PS: The image at the top of this post is of the Treehouse at Alnwick Garden, in northern England, about halfway between Newcastle and Edinburgh. (Click the photo for more info.) It doesn’t look very much like the treehouse in my dream — it’s waaay bigger, and more obviously designed with intention. It just looks very cool.
DarcKnyt says
I’ve not dreamed about a building in which I move about for a while, but last time I did, it was a clap-trap old lake house, like in a former resort area-cum-residential area, on a jade water lake in the woods. Weird. Not something I would’ve bought for myself, in reality, and nothing I seemed proud to own in the dream.
I have no idea how that relates to my state of mind at the time, though; mostly because I can’t remember my state of mind at the time.
That is one cool shot of a treehouse, though.
John says
Darc: A big YEAH on the photo. I don’t know if you’re a gamer, or if so, what sort of games you prefer, but my first thought when I saw it was: Myst and its follow-ups, including the Riven sequel.
If I close my eyes, I can see that old lake house you describe. Love this sort of thought exercise!
marta says
How crazy because last night I dreamed of a house. An old mansion with huge rooms and high ceilings. But it wasn’t well-taken care of and it wasn’t mine. The two women who owned it were trying to sell it for 9 million dollars, and that seemed laughable. But someone in the dream said that someone would pay that. Someone surely would.
John says
marta: You saw the original Matrix movie, right? The house you describe here reminds me of the house or apartment in that movie where they all went and Morpheus was captured. Sort of dusty, peeling-paint, tattered velvet curtains, Paris-in-the-Nth-Arondissement…
It would really freak me out if you said the two women were characters you recognized from one of your books.
marta says
I must confess I’ve never seen the Matrix.
John says
marta: Not to everyone’s taste, that’s for sure. After I posted the earlier comment it occurred to me that you might not have seen it and went looking around for a video clip or even a still image from the scene but came up empty-handed.
Froog says
Well, I did recently dream of a house I’d been hoping to rent – but that was a more specific sort of landlord-negotiation-anxiety dream rather than a general ‘mental landscape’ dream.
For me, it was always a room. From about the age of 12, if not a bit earlier, I fairly regularly used to dream of a single room that my ideal study/hideaway/retreat. Usually this room was located in my school, but occasionally in my home. Oddly enough, although the great thing about it was that it was a secret – my secret – I don’t recall ever dreaming in any detail about how the place was actually accessed; it was enough to somehow know that only I knew the whereabouts of the hidden door. I think I rarely if ever saw myself enter, and never leave. It was a fairly obvious expression of a desire for privacy and solitude. The curious – inconsistent – thing about this vision was that although I’m sure I usually conceived of it as being somehow embedded in the heart of a building, it almost always had tall sash windows that filled it with dazzling light.
In later life, I think, this dream has become transmuted into occasional visions of an ideal pub. That’s where I find my solace now. The ideal pub, of course, has only small windows, which are frosted or silvered and admit very little light at all. Curious change, that.
Miriam says
Last time I dreamed of a building, a group of people and I went into the basement and found a subterranean entrance that led to caves full of weird things.
Don’t know what that says about my state of mind… :)
Sherri says
Hi, John–I’ve been lurking for a little while, but had to come out for this one. I have house dreams a lot, sometimes every night for weeks. The most common one is going into a strange house, always in varying states of decay, and finding unexpected and interesting rooms.
Another is where I move into a house only to find that there is a door which adjoins a busy public place–City Hall, a mall, a park–and I there’s no way to lock the door. Invariably, I tell myself there’s nothing I can do, and to trust that no strangers will come through the door into my private space. Of course I worry about it through the whole dream.
Sometimes I dream I’m trying to find my way home in a city, and the city feels like a house, if that makes any sense. Maybe I should go get some therapy. :)
s.o.m.e.one's brudder says
Not sure how mine work out this way, or what this means of course, but the most recurrent usually involve not a house, or a single building, but vast campuses. Usually they are the emotional equal of either Pratt, or certain places in Philly. I’ve had the same campuses recur, and always find myself prowling around looking for…something. When I wake up I can’t reasonably explain either what I was looking for, nor what the places looked like in the dream. Given that I am an architect, what does it mean that I can’t illustrate a space that I did actually dream? Hmmmmm.
s.o.m.e.one's brudder says
By the way, Myst/Riven/Alnwick Garden definitely the same aesthetic.
John says
Froog: LOVE the idea of dreaming (repeatedly, yet!) about an individual room, as long as it’s not a closet.
Although it’s true — and mysterious — that there’s apparently been a switch from light to darkness, I did notice that the underlying theme of privacy/aloneness lingers. The switch may have happened whenever your subconscious realized that gigantic windows do not a good privacy make. Of course there are other buildings with dim lighting and small windows, but it’s not odd at all to me that you might find pubs, especially, to be ideal.
Miriam: I don’t know what it says, either. And yet…
The Missus once underwent one of those past-life regression demos (which, FWIW, she found very effective). The regressionist, I guess you could call her, had TM close her eyes, relax, all that… and then she talked her down a flight of stairs, into a rather dark basement. Actually it was a hallway, lined with closed doors. One by one, she opened each door…
…which sounds an awful lot like your caverns full of weird things, hmm?
Sherri: Every one of those three types of building-dreams feels familiar to me. In fact, I had a city-house dream last night. I was in a looong narrow building which I somehow knew was New Orleans (a city which I have visited exactly twice — and never before last year). Like the Alnwick Garden Treehouse, this “building” was made (at least on the interior) of some sort of orange-ish wood, which was arranged in vertical floor-to-ceiling slats; there were big rooms at each end and on one side of a central hallway. The room at the far end had a dumbwaiter for going to the upper floors, and there was a line of people waiting their turn to clamber inside it. This room also had only three walls. On the open side, a short flight of stairs the whole width of the room led down into a park — which was also inside the building (and sunlit, to boot).
Your dream about the door you can’t lock sounds like an utter nightmare to me.
(And welcome — and thanks for de-lurking!)
brudder: I have sometimes visited some of those campuses in my own dreams; I recognize them in hindsight as various foamboard (etc.) projects you did when you were at… uh… at Drexel, I think. The prison. The, was it an underground school? with classrooms in a big computer network? or were those two separate projects?
All: I wonder if people in pre-urban societies dreamt of tents, clearings in the forest, caves…?
John says
brudder: PS — is there a term for that “aesthetic”? (I know, I know: probably something like The New Arborism.)
cynth says
I used to have this dream of walking down rickety and steep basement stairs. When I get to the bottom of the stairs, the basement is cluttered with lots and lots of boxes, not unlike it sounds, your treehouse! But the ominous thing about this dark, dank place is that there is very little light and I need to walk around down there (it’s dark, and damp! and it’s got spiders in it!–sorry). Anyway, perched upon one of the tallest towers of boxes, is a very large, black bird, crow-like in appearance. It watches me as I try to move around with black, beady eyes. I used to wake up from this dream at the old homestead and wonder what it meant. I haven’t had it for a very long while, though, so perhaps I’m done with it…or this will revive it, in which case, THANKS, John. Just kidding…
Jules says
Yeah, I have. I suddenly remembered recently that there’s this house I often visit in my dreams. It’s an old, complicated Victorian with lots of nooks and crannies and windy stairs and tiny rooms — and it’s a maze. And kinda creepy, I think. Maybe ghost-y. …Interesting what the therapist said. Hmmm…
Miriam says
Hmm, indeed… Was there an albino zombie shark behind one of her doors? ‘Cause there was one in my dream. (I wish I was kidding.)
Mostly the buildings I dream of are large and rambling with no consistent floor plan. Lots of stairs and ramps and balconies and such.
I LOVE that tree house, btw. :)
John says
Miriam: large and rambling with no consisten floor plan. Lots of stairs and ramps and balconies and such.
You mean something like this? :)
John says
Jules: …whoops, meant to address the previous comment to both you and Miriam!
For someone who specializes in kids’ books, you do have a dark side, don’t you???
jules says
YES! That would be not unlike the house in my dreams!
Now, see that “dark side” comment is all the more reason to write this book we’re writing. Mwahahaha.
John says
Jules: On behalf of the rest of your future readers, I shudder to think what that last comment implies.