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.