Sunday, September 2, 2012

Forgetting the address of the guest house of this world

It's happened again. I've set off on a walk around a city I don't know and now I can't remember the name or street address of the place where I am staying. I've left my cell phone in the room, so I can't call even if I had the number in the address book, which seems unlikely.
    No grid pattern to the streets here. They curve and twist, and it's hard to keep track of all the changing names. I have walked far from the quietly genteel neighborhood where I am staying. In dark alleys and loading areas around the big train station ahead, men huddle, waiting for something, perhaps for work for a day.
    I'm not all that worried about finding my way back to where I started, because I feel my homing instinct will get me there. I have no mental image of the geography, but feel in my body that I have walked two sides of a huge rectangle, and need only to walk the other two sides. I had better keep moving because not it is snowing.
   It takes little time to get back to a place I recognize. Across a busy multi-lane road that runs towards green mountains, I see a street of pleasant Victorian houses with a one-way arrow pointing my way. I passed this earlier, en route the the B&B in the next street where I am staying. There's a gap in the traffic. I hurry across, and am soon back at the B&B, inspecting the little sign by the front gate: Deucas Manor. My host has permed hair and the airs and prejudices of the petit bourgeois. She won't hear of me going to community theater when I announce that as my intention for later; I'll go anyway.
    Why am I here? There's a clue in the things I have arranged on my dresser. They include tiny black-and-white photographs of myself as a baby and a young child, and others of family members. I seem to be on a quest for my origins.


No strong feelings around this dream. It was the last of a series in which I was country-hopping overnight. In a previous dream, I was staying in a borrowed apartment in a city in Eastern Europe. The word "Deucas" has no immediate resonance with me, though word-play brings up a range of possible associations. I don't expect to stay at a B&B called Deucas Manor, but I never say never about future travel options, especially when my dream self has gone to certain places ahead of me.
     The theme of not being able to remember where I'm staying has been quite common in my sleep dreams, over the years, and that is rich in associations. I have photos like the ones in my dream in a little leather file on my desk; I have been on a quest to remember and write about certain episodes from very early in this life. The photos in the dream are different; I am all but certain I have not seen them outside the dream.
     I find a metaphor for life in what I might otherwise tag as a rather "small" dream. I am a visitor in the guest house of this world, needing to keep track of where I started in each life adventure.

2 comments:

  1. If it was my dream I would associate guest house with my body. I get that a lot.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I am always ready to look at the dream house as the body,and because dreams have many levels, many different perspectives may all be relevant. However, the "house=body" association doesn't take me anywhere very interesting with this dream, where there is a wealth of transpersonal information (in the summary and beyond it) that I'll continue to track.

    ReplyDelete