We begin to see the truth of it in dreams in which we discover that our home has an extra level, or many of them. I have yet to meet a dreamer who claims to have discovered all five hundred and forty floors. Yet when we discover even a single room we had not opened before, we discover that we are more than we know.
To spin from Norse gods to the Bible, in the dream house,
there are many mansions - extra stories and hidden rooms and basements, wings of possibility.
The state of a dream
house may reflect the state of the body. If the dream house is in need of
repairs, or there's a problem with the plumbing or the furnace, you may want to consider whether there is a health advisory concerning a corresponding part of the body..
Different rooms in the dream house may represent different
functions, of body or soul. The kitchen may represent the digestive system, or
the state of the family, or of our creativity (since the kitchen is the place
where we cook things up and often the hub of family life).
When I'm living in an apartment in my dreams (which I have not done in waking life for 30 years) I ask myself "what am I a part of, or apart from?"
When I'm living in an apartment in my dreams (which I have not done in waking life for 30 years) I ask myself "what am I a part of, or apart from?"
I love the sense of
expanding life possibility that comes when I am in a dream house that has levels
or rooms beyond any physical house I know.
I'm intrigued by how
life memories help design my dream houses, which are sometimes composites of
several past places where I have lived.
When I find myself
moving to a new place in my dreams, I'll ask myself whether this could be
preview of a literal house move (maybe one I haven't yet considered in ordinary
life). I'll also ask: what changes in my life situation are in store for me in
a larger sense?
In dreams, we often
find ourselves back in the old place, a childhood home or a home we shared with
a former partner. Being back in the old place could be a journey back across
time, or into a parallel reality in which a parallel self never left the old
situation - and/or an invitation to reclaim vital soul energy and identity we
left behind when we made a major life change.
There are dream houses
that are not of this world, places of learning and adventure and initiation in
the Imaginal Realm. These may be places of encounter with a second self, an
aspect of our multidimensional Self. Over many years, I have found myself
traveling in dreams to an old house on a canal in Europe, the home of an
eccentric scholar who is something of a magus, with an extraordinary library
and collection of working tools of magic. It took me a couple of visits before
I recognized that this dream house belongs to me,
Jung's dream of a
"many-storied house" led him for the first time to the concept of the
"collective unconscious" (and also to his rift with Freud, who
refused to accept the depth of this dream). Jung found in his multi-level dream
house a "structural diagram of the human psyche." In the dream, he
became aware that there was a story below the respectable middle-class
environment in which he was living. When he went downstairs, he found
successive stories below his previous consciousness: a darkened floor with
medieval furnishings, and below that a beautifully vaulted Roman cellar, and
down below that - when he lifted a stone slab by a ring - a primal cave with
scattered bones and pottery and the two skulls.
Image: The so-called "Wooden Gagster" house in Archangel, Russia, built without permit or architect, demolished in 2008. Photo credit: Wikipedia, Mr 850
