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January 14, 2004

house dreams

when the pager woke me up this morning, i remember being in the midst of a house dream.

i have house dreams a lot, and they almost always take place in one particular house.

it's my grandparent's house in upstate new york. this was a huge farmhouse; someone once told me it was built around the time of the civil war. my grandparents bought it sometime after all four of my uncles were born. it was situated on a good sized plot of land, most of which was rented out to a local farmer named bruce who took me on his tractor once when i was a little girl (so little that i think i was only wearing underpants).

the porch was inhabited by dozens of farm cats in the summer, mostly kittens. across the street was another patch of land covered in woods; my grandfather would mow a path through the woods leading down to a stream paved with large, round cobblestones. when i was little, and even when i wasn't so little, "across the street" was a magical fairyland inhabited by sprites and nymphs; the kittens were my playthings, and a favorite went with me everywhere.

there were dirt roads behind the house leading out into fields, looping around in ways that seemed strange to me; crumbling outbuildings with mysterious farm-specific purposes, some inhabited by the alluring carcasses of old cars and other tantalizing junk. "across the street" was also the graveyard for many old cars-- maybe spending time in the presence of dead triumphs and volkswagens during my formative years has something to do with my old car fascination now.

the house itself was so large that you really could wander through it, much as i do in my dreams. there was a room specifically for the grand piano, furnished with a formal portrait of my grandmother and an antique sofa; there was a darkroom and a tuba room and my grandfather's workshop where he built tuba mutes and restored old cameras. there were attic bedrooms with slanted ceilings, a front and a back staircase, and a front door that no one ever used. there was a cedar closet that stayed cool in the summer, and a formal front hall that housed the organ that now resides in my house.

the tv rested on a large, low table that someone once told me was used for butchering pigs. the porch included a room, decrepit and falling in on itself most of my life, later restored, call the "cheese room"-- i guess cheese was once made there.

i can remember more detail about this house than i can almost any other. in my dreams, it changes, and rarely looks the way it did in life, but i always know when i'm in that house.

anyway, in last night's dream, it actually looked pretty true to life. i don't remember much, but i think i was looking for a bathroom (and sure enough when i woke up, i had to pee). Crazy Guy Who Dissed Me-- you know, the schitzophrenic guy i went out with a couple of times last year-- was there, oddly.

Posted by lisa at January 14, 2004 07:59 PM | TrackBack

Comments

whoa.

don't house dreams symbolize the body?

'cause, crap... that doesn't bode well for my interpretation of why schizo boy was there.

beautiful description of the farm house, btw. it sounds unbelievably amazing.

Posted by: christa on January 15, 2004 11:05 AM

i think houses are symbols of the self, not the body, in dreams. that's just my layman's understanding of jung based on some reading done many years ago, though.

he wasn't the only person there, for the record, just the only one i remember. and he was just directing me to a bathroom :)

Posted by: lisa on January 15, 2004 11:22 AM

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