myveryown_nemesis | and now, for something completely different...

This one, I'm going to post to my Bluesky and my Facebook account, because I want to know about other folks' "Dream Houses."

I'm not talking about Dream Homes, mind you, I mean the houses that you encounter in your dreams. Do you go back to the same dream space time and time again? Or is your dream space populated with lots of houses? Are they scary? Or are they comfortable?

Here is my description of the House that lives in my dreamscape. It's someplace where dream-Me often goes:

My House is very complex. It has a basement level that dream-Me won't enter anymore. In the first House dream I had, I was curious enough to go down the ramshackle stairs. I don't even remember what I saw, but I woke up feeling that I was being swallowed whole by something that was constricting me from all sides; I suppose you could compare it to being swallowed by a snake, though I've never been swallowed by a snake, so take that comparison with a grain of salt.

In the early dreams (I've been having these dreams for all of my adult life), the House belonged to my mother, but it is not the house I grew up in. In later dreams, it is usually a house I'm moving into. The glimpses of the exterior indicate that it is an old home of three stories; the interior tells a different story. There are two levels of living space, and sometimes the bedrooms are on a third level, but sometimes they are in the extension. I've never seen the exterior of the extension, but it is built over flowing water (definitely Frank Lloyd Wright vibes), and I am not comfortable with the room that the creek flows through. There is something dark and green in there that does not have good intentions.

My bedroom is always the end link of a chain of three rooms. The first room is a large, airy bedroom, and my room is small and cozy. The room in the middle? You have to walk through a field of psychic energy that is terrifying. It's not the same feeling as being swallowed that the basement has, but it's like walking through an ocean of ghosts, both horrifying and mournful. Then there is the attic. IT IS HUGE. But not terrifying. It's easy to get lost up there, and there is more than one access point, so you don't always leave the way you came. When I'm up there, I'm usually looking for something I've lost. (Yeah, the attic definitely now sounds like a metaphor for ADHD, doesn't it?)

This dream space has a lot of stairs. I opened a door in the kitchen that I thought was the pantry, and it turned out to be a rickety spiral staircase (not the same ramshackle stairs from the first dream, but those were also in the kitchen) going down to the basement, and I slammed that door hard and fast. There is a large main course of stairs, and in the extension, there are several half levels. I'd love to see an exterior shot of that extension someday.

I don't think that my House exists in "normal" space and time as it appears in my dreams (it would be a bit much, even for an HGTV weird homes show), but there are some parts of it that feel like they do belong out here, in non-dream space. I have no idea if this last paragraph makes any sense.

Anyway, if you've read this, share with the House(s) that reside in your dreamscape. I'm curious.