Houses: dreamed, real, imaginary, past, lost

[kate_schaefer]

The other night, I dreamed that the house I used to share with Gary Farber and Anna Vargo was about to be sold, and our old landlady wanted us to get our stuff out before she showed it to buyers. In the dream, as in reality, we hadn't lived there, nor with each other, for more than twenty years. Anna was still alive (a bonus with this sort of dream), and Gary lived in Colorado, as he does, which was walking distance from Seattle, as it is not. We still had stuff in the house: books we'd left on the shelves and on tables, boxes of fabric mixed in with boxes belonging to the landlady, beach balls in the pool. The atrium pool with its great arched glass roof was the central feature of the house; all the rooms opened up from the pool, with very narrow walkways at the edge of the pool. This was rather inconvenient, especially when one of us was in a hurry to get from a bedroom to the kitchen, or from the kitchen to the dining room. In fact, now that I think of it, the floor plan was rather like that in the game Clue, with the pool substituting for the spot in the middle where the solution cards are placed.

Of course, none of the houses where Gary, Anna, and I lived in varying combinations resembled this house in the slightest. That's not odd, for a house in a dream. What was odd was that this was the first time I'd dreamed this particular house. There are several imaginary houses that show up over and over in my dreams, and two in particular for dreams with Anna and Gary. One of those is three floors high, a block away from my current house in Wallingford. We have the first and third floors, with a narrow stairway to get us past the luxurious second floor. The kitchens -- there are two kitchens, long and skinny, side by side, of which we use one -- are on the first floor, along with the garage, which belongs to the second floor tenant. Upstairs, we have several small, low-ceilinged rooms, with hardly any furniture. That house vaguely resembles the apartment on Capitol Hill where we lived in 1979 and 1980, but only vaguely. The real apartment was on the low-ceilinged second floor of a one-and-a-half story bungalow, with two small apartments on the first floor. We had one normal kitchen, and there was no garage.

I've dreamed the imaginary house so many times that I can remember it better than the real one; I've been in the house in those dreams much more recently than I've been in the real house.

The other house is more fuzzy. Sometimes I share it with Gary and Anna, sometimes with other ex-roommates. It's in New Haven, and it also has an eccentric, multi-story layout, but it's much larger than the two-kitchen house. I think it's based on a house in Wooster Square where several friends of mine lived for some years, and where I lived one summer. Neither Anna nor Gary ever went there.

Other houses I frequent in my dream world: my aunt Carol's house in Florida, built around an atrium like the one in this most recent dream, but with an open courtyard in the center rather than a roofed pool. Again, my aunt's house in Florida is nothing like this house; again, the layout and individual rooms of the dreamed house are consistent from dream to dream over many years. My grandparents' house in Cleveland, which closely resembles my grandparents' real house, except that there's a secret passageway in the stairwell leading to a huge attic, much bigger than the real attic, and sometimes in the dreams I climb out on to the roof and look into the backyard, a habit in the dream, something I never did in real life. The house I grew up in maps closely in dreams to its real self as well, but the house I live in now and have owned for twenty years changes all the time.

I'd written this much a few days ago, then let it sit until a conversation about dreamed houses in the newsgroup rasff today. Yes, I could have posted it to rasff, in accordance with akirlu's fatwa, but this audience is closer to who I feel like talking to than that audience is.