what I consider to be bad dreams for over a month, I've started having one of my favorite dreams again.
I call it The House Dream:
I don't know as I've ever told anyone about the house dream. In it is, obviously, a house.
I'm exploring this house as if we've just moved in, we being my family as it when I was about 11.
It's fairly ordinary on the outside, other than the atrium/greenhouse on the back side. There are porches that go all the way around the house, with doors going into the atrium and back out again on the opposite side.
Inside the first floor is rather ordinary, a large kitchen at the back on the east side, dining room on the west side, family room at the front on the west and 'parlor' at the front on the east side.
A stairway leads up to the second floor from between the two front rooms, and smaller stairs lead up from both the kitchen and dining rooms.
I've explored this house numerous times over the past 38 years. The first floor is fairly constant, things such as the family room and parlor may change sides, or the front door is different, but fairly constant.
The second floor is my parent's and their rooms can only be accessed from the front stairway, or so they think. This floor never changes. The stair leads up to the hall in the center of the floor. The front room runs the breadth of the house and is their bedroom. The second room is the dressing room/closet. The third room is the toilette and the last is the bath.
The basement changes. One time it may be a simple root cellar, the next a dungeon with walls of squared rock chinked with slimey dirt and the next a laboratory straight from a horror movie.
The third floor is the childrens' bedrooms, none of which can be reached from any of the others. The hallways are on the outside of the house, so none of the childrens' bedrooms have outside windows.
The eldest get their choice, and I always choose one that actually has a window and door that looks out on the atrium.
No-one but I can see or find the fourth floor.
This is my favorite, it's a library, full of books that seem to have been there - some for centuries.
The reason I choose the room that I do is because whether I'm in my room or in the library, if I'm sitting in the window seat, everyone thinks I'm in my room, because they can't see the fourth floor.
Sometimes there is another floor between the third and fourth, and it contains rooms of curiosity, filled with collections of oddities that the former owner/original builder of the house had collected.
Sometimes I could bring a sibling to that floor, but not often.
It's nice sometimes, having something that no one else knows about.
I love this dream, because when I start having it again, things start going better and I feel as though I've slept better than I had been. I also love it for the exploration and the possibilities of what that exploration may bring. A new book, a different room, a never seen view.
Tonight I hope to go into the atrium again. It's been a while since I've done more than gaze at it from the third or fourth floor porch. Last night I saw the pool.
