Dreaming About a House

The house has the steadiest reading in the whole dictionary: a great many traditions take it to stand for the dreamer. Rooms become areas of life, the condition of the building becomes the condition of the self, and rooms nobody knew were there become parts of you that have gone unvisited. It is a tidy system, and it is worth knowing exactly where it stops working.

Room by room

• An attic or upper floor. Memory and thought, the material kept but not often handled.
• A cellar or basement. What has been put out of sight, which is why so many dreamers describe dread on the stairs going down.
• The kitchen. Nourishment and family life, the room that feeds everyone else in the building.
• A locked door. Something withheld, sometimes from other people and sometimes from yourself.
• Extra rooms you have never seen. Among the most frequently reported images anywhere, read as unused capacity and usually described afterwards as thrilling rather than frightening.

Where the neat system fails

The house-as-self convention grew up in nineteenth and twentieth century interpretation. It is elegant and endlessly repeated, but it is a convention rather than a discovery, and it competes with a much duller rival: people dream about houses because people have spent thousands of hours inside them. A childhood address turning up at night may be memory doing routine maintenance.

Damage gets over-read more than anything else here. Cracks, leaks and collapse are traditionally taken as strain, and strain in a dream is a feeling rather than a forecast. It says nothing whatsoever about your actual property or your safety.

Whose house was it

Begin with the address. The building you grew up in arrives loaded with material no general reading can know about, and a stranger's house is a different image again, normally read as a life you are trying on rather than living. If the place was unfamiliar and yet felt like yours, that combination deserves more attention than any single room in it.