5:41 p.m. 20 April 2002
I'm going to tell you about my dream house.
I don't mean like the Barbie dream house, with flowerbeds and an elevator and everything pink. Not the house I would want, the house that would be dreamy to live in.
No. I'm going to tell you about the house that is in my dreams. This great rambling monster of a house, in which every staircase leads to an emotion, and the pieces are both familiar and unfriendly. My uncanny house. My dream-house.
Not all of this house appears in every dream. Often I have house dreams that include an entirely different house or houses. But this morning what I realized, as I was waking up, is that very often dreams taking place in a house are taking place in this one, this same house, just different bits of it. I find this extraordinary, because every time I come to this dream-house I think it is new. Every time I think it is a creation of that dream. After all, I never have repeating dreams. Not even nightmares. But this house somehow seems seems to exist outside of individual dreams. It is the house through which my sleeping brain perpetually wanders.
There's a big expanse of lawn outside, to start with. A huge circular drive, like in one of those old railroad money houses that have now been converted into museums and hotels. And a hill sloping down to somewhere. There are fenced off bits, too, under trees where it gets dark, and somewhere I know, because I have seen it, there is a small family cemetery. Oddly, though gardens and grounds are often the focus of my waking attention, I cannot right now recall much about the outside of this house. I think perhaps that it serves an interior function, not an exterior one.
The front door is large and looming. From the inside, the hall is dim, and stretches so far back in front of you that you cannot see the doors that go off it. There are small tables with marble statues on them and heavy lintels and molding, but often this part of the house is so dim that you can see none of that. Sometimes the house has aged, and all the decoration has gone, and this hall is a yawning, cavernous, decayed space, echoing with dead bugs and dust.
To the right, in the hall, is an enormous heavy staircase that curves up and up. It is the main staircase, but it is not the only one. This is the staircase that was, in former times, shown to company. It is carpeted in its prime, but not when it is decayed. When it is decayed, it is not safe to walk on it. The banisters on this staircase are so huge that my whole hand will not cover them. They are monstrously heavy. And the walls here feel as if they weigh down upon my shoulders, so enormous and so grand are they.
One place the staircase can take you to -- perhaps the second floor -- is a huge ballroom and a conservatory. This is the lightest place in the house. If there are people in the house besides me, this is one of the only places they will be. They stand in the shadows usually, but sometimes they congregate politely on the floor, talking and carrying little cups and plates. The color scheme is predominately a muted pink, but not in any pleasant, homey sort of way. The flowers are ageless, but not silk. They are dream-flowers. This place is no longer accessible when the house is old. It has fallen down.
There are halls here too, and if you walk down them, you will encounter a chapel floor with a few pews and an alter. The woodwork here, like the rest of the house, is heavy and dark, baroque. Perhaps, now that I think about it, it is walnut. Or oak. There are people here only sometimes, and it is not a place I visit often. There are no windows on the sides, but far up above the alter, above a narrow ledge running around under the high ceiling, is a rose window.
If you go back to the stairs and go up another floor, you come to bedrooms. There are too many to understand, and they may have people in them. Some are grand and some are not as grand. And here is where the grand staircase stops, but there are two, smaller staircases diverging and leading to yet another floor above this one -- the attic floor.
One staircase takes you to the real attic, a series of tiny, interconnecting rooms under the eaves and in the main part of the attic, from which sometimes the grounds may be seen. Often they are hot or stuffy, but they only magnify the preserved or still feeling of the rest of the house. They can be frightening, and it is possible for the floors to be unsafe, but mainly they are simply attic. There were once servants here, and sometimes you can see traces of them -- a faded quilt, a broken rocking chair. Sometimes I seem to be a servant, and that washbasin is my washbasin, but sometimes I have just happened to arrive when there is no one there.
The other attic staircase is unreliable. I think, actually, I am not supposed to ascend it, but merely to contemplate it. There is one landing where you may switch over to the first staircase, and go to the regular attic, but if you persist on the right-hand side, where you started out, you will be taken to any number of shadowy places. Sometimes you find yourself on the tiny ledge above the chapel, perched dangerously above an aghast congregation. Sometimes it is only the conservatory again, but you have come out in the corner. Sometimes an even older attic that everyone has forgotten about entirely, and where no sun has touched for a hundred years, full of cracked glass and dead objects. (Once there was a group of people up here who had been forgotten for a hundred years, too. Children grown old.) And sometimes the places this staircase takes you cannot be seen at all, and the dream ends in some sort of shadowy unknowing or a horrible fall.
So back down the attic stairs, then, back down the main staircase, back down to the hall with its incomprehensible doors. Here, tucked away in the corner is another door, and that leads to yet another staircase, and that one leads down. Down first to a kitchen / pantry level, but I never stop there. Then down further, and the basement, and suddenly I understand that this house has in fact been built entirely on the remnants of another house, perhaps a hundred other houses, that have sunk deep into the ground or been buried under its ponderous baroque weight.
For here are yet more interconnected rooms, a maze of rooms reduced to their concrete walls and rotting wood, full of cracked stone and plaster and inconceivably dark. Here are things scuttling in the shadows, here are bits and pieces of forgotten bedsteads and dressers and tables, not only left in the dust, but completely dead, rotting and collapsed. But here, also are the signs that this was once the upstairs floor of some other house -- here is wallpaper, pretty pink flowers hanging in a few ancient strips off the wall. Here is a window where I can almost see the sun shining through in the morning, almost see waking in that bedstead that tilts crazily to the floor in the corner.
And here is the thing -- I remember this buried house. I do not just imagine the sunlight coming through that window, I remember it. This was a bedroom I slept in, that, though I do not remember it now, was a living room where I read. Sometimes I forget that, and these rooms are incomprehensible, but sometimes the shock of realizing that I have come to my own place, buried, hits me fully, and I am afraid.
There is water seeping through the ceilings of these rooms, and they slope up and down and through doors sometimes are impossible angles. Sometimes it is flooded, and always there is a point at which you can go no farther. At which there has been a fall of rock and plaster or a huge flood, or simply it is too dark and too crazy to even continue. Through there, though, if I am remembering this time, I know that there are other rooms. I know what has been buried there, smelling of death and dirt and age.
Can you hear things in the shadows down here? Can you here the drip and the squelch of the water? Can you here the occasional soft, dirty fall of plaster a long way off? I can.
I can hear those things throughout the house. This house is, in fact, already decayed. This house is a ghost of itself. This house is a hundred thousand ghosts. When I wander in this house, the things I feel are the weight of the past, either here or about to come. If it is not decayed, I smell its death -- or my death -- coming on the wind. If it is, it has merely borne out its original promise.
Every time I come here it is as if I have come here for the first time, even when in the story of the dream, I have been here forever, but every time I also know, somewhere in my brain, that it has always been here. Waiting for me.
I'm going to tell you about my dream house.
I don't mean like the Barbie dream house, with flowerbeds and an elevator and everything pink. Not the house I would want, the house that would be dreamy to live in.
No. I'm going to tell you about the house that is in my dreams. This great rambling monster of a house, in which every staircase leads to an emotion, and the pieces are both familiar and unfriendly. My uncanny house. My dream-house.
Not all of this house appears in every dream. Often I have house dreams that include an entirely different house or houses. But this morning what I realized, as I was waking up, is that very often dreams taking place in a house are taking place in this one, this same house, just different bits of it. I find this extraordinary, because every time I come to this dream-house I think it is new. Every time I think it is a creation of that dream. After all, I never have repeating dreams. Not even nightmares. But this house somehow seems seems to exist outside of individual dreams. It is the house through which my sleeping brain perpetually wanders.
There's a big expanse of lawn outside, to start with. A huge circular drive, like in one of those old railroad money houses that have now been converted into museums and hotels. And a hill sloping down to somewhere. There are fenced off bits, too, under trees where it gets dark, and somewhere I know, because I have seen it, there is a small family cemetery. Oddly, though gardens and grounds are often the focus of my waking attention, I cannot right now recall much about the outside of this house. I think perhaps that it serves an interior function, not an exterior one.
The front door is large and looming. From the inside, the hall is dim, and stretches so far back in front of you that you cannot see the doors that go off it. There are small tables with marble statues on them and heavy lintels and molding, but often this part of the house is so dim that you can see none of that. Sometimes the house has aged, and all the decoration has gone, and this hall is a yawning, cavernous, decayed space, echoing with dead bugs and dust.
To the right, in the hall, is an enormous heavy staircase that curves up and up. It is the main staircase, but it is not the only one. This is the staircase that was, in former times, shown to company. It is carpeted in its prime, but not when it is decayed. When it is decayed, it is not safe to walk on it. The banisters on this staircase are so huge that my whole hand will not cover them. They are monstrously heavy. And the walls here feel as if they weigh down upon my shoulders, so enormous and so grand are they.
One place the staircase can take you to -- perhaps the second floor -- is a huge ballroom and a conservatory. This is the lightest place in the house. If there are people in the house besides me, this is one of the only places they will be. They stand in the shadows usually, but sometimes they congregate politely on the floor, talking and carrying little cups and plates. The color scheme is predominately a muted pink, but not in any pleasant, homey sort of way. The flowers are ageless, but not silk. They are dream-flowers. This place is no longer accessible when the house is old. It has fallen down.
There are halls here too, and if you walk down them, you will encounter a chapel floor with a few pews and an alter. The woodwork here, like the rest of the house, is heavy and dark, baroque. Perhaps, now that I think about it, it is walnut. Or oak. There are people here only sometimes, and it is not a place I visit often. There are no windows on the sides, but far up above the alter, above a narrow ledge running around under the high ceiling, is a rose window.
If you go back to the stairs and go up another floor, you come to bedrooms. There are too many to understand, and they may have people in them. Some are grand and some are not as grand. And here is where the grand staircase stops, but there are two, smaller staircases diverging and leading to yet another floor above this one -- the attic floor.
One staircase takes you to the real attic, a series of tiny, interconnecting rooms under the eaves and in the main part of the attic, from which sometimes the grounds may be seen. Often they are hot or stuffy, but they only magnify the preserved or still feeling of the rest of the house. They can be frightening, and it is possible for the floors to be unsafe, but mainly they are simply attic. There were once servants here, and sometimes you can see traces of them -- a faded quilt, a broken rocking chair. Sometimes I seem to be a servant, and that washbasin is my washbasin, but sometimes I have just happened to arrive when there is no one there.
The other attic staircase is unreliable. I think, actually, I am not supposed to ascend it, but merely to contemplate it. There is one landing where you may switch over to the first staircase, and go to the regular attic, but if you persist on the right-hand side, where you started out, you will be taken to any number of shadowy places. Sometimes you find yourself on the tiny ledge above the chapel, perched dangerously above an aghast congregation. Sometimes it is only the conservatory again, but you have come out in the corner. Sometimes an even older attic that everyone has forgotten about entirely, and where no sun has touched for a hundred years, full of cracked glass and dead objects. (Once there was a group of people up here who had been forgotten for a hundred years, too. Children grown old.) And sometimes the places this staircase takes you cannot be seen at all, and the dream ends in some sort of shadowy unknowing or a horrible fall.
So back down the attic stairs, then, back down the main staircase, back down to the hall with its incomprehensible doors. Here, tucked away in the corner is another door, and that leads to yet another staircase, and that one leads down. Down first to a kitchen / pantry level, but I never stop there. Then down further, and the basement, and suddenly I understand that this house has in fact been built entirely on the remnants of another house, perhaps a hundred other houses, that have sunk deep into the ground or been buried under its ponderous baroque weight.
For here are yet more interconnected rooms, a maze of rooms reduced to their concrete walls and rotting wood, full of cracked stone and plaster and inconceivably dark. Here are things scuttling in the shadows, here are bits and pieces of forgotten bedsteads and dressers and tables, not only left in the dust, but completely dead, rotting and collapsed. But here, also are the signs that this was once the upstairs floor of some other house -- here is wallpaper, pretty pink flowers hanging in a few ancient strips off the wall. Here is a window where I can almost see the sun shining through in the morning, almost see waking in that bedstead that tilts crazily to the floor in the corner.
And here is the thing -- I remember this buried house. I do not just imagine the sunlight coming through that window, I remember it. This was a bedroom I slept in, that, though I do not remember it now, was a living room where I read. Sometimes I forget that, and these rooms are incomprehensible, but sometimes the shock of realizing that I have come to my own place, buried, hits me fully, and I am afraid.
There is water seeping through the ceilings of these rooms, and they slope up and down and through doors sometimes are impossible angles. Sometimes it is flooded, and always there is a point at which you can go no farther. At which there has been a fall of rock and plaster or a huge flood, or simply it is too dark and too crazy to even continue. Through there, though, if I am remembering this time, I know that there are other rooms. I know what has been buried there, smelling of death and dirt and age.
Can you hear things in the shadows down here? Can you here the drip and the squelch of the water? Can you here the occasional soft, dirty fall of plaster a long way off? I can.
I can hear those things throughout the house. This house is, in fact, already decayed. This house is a ghost of itself. This house is a hundred thousand ghosts. When I wander in this house, the things I feel are the weight of the past, either here or about to come. If it is not decayed, I smell its death -- or my death -- coming on the wind. If it is, it has merely borne out its original promise.
Every time I come here it is as if I have come here for the first time, even when in the story of the dream, I have been here forever, but every time I also know, somewhere in my brain, that it has always been here. Waiting for me.
Labels: dreams, liminality, space
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