(this reads like so much psychotherapy but I wanted to write it down after reading a chapter in our assignment about dreaming.)

the victorian house of my dreams...sorta

I don’t recall many reoccurring dreams, but there is one that keeps coming back to me. I can recall having it when I was a still a child no more than 9 or 10 at the time. And I had a dream involving the same house just a few weeks ago. The thing is, it isn’t really the same dream, but the same house.

The house is a multi-story Virginia farm house with a large living room divided into two sections by french doors. There was a bay window on one side that I recall let in a lot of light. Beyond the living room was a bathroom and master bedroom on one side and a dining room on the other.  Behind this was a kitchen and pantry where the back door was. Upstairs there was another bathroom and a large bedroom that took up most of the second floor. There was a smaller bedroom and bath where the stairs started, and the rest of the second floor was unfinished attic. There was no basement under the house, it was set up on blocks several feet off the ground. It had a deep front porch made of wood and several buildings around it. The property it sat on must have been several acres’ worth.

In my mind, thinking about the house in the waking world, I realize that it is a mix of the house where we lived during the snake bite incident, and the house we moved to a few years later. Both are in the same area of Virginia (or was.) I can’t tell them apart after so many years. The point being, that it was this house, or this style of house that keeps showing up in my dreams.

I remember the first one very clearly:

I was playing on one side of the house while my mother hung washing up to dry on a line in the back. It was very warm and windy and I think our dog Sparky was there too. I was trying to coax him out of the shade to play in the sun with me when I noticed a flying saucer go over the house. I was just like the ones in the movies. Pie-pan shaped and all shiny with no windows or lights. I watched it scared into silence, not able to move or even breathe. I just stood there watching as it disappeared out of site behind my house.

I ran to the backyard to warn Mom, but she wouldn’t even stop what she was doing to look at it. I was very excited, jumping around and pointing behind her “Look! Look! There’s another one!”  But she just kept doing the laundry. ”There are flyin’ saucers all the time son, they land at the air force base.” I looked around and now there were dozens of flying ships of all designs in the air. I remember thinking that the warm air on my face might have been exhaust from so many air craft. I turned to ask her why everyone had let me think flying saucers weren’t real before, but she was gone. I wanted to go see where they landed, but the land behind the house was swampy, and I needed someone to take me. I awoke still watching the skies for more flying saucers to go over.

There was another one in the same house where I kept finding doors I hadn’t noticed before. Not the dream imagery of the endless hallways with doors repeated ad infinitum off into the distance, but more like there was a door to the pantry off the kitchen in real life, but in my dream there was a further door that led to another unused pantry or closet beyond that.  They were always darker, unkempt rooms, as if no one else in the house knew about them. Clearly my mother hadn’t noticed that they were there, or she would have cleaned and brightened the room. Let in some natural light as she would say. I remember finding an extra attic door, an extra bedroom, and even a basement that the real house didn’t even have. It was the same house though, from the look of the exterior and mainly the Feel. I knew it was the same house as before.

The air seems a bit more clear in these dreams, with everything sharply defined. I seem to be more lucid there than I am in most of my dreams. I don’t mean lucid as in sane, but lucid as in aware that I am dreaming, participating instead of observing. With other dreams I wake up right after I realize I’m dreaming, but in this series of dreams I have free will. What usually wakes me up from them is thinking too hard that I don’t want to wake up. Then I drift into consciousness wondering why the dreams are so mundane – except for the flying saucer bit, when there could be so much more interesting things to dream about. Or why I never got to see the space ships up close.

In other dreams the house had been split into two apartments, but I still had free access to all the former rooms. I remember being offered a chance to sleep in my old bedroom in one of them, even though some cousins of mine were sleeping there at the time.  Many of the dreams in this period picked up within moments of where the last one left off despite being months apart in the real world..

For example, in one dream there was now a radio station’s studio in the big living room area, and I had been sent to the basement to get some old vinyl records.  I remember going down stairs and being surprised to find another family living in the basement, it was a full apartment down there now, and that new feature woke me.

Some time later, months or even years later, I picked up the dream at the bottom of the stair, asking someone there where the records were kept and being directed to a room lined with wooden shelves full of music. There was a hispanic woman in this series of dreams, though I was unsure how she was related to me thru the cousins still living there.

In one dream I found the basement had flooded several feet deep and we — the cousins, their dad and their hispanic mother– walked on wide boards they had put across till the water went down.  I should point out at this point that I’m using the term cousin very loosely. It was habit to refer to any adult friends of my parents as ‘Uncle Soandso, or Auntie Thisandthat.’ So its very likely these other kids weren’t related to me at all, but were part of the extended family around me.

Once in a related dream I was in one of those grand old buildings like you see in movies featuring a private school of some sort. The type with 100 rooms and huge grounds all about. A Stately Home. At the start of the dream I was in a classroom or meeting room when the power went out. I was heading home to get a fuse and someone told me to go thru the basement of the building to the tunnels. Apparently all the buildings connected together.  I met several students along the way who all knew the way to the tunnels. I didn’t, so I must have been new at my job. The tunnels quickly led to some natural caves, each larger and longer than the first. There was even a hot spring and some sort of animal playing in it, but I recall being afraid of it and giving it a wide berth. In that dream I never made it to The House.

I can remember being lucid enough in a few of them to try and discover where I was. I would leave the house and try to walk to school, or into a town where I might see a sign with the town’s name on it. I remember several times I tried to do this and never got out of sight of the house. The road always seemed to become unpaved and overgrown and more than once dogs would jump out at me and bark viciously, or force a standoff preventing me from going any further. Once I even asked someone if flying saucers were real, and they said yes, but everyone calls them UFOs now. Pronounced “You-foes” by the way. It seemed like an important point to the person I was talking to that flying saucers were everyday things, but no one mentioned aliens. That seemed like a whole different subject.

There was even a dream in which I was driving on an elaborate cloverleaf highway that had been built in route to the House. Sometimes I was driving, sometimes I wasn’t, but we couldn’t find our way there.  After trying several different exits I determined to try each one in order. Then I noticed the exits were no longer numbered so I couldn’t tell where I had started so I turned to the person in the passenger seat and said “Ok, This is just too ridiculous.” and woke up.

These dreams span 20 or 30 years, and at one point I had almost convinced myself I was contacting an alternate timeline where “Everything was exactly the same, except now there were UFOs.” I tried to will myself to have these dreams, but I don’t recall it ever working that way. I found I had the dreams more often if I slept on my side with one arm under my head and my hand touching the headboard or the wall beyond it. Maybe the constant firing of the nerves in that arm when it went to sleep under me was triggering this particular dream state.  I don’t know enough about dream research to do more than guess.

I’ll expect I’ll have these dreams all my life. I don’t mind really, except for the dogs.