Dream a little dream
Since edda was talking about her dreams... mine really annoy me, because I never have particularly satisfying dreams. They're always questing in some way, looking for something or running away for something. I can't just have interesting dreams the way I did when I was younger. And I'm pretty sure I know what they mean--usually, once I've figured out a dream, I don't dream about that thing anymore. In fact, I rarely dream the same thing twice (that I know of), so it's weird that I've been having sort of recurring dreams the last year or so. It's never the exact same setting, but the dreams are basically the same.
Usually I'm looking for something. The weird thing is that I'm usually looking for a place, not a thing--a room, "my room" in a giant mansion. But the rooms and hallways I'm wandering are always long and relatively narrow--they go on for miles and slope up and down, sometimes with short flights of stairs up and down and long landings, with dark red carpets and tons of antique furniture and knick-knacks. It's always very open--sort of the way a mall or a school is; you can see other rooms and hallways and things. Sometimes there are libraries, just random sections of bookshelves. There are a lot of lamps and crystal sitting on little mahogany tables by dark, polished chairs, just littered up and down these halls. Sometimes I pass people, and they're usually all right--sort of helpful, or sort of unpleasant, but no more so than your usual passersby--but mostly it's just me going around corners or straight forward. Sometimes I trace my steps back to these libraries, but not often. There's never an end in sight. Sometimes there are variations--I've had dreams where I was in an airport that went on and on like that, and everything was a deep coral color, wall-to-wall coral, and I was trying to get away from someone... someone I wanted to find me. I was afraid he would and afraid he wouldn't. I don't know, dude.
A big element of the "searching" dream is that I find some secret passageway--I'm usually trying to escape from something, I don't know what. Sometimes I'm younger--maybe 12--and I go through our attic (which was just a narrow room with shelves on the upper floor) in the old house and slide open one of the doors to the shelving and crawl around the boxes into the eaves of the house where the insulation is. So far, this is all realistic. And then... it's like there's this passage to a completely different house. Usually the attic is dark and then the passage is white, or there's more than one passage, and I emerge into the Extremely Long and Expensively Furnished House (see previous paragraph). And the inside of this house goes on for miles--I can look out windows, but I have no idea how this house exists in space or time, because somehow it's all inside this two-story brick suburban house. But once I've gotten through, they can't come after me, whoever "they" are. I hear noises, and I'm afraid they're coming, but they're so far behind that I just keep going. And I have to keep going--I have to put distance between me and "them." I've had all sorts of variations of this dream--sometimes it's a giant mansion and I keep going downstairs, deeper and deeper into rooms that are lighter and lighter, and sometimes I just keep walking forward through these giant, open-air halls and stairs.
Other times I'm in the real house I currently live in, and I'm trying to lock one of the room doors but I can't--I keep turning the locking mechanism but when I test it, the door just opens. I keep trying to lock it and testing it and someone is coming but I can't. make. the door. lock. (You may be interested to know that the lock on my bedroom door is exactly like this--it doesn't work. But even when it did, for a few brief months, I still had my entire family beating down my door every five minutes to ask me stupid shit. In the end, it was just easier to leave it unlocked.) The door-locking dreams tend to be more like nightmares--there's usually someone or something sinister I'm actually trying to get away from, and I start to panic. And sometimes my running away blends into the Giant House dream--I keep going forward and forward and forward, trying to lock doors behind me but I can't, so I have to keep trudging on to put distance between me and whoever's chasing me.
The weird thing is, there's really not all that much urgency to the dreams. Like, mild panic, at worst. Even when I'm looking for "my room," I... sort of don't really want to find it. Like, I'm curious to see what it looks like, and I'd like to stake a claim to it, but I'm just sort of having a good time wandering around (when I'm not actively fleeing something). One time I dreamed that I emerged onto this rooftop that was a garden walled with grey stone, hidden by vines and tree foliage, and I could look out over the yard of this house and people were trying to find me but they couldn't. The garden was literally a secret. And then there were other people up there with me, like friends, who were also up there to get away from Them. It was nice, and all the green gleamed in the sun, and we were having a good time talking and milling around. I woke up just as They discovered the garden, and we had a little time to get away before they found us. But until they found us, it was nice.