The house is never finished.
I have very vivid and by usual standards, weird dreams. I remember them most nights and for as long as I can remember I have dreamed (whether it was fun, frightening or mundane) of being in a huge house or traveling to and then going into a different house. I'm rarely outdoors for long in a dream. For the last several years the buildings that I explore are sometimes my home, or I am 'visiting' but they all have one thing in common; they are under construction. I find places where they have never been finished and the outside is creeping in, I find huge rooms with half finished areas and no way to arrange the furniture or I am constantly trying to get the place in order (ie move furniture in) to live there or to just try to go to sleep.
Tonight in particular in my dream I went to visit a friend. I left one broken down house with vines creeping in under the roof into the rooms to drive high up in the Sierras to a house literally under construction. We (I was with a friend, and that's all I can tell) walked in past the plastic sheet over the door to find the place a normal house under construction littered with tools. I asked Liz where I was supposed to put my suitcase while eying a set of steps leading to a platform with a bed and dressing table on it (the rooms are sometimes just platforms open to the rest of the house, sometimes so narrow nothing fits, this is also a reoccurring theme) and my Dad was kneeling there stapling the carpet to the stairs. He looked at me and said "Not here". Liz told me to go up the steps anyway and that would be where I was staying. In the 'guest house' as she called it, which led me to feel as though she would be going to sleep in a finished house somewhere else. I walked gingerly up the steps, careful to avoid the ragged edges and set my luggage down next to the bed and then I woke up.
Dream dictionaries tell us that the house is a symbol for yourself, whether bodily, or more broadly, your life. I find it intensely interesting that the house is never finished. There is always a surprise when I open a door and find the floor dips under the sod of an open field and the ceiling has fallen in, or that there are mazes of strange little rooms that I explore full of things like antiques, clocks, huge furniture sets, that there is a corner of the room where the window has never been put in and I can't shut the world out properly or that every doorway is too narrow to admit my furniture. Sometimes when I explore the house is so large that I never see the same room twice and its exciting to see all the things 'I own'. In one in particular I was excited to find that I had a room filled with two matching fancy dining room sets that if I cleared them out would be perfect for my belly dancing troupe to practice. When I started moving these things out I discovered a literal underground mall under my house complete with concrete fountains etc. But I was never able to get my troupe in there, I just wandered around exploring instead.
I know that this is probably a big metaphor for my life not being as I want, but it feels like more to me. I suppose its probably much more simple than I think. I'm seeing my councilor again, just to get some things ironed out (you know, a little self improvement) and I think I'll tell her about them and see what she thinks.
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