Union Station Columns & Arches (Washington, DC)

My recurring dreams are all based on a central figure. I call this The House and in my dreams it is almost always either visible or a central player in my dreaming. Sometimes the house is a grand hotel, like the Waldorf Astoria, and it’s full of elevators without walls – just a platform and a knife switch for it to go up and down. Most often though The House takes the form of a sprawling 1970’s circa clapboard-sided bungalow house that is laid out in a single floor over thousands of square feet. In the house are people living in rooms, some are bedrooms, some are complicated conch-shell organized rooms with mystery hiding behind every door. Sometimes it’s bright and sunny, and sometimes it’s wet and rainy. Sometimes there are people I recognize and sometimes not. I don’t know why my dreaming mind takes me there and I remember the house so very well, and I’m sure it means something deep and meaningful but I’ve never been able to put a finger on it. I doubt dreams are supposed to be nailed down anyways. The minute you start trying to pin them, they slip out from beneath you and you find your memory slipping away from you. Many of the dream memories that I bring back to my conscious life function a lot like sand. The harder I grip, the faster the sand runs out of my fist and gets spread to the wind.

Every once in a long while I’ll have a very meaningful dream and the memory will hang around for the better part of a day. Very very rarely will those memories live beyond that, but there are some. I find that if I write about the dreams, that writing somehow solidifies them in my memory. I can’t really explain that one either other than it makes a fair amount of sense on a behavioral standpoint. What to make of the sprawling house? I’m sure any armchair dream analyst would have a field day with that one, especially if they knew some of the activities going on in the house and who was playing what parts.