room to dream
my unconscious is either posing me a riddle or offering
me a window or both. i have recently had 2 dreams with
a very similar theme. perhaps the fact that i was able
to work with the first one brought the second, as
though this ground might be fertile. i could also be
labouring under an illusion, the second being a sort of
decoy away from thinking further about the first. who
knows?
in both dreams my parents' house (we moved there when i
was about 6, and dad sold it after my mother died about
33 years later) had grown an extra room.
in the first:
i discovered a hidden and forgotten room accessed by
trapdoors in the the wall between 2 coat cupboards. the
room was large with dusty golden light. there was a bay
window, like the one in my parents' bedroom in the flat
we lived in before. i rushed to get my daughter for
fear the room would disappear if someone else didn't
see it too. i was trying to work out where this room
could have fitted, and decided that it had been
replaced by the garage. outside the house i met my
analyst, and we started going up a steep and unevenly
paved pathway around to the left of the house.
in the second:
the additional room was between the coat cupboard room
and the front door. it was a bedroom with an en suite
bathroom, built and decorated with the highest quality
materials by the original owner, and still in original
form. unusual japanese fittings had been used, such as
a bed whose springs were wrapped in high quality
leather. the bathroom had small a polished stone
bathtub, and thick white towels were piled up alongside
it. however the springs in some of the light
switches had broken - they were very old, like tiny
buttons on the switch plates - and they were not all
conveniently placed. i prepared to call the
electrician.
the first dream resonated for me with an archiving task
i have been doing over summer. my mother saved decades
of letters - hundreds of them - i had sent home while i
lived overseas, as well as letters written during my
childhood. my daughter wanted stories of her early
life, and those letters contain many. but i also
discovered pleasure and pain in some of those letters,
and reckoned i'd find a lot more as i read. would i be
able to take my analyst to that internal journey, or
did i want to keep him outside, navigating some other
steep/distracting pathway?
the second dream is fresh, and now that my analyst has
returned it doesn't offer itself up so easily.
(21.01.2001)
mail address Hilary Ash: quincetree@gmail.com