[I've been having] dreams about houses... for decades. In one recent dream, I toured a house for sale that kept opening into more and more magical rooms: a kitchen with a glass ceiling and plants strung from the rafters and a little loft for napping while the soup cooked, and a living room with a full restaurant-style bar, and a shady Olympic-size pool tiled in elaborate retro patterns.

Back at the front door, I learned from the realtor that the house had just been sold, and I sat down on a purple velvet stool to weep. But then an elderly couple stopped next to me. The old woman placed her hand on my shoulder and lovingly said, "Oh, don't worry! In the end you lose everything."

And the truth of this flooded me with relief. Ahhh, yes. In the end, all is lost! What a relief. I'd been riding this feeling through the falling-down world of my midlife--through the too-lateness anxiety, this nagging dread I was some sort of fool, the bald facts of bad decisions--through all this I'd held fast to the joy of death given to me by the old woman, but then even this began to disintegrate, and the prospect of losing instead poured over me with horror, horror, horror...

SOURCE: "In the Glimmer", Harper's, July 2023, p. 33

EDITOR'S NOTE

When I read Yoder's dream, I recalled a recent one of my own. I lived in a huge labyrinthine house, and discovered one day that both a cafe and a clinic were doing business in it without my knowledge.

So this dream got me thinking about such dreams as a type. It's ancient, pancultural, and universally agreed that house means self, and unexpected parts of house mean unexpected parts of self. Yet I never thought to compile a World Dream Bank list of them--til Yoder got me thinking. Secret passages, hidden rooms, whole floors, wings, annexes.... Way overdue!

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