Dream Home

We're back to that old question of whether dreams have any actual meaning.  Personally, I doubt it.  I think that we give them significance at our peril.  That said, it is always tempting to do so when the same motifs appear over and over again in one's dreams.  I have a couple of recurring dreams.  One is fairly easy to explain: for many years, every June I'd suffer a series of dreams in which I found myself completely unprepared for a series of exams vital to my future.  Clearly, these derived from anxieties dating back to my schooldays, triggered by the subconcious realisation that the time of year when exams roll around had once more arrived.  I seem finally to have outgrown these activities as I haven't experienced this dream, so far, this year.  The other recurring dream is somewhat more mystifying.  In this dream I remember that I own another property, apart from the house I'm living in.  I also recall that this other property is meant to be my primary residence, so I travel there and find it run down, musty and full of rubbish.

In the most recent manifestation of this dream, I arrived at the second property only to realise that it was this house, that I'm currently living in.  This time I couldn't even bring myself to open the front door, such was the sense of dread I felt.  Interestingly, there was some kind of funeral procession emerging from a gateway (which doesn't exist in real life) across the road.  The dream has several variations, several involve the interior of the house being like some kind of time capsule, stuck in another era.  Another version of the dream involves me actually living in another property, different to this one, which has a set of rooms I never use.  The dream usually charts my attempts to switch my living arrangements so as to start using these rooms - usually a living room and a bedroom - rather than my regular living spaces within the house.  The reason I don't use these rooms generally has to do with their isolation from the main part of the property.  Also, they just don't 'feel' right.  Another version of the dream involves me living in my real house, except that it has an extra room - one that couldn't possibly exist in reality as it would involve knocking down the party wall to the next house in the terrace.

So, what does it all mean?  Does it have something to do with anxiety over the maintenance of my property?  (Is it significant the dream's recurrence has coincided with me doing major work in the garden and carrying out repairs to the exterior paintwork?)  Does it reflect subconscious insecurities about the area I live in?  Maybe.  Or maybe not.  Answers on a postcard to anyone but me...