Today, we visit a symbol that’s vast and often experienced – the symbol of the house or home. To narrow down this wide and deep symbol, I’m focusing our lens on the Unfamiliar Home. That is, any house or home that is not one we know. It differs from the other main category of home that comes to me, the childhood home, or a house you know from waking life.
Shall we enter through the front door, and explore a dream?
We find ourselves on a street, approaching a house from our car. It’s a small town street, and quiet. We cross the road, and easily open the old gate. The fence is painted white, or it was a long time ago, and it’s peeling. The grass is not neat, but it’s not terribly long either. We walk up steps onto a verandah. It wraps around the house, and we choose to go left, instead of entering the front door. We feel like we know what’s in the front door, but not what’s to the left. So we walk round the side, of this house that’s an old wooden house, with large rooms, and a shady verandah. There are many french doors, which we can see through into the large, dim, and velvety rooms. Old persian carpets and velvet lounges are glimpsed. We continue to the back of the house, entering in through a wide open doorway, a double width door, to an old lounge room, where people have just departed. There’s an air of something just having happened – an afternoon tea? People have left to cavernous other rooms of the house, and the furniture is a little askew. We look left and see a closed-in part of the verandah on the 4th side of the house, which is full of stored furniture under sheets. It holds no interest. It looks like hard work and dusty. We decide to leave, heading to the front door, with keys in hand to lock it and leave. It does worry us that we haven’t locked any other doors, but after considering it a moment, we decide what will be will be, and we leave to our car again.
It’s a longer dream than some examples, but a house can’t often be rushed. It contains spaces, pauses, memories and many interlocking parts of the psyche. Within a house, a symbol at large, we find many nested symbols. Let me pull out the main symbols we encountered in this dream before continuing on.
- Car
- Street
- Gate
- Garden
- Steps up
- Verandah
- Large rooms
- Velvet and old persian carpets
- Old door
- Wide door
- Lounge room
- People having just left
- Store room
- Keys
The House of Self
Homes and houses often refer to the inner architecture of the self, or of the psyche. A house can map to a body, and a house can map to life functions, and to the psyche too. Some common mappings of parts of houses to our body, life and psyche include:
- The kitchen being the “heart”
- Bathrooms being places of purification
- Living rooms being the social part of the psyche or of life
- Bedrooms representing rest, rejuvenation, repair
- Foundations mapping to the foundations of your life, habits, or of skeletal body structures, especially foundational ones like lower back, hips.
- Upper parts of a house often representing “higher mind” and lower parts like a basement representing unconscious or subconscious.
- Hallways could represent flow ways – body systems that move energy or blood, or movement habits
These are illustrative and not definitive, but might provide starter points for you to consider rooms and parts of houses and how they might map to your body, life or psyche.
Interpretation path
We approach from our car (agency, free will), across a quiet road (movement, calm energy), and enter the garden gate (boundary which welcomes). The fence is old but operational. Something (a boundary perhaps) that’s been there a while, perhaps unexamined but functional.
We enter the house up some steps, but only a few. A slight rise above the garden, which is possibly representing our mental state because it is where the action sits within. It is also not recently attended to, but growing naturally. A calm and neutral state perhaps.
Deciding not to enter the front door – the main welcome, the face of the house, the forward appearance – and instead go left (subconscious, feminine), may suggest we are not taking the surfacemost view, and are interesting in exploring an unexplored area. This is generally a positive move in dreams.
We walk around the left side, looking inside. The rooms are cavernous, and dim. What might we say about them? Perhaps they represent areas we have not explored in our psyche. Contrast them to a well-lit, welcoming, attractive room, if it was in our dream. The well-lit room might be a part of life we know well, although the room in the house might be unfamiliar, we are seeing all the parts of this part of our life, and they’re lit by the light of attention and familiarity. When you enter a dimly lit room, you enter slowly, you don’t see every detail, you move by feel a bit, you are wary maybe. These rooms are not an area we have deliberately ignored, or are scared to know about, but life is big, and we just may not have got to this part of our psyche yet. So in this way, these rooms show unexplored promise. Unopened gifts.
You might have further associations with these kind of rooms, the velvety nature of their furniture and the carpet. Maybe they represent a historical phase or stage in your life or ancestry. Maybe they represent a current interest, connected to your waking life hobbies of collecting persian carpets. Depending on your circumstances, these rooms could refer to, and mean different things.
Coming round to the back of the house, we see a wide open doorway. The double width is inviting, and also shows good energy flow. We can enter easily. The ‘back door’ might be associated with a number of things, vs the front door. Ones that come to mind for me are: ‘servants’ entry’ (although this door feels too wide for that), friends & family entrance (casual, familiar), informal approach, subtle / stealth entrance. There might be many more associations you have with a home’s back door.
This reminds me: we don’t know whose home this is. We approached it easily enough, but it is unfamiliar, it’s not a home we have dreamt of before, or lived in. Therefore, maybe we are the friend, we are the family, of the owner here. And what if it was our house? We usually can assume in some way, even the long way round, it is our house. By nature of being a symbol in our dream, it does represent us. But there is a slight difference about that feeling of ownership, familiarity, fluency moving around and operating the house, when it is ours.
So, when we enter the back door into a lounge room that’s been recently vacated by people, we sense them in the air – the familiar, casual air of an afternoon tea, after which people have gone to their separate spaces to rest and digest. This could mean something like, a part of us is relaxed and has removed all watchers, and also prepared the space to feel lived-in, safe. Say this lounge room represents something about your life – maybe your way of connecting with family – and it’s wanting to show you something new. It’s prepared a safe space for you to come in, and see a pattern. No one watches, no one minds if you stay and look at the plates, cups, crumbs, sit in the chairs, move the cushions, stare at photos on the wall. It’s set up like a learning room, a point and click exploration. That is one possible option anyway. What you do, once you’re there, is now up to you.
What we did do was look left again – again to the unknown, the subconscious. What we saw was a large closed in part of the verandah (airy, movement, closed to stale/still), with old furniture (habits, clutter, unwanted/unneeded aspects we could let go of), covered in sheets (hidden, but knowable. Not invisible, not secret). It is dusty (not a recent collection of elements then), and seems like hard work (so we know it’s there and have even assessed the effort level at least subconciously, of cleaning this out, bringing in fresh air and ideas, and letting all this go). It is like we sigh, and leave the lounge room. It is like we were offered a learning experience but saw all the baggage of the years, felt depleted, and left. What if we’d done dream magic and imagined that room cleaned? What if we did a releasing and mental cleaning ritual in life, then dreamt again? Might we find the energy and inspiration to learn and engage?
So, we leave the lounge room, and we have house keys. Oh, here’s significant moment. The keys suddenly say we can return. We have the keys, it’s okay we didn’t look at everything here, because we can return and open the door again, and try again. The dream doesn’t begrudge us our mental clutter, it says, please come back sometime.
We leave, locking the front door, for care, security. Then have a moment of “…whatever”, a sense of tiredness, we don’t lock all the doors of the house, but leave it to trust it will be safe.
We go back to our car, signalling we are still truly in control, we have used our free will this whole time, and we depart by choice.