A note about houses and dreams

I spent the day in a painful IC fog,  had to euthanize one of Grace's ratties (Hammy was a sweetheart and there's a story here. Details will follow in an upcoming post) and then went to work at 4pm, so I didn't get a chance to post this until now, at midnight, but something really neat happened this morning.

I woke up at the tail end of a dream that was taking place in Brian's home in Massachusetts. Which is a significant thing, for me.  I don't generally think of myself as someone who gets attached to places, but in my dream world, location is everything.

When I was a teen-ager, the farm house that I grew up in burned down. We weren't living there, my parents were divorced and I lived with my mom in a duplex in Ormstown. My dad had renovated one of the outbuildings on the farm into a smaller house, and was living in that. So when we visited him, which was often, we stayed there too. The big house was empty when it burned, and it was pretty much completely destroyed.

The farmhouse was very much a character in my childhood story. For years after it burned down, every dream that I remember having took place in that house. The geographical location could be anywhere, the people involved were varied, and the story lines were typical dream-type stuff. But the house was always a presence in my dreams. It still is, to a lesser extent, to this day.

The same is true for the duplex in Ormstown, although not with the same frequency. I always thought that the persistent presence of the farmhouse in my dreams was a way of keeping it in memory, as it doesn't exist anymore. The Ormstown place became a much more common scene for my dreams after my mother died, two years ago, and that was really more about going back to where she was, keeping her memory alive.

Lately, both of my childhood homes have been frequently cropping up in my dream world. No big surprise there. I am preparing to leave this place, this valley, the only home that I have ever known.

Which is what makes it so nice to have Brian's house serve as a back drop to my dream last night. I don't remember details.  I think there may have been pizza involved.  And Christmas lights.  The basic weird dream stuff.  It feels really positive, though.  After all, it's not just any house that gets to be the backdrop for my dream land story lines.  Just the important ones. The ones that matter. The ones that are home.

I'm not going to analyse the death out of this.  Okay, I'm tempted. But I'm trying really hard not to.

It's just neat, that's all. And as the start to a day that involved mind-numbing fatigue, crippling abdominal pain  and the death of a family pet, I'll take all the neat I can get.