Dream House

I often dream of houses. I dream about my parents house, where I grew up, most of the time. Rarely do I dream about the house my wife and I built 30 years ago and where we raised three kids, 3 dogs, and a lifetime of memories. My dreams typically drop me off at my mom and dad’s house, where I lived from the age of 2 to 21. And in those dreams, I usually find some room that was sectioned off and hidden away for decades. A secret hallway that once existed between the living room and kitchen. That space, logic, and architectural configuration would prove to be impossible given the house’s layout.

In that long hidden space there’s usually old relics from my childhood, some real and some created from my subconscious. Baby blankets, toys now relegated to vintage shops and Ebay, and dusty picture frames of moments cooked up and leavened in a brain firing on all cylinders during REM sleep.

There are houses that I seem to concoct out of thin air as well. Houses built from memories of movies, TV shows, and houses of people we knew when I was young. A lot of them seem to never end in the dream, as I walk thru they seem to be building rooms and wings in real time. It’s a feeling both fascinating and horrifying as it seems as if I’ll never get through it or find my way out. I’m not really scared, but there’s an underlying feeling of being lost that I never quite get over.

The film Backrooms, about a furniture store that seemingly begins to grow new spaces and endless rooms of varying nightmarish degrees and includes slightly off versions of reality within it, sits heavy in my mind. It was hugely successful, making many times over its budget, while also being a rather polarizing film. Some like myself found it endlessly fascinating and connected to the concept of the liminal space on a deeply personal level; others thought it was boring and pointless. To each his own. But when a movie connects to me as if hardwiring into my subconscious and giving me a cinematic visual of my sleeping mind I take note.

Skinamarink from three years ago was another movie like that. Made a ton of money while polarizing viewers. While I can’t sit down and rewatch it, I definitely connected to it. Two kids waking in the middle of the night to find their parents gone, and the windows and doors of the house disappearing keeping them trapped. A house lit by vague light, a TV broadcasting old, disturbing cartoons, and toys strewn on the floor. A dark presence humming in the home. It felt like childhood and the kinds of nightmares I would have. There were sequences in that film that felt as if they were lifted directly from my 5-year old mind.

There are dreams I recall when I was barely in grade school that teeter on the brink between fantasy and reality. One in-particular sits rent-free in my head. I remember waking in the middle of the night and coming out into the hallway. There’s one light on in the living room, and one light on in the kitchen over the kitchen sink. My dad is in the kitchen standing in front of the sink, as if he just got off work(he worked 2nd shift for years, 4pm to midnight.) I don’t remember saying anything to him, and then I turned around and went down the long, dark hallway to my parents bedroom. It was dark but the light was on in their bathroom. I stepped into their bathroom, and there was my dad. He was shaving in front of the mirror. There is only one way to their bathroom and that was the way I came, so my dad was in two places at the same time. In the middle of the night. Which one was my actual dad?

This dream kind of melts between reality and dream, as I also have a memory that looks a lot like this dream. Except it’s my mom in the kitchen, not my dad. I would often wake up when my dad worked off shifts when he’d get home. Sometimes I would go out to see him, but a lot of the time I’d just crack the door of my bedroom open just enough to see a figure in the kitchen putting away a lunch box.

While I wouldn’t say I have traumatic memories of growing up in my house, perhaps it’s just that so many memories from childhood went into forming who I am today at 52, nearly 53. Illnesses, deaths, midnight fights between my parents,…as well as birthday parties, holiday dinners, summer bbqs, and friends sleeping over making memories both in the house and outside. The memories I’ve made with my wife and kids in OUR home, have been made as an adult. I had more control over those memories and how they transpired, as opposed to being a small child in my parents world where I felt like I didn’t have as much control. As a parent you fake control till you take control. You do it for your kids. To give them that sense of security and safety.

But despite how hard you try, you can’t save your kids from their own imagination and internal anxieties. They have to work at controlling them themselves. Or if not controlling them, then at least living with them. For me, I guess dreaming about childhood spaces or copies of copies of facsimiles of them is my way of confronting those childhood memories and experiences. Movies like Backrooms and Skinamarink make me think that I’m not the only one with varying degrees of psychic trauma from their early years. When filmmakers seem to open these portals and can visualize them for themselves to share and others to see make me feel slightly less neurotic.

I actually look forward to these dreams. I feel with each dream house I discover in sleep I’m uncovering little secrets and subconscious caverns where maybe some healing occurs. If not healing, then at least maybe some understanding into who I am and why I am the way I am. I wonder if my kids dream about our house when they dream? And if so, if their dream house has some hidden rooms as well?