Whenever my levels of anxiety are heightened, I seem to have dreams that take place in the same building, an enormous old house, once grand but now run down, that somehow was abandoned with similarly good quality but run-down furniture and somehow became our home, either by inheritance or some other fortuitous circumstance. The dreams are always different and the house itself remains largely undiscovered, with new sections revealed with each dream. One recent dream took place in the basement, full of boxes, some of which were unpacked in the course of the dream. Last night�s dream took place in the living room, which appears in just about every house dream. It is long and banked with floor to ceiling windows � windows like those on the front of the flat I lived in as a child in London. The floors are faded hardwood, the curtains are dusty velvet of an indeterminate color, possibly once green. The furniture is worn and haphazardly arranged, yet appealing and inviting somehow. The room is very sunny. About halfway up one side of the room is a bay window into which is built a platform about 8-10 inches high, made to blend seamlessly with the floor. It has always stood empty in my dreams, which have been going on for many years. In last night�s dream, I bought a second-hand baby grand piano from a friend (my real life friend J., a singer) and put it on the platform. We all admired it and discovered that, given the reinforcements in the floor, the platform was probably built specifically for a baby grand piano. While sitting on the bench, you could see out the window to the garden.

At the end of the room farthest from the front door, a section of the room is partially partitioned off. It has, as far as I can remember, always been that way. But the arrangement of the house has largely been a mystery. In last night�s dream I realized I hadn�t been behind the partition in a long time. I looked around at the weird collection of furniture � a Eames-like table with a large, wood kidney-bean shaped top and another been that swiveled underneath, another simple pine table and a chair, and several ladder-like bookshelves, all in the middle of the room. There was one window and a fireplace on the very end of the room. There was no door, but an opening around the partition led back to the main living room. I took a look around and decided it would make a good office and that the furniture, despite its eccentric arrangement, perfectly suited my needs. My husband walked in as I was surveying the territory and said, �I think that�s a great idea. You really need to get out of the basement.� My response was, �I think so too. And maybe I�ll spend more time in the living room that way.� They are the sunniest rooms in the house and I�ve always been attracted to them, but the dreams never seem to take me there.

From there, the dream disintegrated into near incoherence, although there was a funny moment where I found myself lying in bed next to a large and very hairy man having a conversation. In the middle of it, he said (in a sentence of some sort) the word �shuvvered� (it sounds like a cross between the words �shivered� and �cupboard.� I asked him what it meant and he said it was the new word for Friday-night Sabbath. Then he launched into a rendition of Max Janowski�s �Sim Shalom.�

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I have no idea who the guy is supposed to be � totally not my type � but the word �shuvvered� is an AJism. It�s the one word he says frequently that we have never been able to figure out. I�m pretty sure, though, that he�s never heard of Sabbath. Or Max Janowski, for that matter. Perhaps it�s my subconcious� way of trying to get in on the High Holy Days.

As for the house, the traditional Jungian interpretation is that it represents the self and the different rooms represent different aspects of my personality. Last night�s dream explained a lot about the house that has remained unexplored in previous dreams. I�m still not sure what I�m looking at � perhaps a push to reinvest myself in musical and intellectual pursuits � but I�m fascinated by the strange logic of all the house dreams and the revisiting of the same location. It really does feel like home and I�m always happy to find myself in the middle of it.

I have always had repeating dreams like this. As a child I used to have regular vivid dreams about a girl named Callie who seemed to be from another place and time, but whom I used to encounter on the backside of the playground at one of my elementary schools. Then I went through a long period where I would dream about water. Everything was water. The city jutted out of it like Atlantis and the roads appeared to float just inches from the briny deep. My first house dreams took place in a small but beautifully appointed and dark apartment � pretty much the polar opposite of my current dream home. And for many years I had recurring dreams where at some point I would look in the sky and see fire, planes falling to the ground. Without hearing screams or seeing anything, I would always know that many people were dying painfully and I was powerless to do anything about it. Strangely, those dreams ceased entirely after 9/11/01.

I have also always been simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by dream analysis. While I feel strongly that such dreams offer some potentially useful information in an arcane format, the dreams themselves are much more elegant and succinct than any analysis could be. And yet, given the frequency of some dream images among a wide number of people, it would seem there might be an argument for something like Jung�s collective unconscious (or perhaps cultural brainwashing). I�d rather treat a dream like an unidentified found object. You pick it up, hold it in your hand, feel its weight and texture. You turn it over to look at it and marvel at its beauty, wonder about its purpose, wonder about its history. And then you return it to its location for someone else to find.

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