A middle-aged man who was on a journey of self-growth through psychotherapy dreamed that a house was being built. It was a large house with workers all around, many on the roof hammering boards and shingles into place.
Personal growth is a construction process – its excatly like civil construction. We are building a new home for our soul, a new way of being in the world. New windows, new vistas, new perspectives. New rooms for the many parts of our personality. It is a new structure for the personality, an expanded space for an expanding consciousness.
This is the essence of the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California, a sprawling estate of 160 rooms, built by Sarah Winchester, heiress of the Winchester Rifle Company. She kept adding rooms, redoing and restructuring her mansion like an artist painting over one picture to create another. Each new room was a way to express and explore a different part of her personality, a mood, or a healing image. Her mansion was a personal exploration and expression of her unconscious.
A female client dreamed that she entered the house she grew up in. She decided to empty her mother’s closet for her mother had died some fifty years before. She discovered a small room behind one wall of the closet. In the room she found a casket with a doll in it wrapped in plastic. She decided to work with the dream images imaginatively and came to experience that the doll represented all of the emotions of love and sorrow she had for her mother but which had been wrapped up and unprocessed for many years.
An old man, a former building contractor, kept having dreams of building homes and business spaces. But in each dream he was always given new blueprints for additions to the work he had just done. There was always more building to do, one more project to be completed. He wondered why he kept having these dreams.
This is the nature of the psyche. Like the shell of a snail, it keeps expanding until it dies. There is no fixed end. Each new development makes further developments possible. Consciousness grows, the personality grows, the spirit grows. We become more whole.
Perhaps you have had dreams in which you are exploring a large but unfamiliar house, finding rooms you didn’t know were there. The house is a symbol of your psyche, or total personality. Get to know it, furnish it, live in it. Allow yourself to grow and embrace all that you are meant to feel, remember, and be.
.....Copyright © Andy Drymalski, Ed.D. Excerpts may be used provided full and clear credit is given author with link to original article.
When I was younger, I dreamed of a little, yet robust cottage in the woods that had all the woodland animals. I felt safe and bent down to pet a cute raccoon and it bit me, subsequently draining my life. Periodically since then, the houses I dream of are all dark, ratty and decrepit inside with ghostly curtains all torn and “holey.” Sometimes, there is a random mattress on the dirty floor, with no sheets.
Recently, I dreamed about going inside my son’s father’s house -though beautiful on the outside, was dark and damp, with dirty and stained Kelley green carpet that looked like it hadn’t been vacuumed in years, no furniture and the windows were all boarded up. There was only one light on, somewhere off in another room.
The other night, I dreamed about their house again, this time it was a completely different house -very modern, lots of big windows and natural light, everything was painted white, but the water from the Bay was sloshing around inside because of a storm. My son was around the age of 10, we were waiting for his dad to get home so I could take him with me.
Hi Tanis,
Thank you for sharing these dreams. They offer very descriptive, powerful images.
Andy