Amy – A wonderful dream, which is like a doorway into wonder.
Example: When I identified with the house it took a while to really experience it as a living process rather than simply an intellectual interpretation. But when I did become the structure and experienced the extent of the house, I realised it as my body. But it was not my body as I had been taught to see it through my training as a nurse. I did not experience it simply as a biological process, or a physiological machine. I experienced it as an incredibly ancient thing, carrying or incorporating in its form and functions lessons of life gathered over millions of years of human and animal evolution. I felt that it holds within its darkness – the presently unconscious areas developed and lived in the past – enormous amounts of information or memories. We fail to be aware of these because our attention is so fixed on the world outside of us. But of course, even there, if we look carefully, we can see we are the result, our culture and language are the result, of the events and lives stretching back into the ancient past.
I really want to emphasise that your dream has massive amounts of information hidden in it. I suppose one of the most striking things I experienced in recent years is that a dream image is just a 'front' for massive data banks of experience and information. For instance, supposing we liken your memory to a huge filing system - rooms of it. Within those rooms there is a whole section marked 'MAN'. Within that section of 'MAN' are countless folders with experience and information in about particular men in your life - from father onwards and of course Man which includes everybody, especially women. Apart from that there is a big file or system of files dealing with what you inherited culturally about MANKIND, and also what you have absorbed from mother and other women. Then there is the media and books. There is so much within dreams that we miss if we do not explore them.
Getting down to your dream though, especially, “… one very old and grand house, which hadn’t been lived in for many years. We looked around but knew it was well out of our budget.”
That is nonsense as far as dreams are concerned for people are very confused about the difference between their waking life and their dream life. They believe that what they dream is the same as what they meet in waking life. So your dream is not about the physical world house, but a wonderful house you built in the past – for a dream house represent you.
When dreaming you are not operating in the waking world with its rules and laws, because the dream world is a totally different dimension in which things work differently. You life came about from an egg/seed planted in your mother’s womb. You mother didn’t create you because the processes of Life did the huge detailed work, but your mother provided an environment and food, water and air.
You are the product of an egg and a sperm that are the descendants of other cells that began when life on Earth began with single celled creatures, so your seed is in a sense, immortal. But no plant or tree grows from a dead seed, and each living seed carries within it all the past gathered from all its forebears. So you have a very long history and of course memory.
This suggests that in fact your personality is only a small part of a huge memory; the memory people call the unconscious. In fact you were not born with a personality already in you, but it developed out of the new memories and experiences gathered by the new brain in your new body, but beneath that were influences gathered by a long line of seeds/lives, that gave rise to the miracle of your body, the memories of which are only available if you dig deep into your mind or through dreams.
You wrote, “I don’t know how it is hidden, there are no doors connecting the two buildings but I think they’re attached.” The reason you do not know is because you have never been acquainted with your inner dream life. The doors are there but you have to open them by digging deep into your mind.
But you did explore by walking around the house but were terrified by a ghost. A ghost is a memory from the past – maybe the long past – that you have met and dealt with. Obviously in the long time your seed has been collecting memories there are some needing attention. But if you were not ready to meet them you would not have dreamt about it. Also that you keep dreaming about the house is because you are ready to wake up to the larger you than you know as your personality. See
http://dreamhawk.com/stories/the-house-of-the-ancestors/ “Sometimes I have a brief dream about the little house, where I’m in the loft, which is huge (and part of the other house, though not scary) and look down through a little hole in the floor so I can see the grand house. I can see the large open entrance and the beautiful staircase. I’m always intrigued & want to use the house, but know that stepping foot in it frightens me.” Many people as their awareness reaches beyond what they feel is their normal self feel scared. Such resistances cause us to create awful dreams and fears as a means of avoiding our own inner world and its wonders. We feel that we will be swallowed up and we will die. It is important to say that when we meet the experience of powerlessness through becoming aware of the hugeness of your Life, which we are usually unaware if, it feels like something alien or attacking you and it is a shock.
But looking through a hole in the floor is full of meaning and I quote form House of the Ancestors above: “The room I was in was not brightly lit and although dark with age, was in no way a ruin or damaged. I was standing looking at a hole in the floor. I knew my ancestors had lived in the area or rooms below me, and I was trying to see if I could bring any object from there up to where I was.”
You have the option of exploring the past you have inherited. Maybe try using
http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/acting-on-your-dream/#BeingPerson -
http://dreamhawk.com/dream-dictionary/practical-techniques-for-understanding-your-dreams/ -
http://dreamhawk.com/approaches-to-being/opening-to-life/ Tony
