(I was looking through Evernote just now and I found this, which I seem to have never posted.. It’s backdated to the date Evernote says it was written on.)
There was a closet in the house I grew up in that formed the wall between the rarely-used front hallway and the dining room. It was a wide, shallow one, filled with things my parents owned but rarely used – good china, various single purpose cooking gizmos, and assorted stuff that blurs together in memory.
In my dream, I opened this closet to find that it was much deeper than it really was. There was another space about as wide as the hallway it was next to, with the shelves containing all the disused stuff my parents owned set against the far wall. Which would have meant they were overlapping the space used by the dining room.
This extra space continued off to the left, then turned right, well outside the space the closet normally occupied. I went in and found new spaces in the house. Slightly dusty, unused spaces, with different wallpaper and trim from the rest of my childhood home. Decor that felt like it was left over from previous inhabitants who had used this hidden apartment that we never knew about. I looked into a room or two and found furniture waiting to be used, shelves with stuff on them. I found myself reminded of a long-ago dream of finding new spaces within my grandmother’s home, which I am pretty sure was a real dream long ago rather than fake deja vu within the dream.
And then the hall I was following opened up into a vast warehouse, full of neatly organized shelves holding… things. Fragments of my parents’ lives and my memories, jumbled up and neatly labeled. Bits of a gothy comic that an unknown female relative drew with someone else’s assistance. Weird signifiers of people related to me who I never met.
I was wandering through this place, marveling at this huge space hidden inside my parents’ house, storing all kinds of vaguely nonsensical things, when I became aware of a generalized hubbub of conversation. There were other people here in this hidden space in my parents’ house. I started trying to chase them out, screaming at them. Gradually they left, until I was deep in the place in a livid rage at the idea of someone about to present an art project made by rearranging things found in this warehouse of weird detritus of the lives my parents lived.
Then I kinda drifted to another dream, of being in a different but familiar-feeling house full of books, with a sinkhole opening up in the grassy floor, but then I woke up.
Earlier I had dreamed of waiting for a bus in the night, which proved to be a small park the size of a city block that was lifted off the ground with wheels barely visible beneath. It ran through the city in streets far too small for it, slipping through wide holes in buildings designed to have just enough ground clearance for the park and its trees to zip through. Eventually it went into one hole and came out over a precipitous drop to a multi-lane road, which everyone else on the park-bus seemed to be expecting – they screamed like people on a roller coaster rather than people in fear of their life. It fell straight down and landed safely; I thought I almost lost my phone but apparently lost a lighter instead.