on mushrooms the weekend before last with two pals i've not seen in a while. we are having a beer and one is discussing recent iboga experience where a lot of the trip involving walking through underground rooms and chambers, opening boxes, looking on shelves. the other then says that this is a recurring dream he has, where he's in an old house, wal;king through doors that reveal different rooms, there are boxes to look in, nooks and crannies to hide in. i then say it reminds me of childhood, wandering around the house when it felt very big, and discovering new areas with bits of furniture etc i've never seen before.
then few days later i'm reading this john higgs book, "watling street" and come across this passage:
"When I was a small boy, my dreams were always set in the same house. It was a huge, rambling collection of passages, doorways, nooks and stairwells that bore no relation to any house I had been in at that age. I remember it feeling incredibly old, with small windows and rough whitewashed walls. It was a house that had stood for a long time before I arrived and would be there a long time after I was gone. My dreaming hours were spent exploring that unending old house, climbing out of windows and over rooftops, discovering new passages and hidey-holes. Physically, the geography of the building made no sense at all, but in dreams that is not a concern...
...Those dreams stopped as I got older. Details were lost, or perhaps overwritten. But a memory lingered that was, like most dream memories, more a feeling than a concrete image. That house felt like a lazy Sunday afternoon in late spring...
...I’m not sure at what age I first read Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, but at some point my old dream house and Satis House, Miss Havisham’s rambling, decaying home in the book, became linked in my mind. Miss Havisham’s house, Dickens wrote, ‘was of old brick, and dismal, and had a great many iron bars to it. Some of the windows had been walled up; of those that remained, all the lower were rustily barred. There was a courtyard in front, and that was barred.’ Inside, the house was always dark. When Dickens’s hero Pip was first taken through those dark passages, he was guided by the light of a single candle. My dream house was not dark or foreboding like the one described by Dickens, so I wonder now why I ever connected the two...
...Perhaps I recognised that the house was not so much a real building but a physical extension of its owner’s mind..."