First, I should tell you I can remember having this dream at LEAST 3
times a year from the time I was about 9 or 10. 1989 - my 40th year -
I only had it once. I don't quite know if that means it's being
resolved, or if I was just to immersed in other things to deal with
it.
My grandmother's house was an old 2-story white frame with a concrete
basement foundation. It had a cement slab porch with white columns on
it, and which was screened from the nearby street by a forsythia
hedge along the porch. The front yard sloped down to the sidewalk and
street; the back yard (it was a corner lot) was actually a square back
and a narrow side yard, all surrounded by boxwood hedge. Oak trees
and a hickory tree (huge!) and one large stone (my "mother rock")
were my playground as a child. Inside the house, it was a typical
older midwestern home: the front door opened into the livingroom, with
a staircase directly in front leading to the second floor. Clockwise
on the 2nd floor landing were a linen closet, the largest bedroom, the
2nd bedroom, the back bedroom, and the bathroom. Downstairs, the left
wall of the living room was common also to the dining room. Beyond
that (to the right) was the kitchen, with a screened in porch
containing the back door, and a stairway down to the basement.
Halfway down that stair was the "side door" outside. All in all, a
very typical house of the type built around 1920.
The dream runs thusly:
I am about 9 or 10 years old, sometimes younger, never older. With my
teddy bear (a gold fuzzy one, wearing a red bow collar), I come down
the stairs, through the living and dining rooms and into the kitchen.
No one is around, and no sound indicates any activity. I'm frequently
dressed in courderoy pants and a t-shirt type top, sometimes (but
rarely) in pajamas or a dress.
I open the pantry door, which is just above and to the right of the
basement stairs. Getting down flat on the floor, I slide under the
bottom shelf (about 6 inches from the floor), and into a hole I know
exists in the back corner. When I get through, Teddy and I are in a
strange area:
This is the inside of the house as it would be if it were maybe 300
stories up and down. The walls are there, but there is a lot of room
between them, and there are long, narrow staircases going up each
wall, connecting all the floors, and sometimes running level all along
a wall, like a catwalk. It's twilight or a bit lighter, but dull
looking, and very quiet.
There are people on the stairs. Most of them are men - sometimes in
groups of 3 or 4, mostly in singles and pairs. They never talk above
a whisper, but they do talk to each other. The men are dressed in
suits - gray or brown or black. For some reason they remind me of a
caricature of undertakers. The women are in dresses and heels, with
fancy hairdos and makeup on. Men or women, they seem to always be
walking up or down like they're going someplace important. I always
have the feeling that I should not be found by these people, so I hide
BEHIND the stairs (on the wrong side - where I shouldn't be able to
stand, but I can. I can even climb the stairs over on this side).
While I'm hiding out on the wrong side of the stairs, I can see into
the rooms in my Grandmother's house. It's like there's a small hole
in every room. I can see people sitting and talking, or eating, or
watching tv and drinking beer... I can hear them talking, but I can
never remember what was said. I know I have to be quiet, because I
don't want them to know I can see and hear them.
When the "strange" people on the stairs are gone - I have never
recognized one of them as anyone I ever knew - I can come out and go
to another part of the stairs. I can just dissolve through the stairs
to the other side if I see someone coming I don't want to meet. Each
part of the stairs is a different room, but they're all in my
grandmother's house. Sometimes I'd see a room on one stairway, and
see it later on another stairway decorated differently, but with the
same people or activity in it.
These dreams tend to come about 3 times a year, but there is no
correlation as to when they show up. So far, no coorelation between
anything I've been doing and their appearance, either. I do not ever
remember leaving the pantry the way I came in - I usually wake up
still on the stairs, and that's how I always remember it.
Any ideas you have on this one will be greatly appreciated!
(I can correlate parts of it to my natural shamanic abilities, but
some of it seems to be more environmental or psychological(?))
