I dreamed again last night. I dream fairly often, but I only occasionally remember them in detail enough to share. A few of my dreams have been told and retold even by others since my college days. The one about the giant squirrel and the other about the Devil's Nachos are my favorites.
But I digress. This dream was one of the recurring ones. I've had a recurring theme all my life where I discover a room/apartment/cave where there wasn't one before and finding it is so...cool. The feeling I have as I walk into that space is adventure and mystery and excitement--even if all I find there is some crazy Hawaiian shirts (which in that particular dream world were actually Mexican shirts). Some of these rooms are attached to specific places. There is a secret room in the attic of Mr Morley's house in the town where I grew up. The entrance is behind the pool table--when its there at all--and its full of candlelit beds with frilly canopies. There is also a secret cave branching off the entrance to Subway Caverns near Redding, CA. That dream was so real that I mentioned it to some friends who were in the dream as if it had actually happened. It took another visit before I was fully convinced it wasn't real.
This one was an apartment. It isn't attached anywhere, but its at the top or at the back of a large apartment building. In the last dream I was contemplating moving to that apartment, but even in my dream I'd wonder if I'd be able to find it again after I left. This time I was looking for our missing pillow. We lost a pillow somewhere in the 1/4 mile move into our new house. I never found it, but my wife was there--an unusual occurrence in itself--as well as a very billowy set of the aforementioned Hawaiian shirts that were actually Mexican shirts.
What do these dreams mean? A quick search of online "dream dictionaries" tells me I'm discovering or exploring a new aspect of my personality. I'm not really sure what that means exactly, having the personality that I do, but it sounds cool. Trouble is, I can't really think of any new aspects of my personality that I hadn't known about already.
The other option to the room theme focused on my feelings about the room. Feelings of excitement when entering the room are supposed to represent satisfaction about life. This one seems a little more relevant, as I am supremely satisfied with my life these days. I have a great job with a great boss and coworkers, my newly decorated little house looks awesome, I am actually planting a garden with brick planters and everything, I love my new town, my wife is even more beautiful, exciting, patient, kind, loving, intelligent, radiant, talented and amazing to me then she was when we got married.
So I guess that's what the dream means. I'm happy with life. I've found that passageway that leads to joy that isn't always there and may not be again. Its a feeling that's so real and vivid, but hard to explain and even the memory of it flees too quickly leaving behind only odd floral shirts and frilly beds. But I talk about it and write about it in the hopes that those details will remain. That when the wall behind the pool table no longer opens to a staircase we together will be able to remember what it was like when it did.
I'm still looking for that pillow though.