What causes recurring dreams ?
Mine is of a huge old house , well known to me in the dreamtime though not somewhere my waking self recognises though I can recall it perfectly when I wake and could reproduce it in a design or drawing if I had those skills . Mostly its a sense of a house , a feeling of a place , a sense of texture and rich details . Its a place I seem to return time and again , often when I have or have had headaches . It doesn't make me better , but there 's something about it .
The rooms are on many levels and I spend time wandering up and down the levels , sometimes on staircases with wide stairs , sometimes using glass escalators which move with great speed . At the top of the house on one occasion I found a roof terrace , with a coffee bar open to the sky with Mexican colours and palm trees . Yet we were bang in the middle of Linskill Terrace , North Shields . How about that for detail and surrealism . You would have to know North Shields to make sense ( or not ) of that . The roof terrace was hosting some kind of open air party under the stars and everyone was there , happy and relaxed . There was a shiny coffee machine right in the middle of proceedings , making all the right espresso noises . No escalator or grand staircase that night , just a simple stair way down the back of the building and off to a field where someone ( but not me ) was keeping some red hens and some white chickens .
That was one particular version of the house .
It comes in many guises .
Early this morning the version was more traditional . The one where I am staying in someone else s home and I am wandering round looking for my room and aware that there are a variety of rooms I could sleep in and each with a bathroom nearby . There are no bathrooms en suite . The house is too old and unreconstructed for that . The bathrooms have doors but many of them also have heavy brocaded curtains pulled back with tie backs adding to the sense of drama and grandeur .And always as I wander this sense that I have been here before , and indeed , as I pass along a particular hall , that I have slept in these rooms many times , and that I am not chosing a room in which to spend a night , but that these are all my rooms and I can sleep in any one of them , and that there are friends who will sleep in the rest of the rooms .
Where do these dreams come from ?