Meaning of dreaming about the same House

Here we can only agree with Sigmund Freud: there is no perfect relationship between dream symbols and their meaning, much less a universal cipher. Rather, every symbol that appears in our dreams, no matter how trivial or casual it may seem, is linked to a feeling, a state of mind, a memory, and these links are the result of personal experiences or associations that no one can decode better. than you At most, someone will give you the right tools (see: 10 universal patterns to understand your dreams and nightmares)

This is the first tool I give you: a flashlight, a light in the darkness, in a reading by Carl Jung:

In each of us there is Another whom we do not know. He speaks to us in our dreams and tells us how different he sees us from the way we see ourselves. When we find ourselves in a difficult situation, for which there is no apparent solution, sometimes this Other can turn on a light that radically alters our attitude.

Now with some light to illuminate our path, we share a dream by Carl Jung, published in the book Memories, Dreams, Thoughts (Erinnerungen, Träume, Gedanken), as a model to analyze the meaning of dreams about houses.

«I was in a house I didn’t know. However, she knew it was “my home.” I found myself on the upper floor, where there was a kind of living room furnished with beautiful antique pieces in the Rococo style. Several old and beautiful paintings hung on the walls. I was wondering if this should be my home and I thought, “Not bad.” But then it occurred to me that I didn’t know what the bottom floor was like. Going down the stairs, I reached the ground floor. Everything was much older there. I realized that this part of the house must be from the 15th or 16th century. The furniture was medieval, the floors were red brick. It was pretty dark everywhere. I went from room to room, thinking, “Now I really have to explore the whole house.” I came across a heavy door and opened it. Beyond, I discovered a stone staircase that led to a cellar. Descending again, I found myself in a beautiful vaulted room that looked extremely ancient. Examining the walls, I discovered layers of brick between the ordinary stone blocks. As soon as I saw this, I knew the walls dated back to Roman times. My interest was now intense. I looked closer at the ground. It was made of stone slabs and in one of them I discovered a ring. When I took it, the stone slab rose and again I saw a staircase of narrow stone steps leading into the depths. I also descended and entered a low cave carved into the rock. Thick dust lay on the ground and on it were scattered bones and broken pottery, like remains of a primitive culture. I discovered two human skulls, evidently very old and half disintegrated. Then I woke up.

Carl Jung mentioned the dream to Freud, with whom he was working closely at the time, but he was dissatisfied with his interpretation. In fact, Carl Jung discarded it, and independently interpreted the dream of the house as follows:

The house was a symbol of his psyche, of his own mind. After all, houses are among the most primordial collective symbols. Home is where the heart is, the saying goes, and our homes, no matter how modest, are our sanctuaries. They are sacred ground. The limits of the house constitute a border between the “I” and “mine” and the world and others. Its boundaries are designed to keep undesirables out, but open to those who are welcome. In your house you feel contained, safe, so much so that, symbolically, the house is an extended psychic body, a physical manifestation of your mind (see: Houses as a metaphor for the psyche in Horror)

This symbolic meaning of the House explains much of the rituals and cultural protocols around our homes. Every house has its rules, its norms, its habits. One behaves very carefully when he is invited to someone else’s house. He extremes his education, his behavior, he adjusts to the regulations of the place. This also explains the psychological trauma caused by intruders breaking into a home, and the frequent need to move after a robbery.

In his dream, Carl Jung is clear that it is not just any house, even though he apparently did not know it, but “his house.” Fortunately, Jung had a powerful flashlight, the concept of the Collective Unconscious, so the interpretation of his dream came about quite organically.

As he descended through the different levels of the dream house, he traveled through the different layers of his own psyche. What he discovered was that each level connected him to a previous time, projecting a network that went beyond the history of his ancestral line. Or perhaps it is more appropriate to say that each level connected him with an increasingly large group of human beings who share, at the different levels, his ancestry. In such a way that he begins in his personal living space, on the upper floor, and ends in the prehistoric roots shared by all humanity.

Using the symbolic structure of Carl Jung’s dream house, I want you to consider the ancestral impulses and archetypal inhabitants of your own psychology. To do this, we will borrow Jung’s conceptual apparatus of the Collective Unconscious and the Archetypes, although in a somewhat liberal, shall we say, non-canonical way (see: Which of the 12 Jungian Archetypes Corresponds to Your Personality?)

In principle, we could say that Carl Jung was visited by what shamans call the “Big Dream.” That is, a dream that is not entirely our property, but that of all humanity, although adapted to the particular characteristics of our own psyche. In other words, I propose that we find your Archetypal House (see: The House as an organic and conscious entity in the Gothic)

Following the model of Jung’s dream house, we will move through the different levels or internal structures of the house. They don’t necessarily have to be the same as those in your dream. In fact, they probably aren’t, but there are surely some analogies you can apply. Following Jung’s trajectory we will move from the upper part of the house to the lower part. At each level I want you to identify a ruling archetype.

LEVEL 1- The top floor of Jung’s house deals with his personal history. In this particular dream, it is an upper floor, but it does not necessarily have to be that way in your dream. In mine, for example, it is the area of ​​the house where I live, the most familiar part. The archetype we are looking for here is that it governs your personal life, your history.

It won’t be easy at first. You must be a good observer. This archetype will be in this part of the house as something, which can be an object, a concept, an idea, that in some way has been present throughout your entire life. What is there in this part of the house that you can associate quickly with your childhood? If your subconscious feels that you have somehow betrayed this archetype, it can be represented in the dream as something absent, something missing, something that has been lost.

LEVEL 2- In Jung’s dream, it is the ground floor of the house. In your dream house it can be a simple room, or an entire floor, that reminds you of your family; in fact, your parents and grandparents are probably there. In my dream, for example, I sometimes encounter people wandering around the house. Although they were strangers, I did not feel intimidated by their presence, probably because these people are surrogates for my family, and probably even my ancestors.

The men you find in this part of your dream house represent your paternal line. They can be unknown men, or fathers, brothers, sons, uncles, cousins, grandparents. The women in this area of ​​the house naturally represent your maternal line (see: The Haunted House as a representation of the female body). Although there may be men and women in your dream, it is likely that one of the two archetypes is the most predominant.

LEVEL 3- Jung’s basement, but it could perfectly be any side room or floor of our house (see: Horror always comes from the Basement). It basically represents the culture in which we live and with which we identify. It is a tricky area of ​​the house, and it is open to various interpretations because a series of factors come into play here that complicate the situation. It could be the culture you grew up in, for example in a religious family, or the culture you currently live in. However, for most of us there will be obvious symbols of certain cultural, social and group influences.

LEVEL 4- Jung’s cave, but in the dream your house will be an area related to your ancestral line. This could be singular or multiple depending on your personal ancestry. Here the archetype is related to “your people”, that is, to the people from whom you are descended.

Using my own dream as an example, I found the following archetypes:

LEVEL 1: Consciousness, or the pursuit of consciousness, would be a likely candidate for the archetype of this level.

LEVEL 2: The paternal archetype is equivalent to the will to power; the maternal archetype, to nostalgia and melancholy.

LEVEL 3: I identify as Argentinian, but I refrain from mentioning what could be the dominant trait of my culture. Probably the traits of a culture based on immigration have multiple factors that are very difficult to analyze, but for the purpose of this article, let’s say Multiculturality.

LEVEL 4: I emerge from three ancestral lineages: Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. A good candidate for its dominant trait or archetype would be the pioneer spirit, not because these countries really are, but associated with the people who left their land to settle in America.

So I find the following archetypes in my dream of the house: Consciousness, Melancholy, Multiculturality and Pioneer. I definitely don’t identify with the fourth archetype, but it doesn’t really matter what my perception is here. It matters what my subconscious is telling me.

Now, it is important to mention that each Archetype has productive and destructive aspects. This is something that Carl Jung emphasized a lot. For example, Mother can be nurturing or consuming; or, in my case, Consciousness can be constructive or destructive, in terms of passivity, inaction, paralysis. The same can be said of Melancholy. When it is productive it is associated with reflection, empathy, solidarity; or with sadness, apathy, fatalism, when it is destructive.

Armed with this knowledge, the next question to consider is: what story could be told with these archetypal characters? This is, I believe, what Carl Jung means when he asks us to identify our own Myth. In other words, the archetypal characters in your dreams are characters on the stage of your life, and the story of your personal life is their story, the…