It’s not often that I have (or remember, I guess) longish dreams, but whenever I have one that seems to have plot (if that’s the right word), it often takes place in a recurring location. I don’t mean it’s the same dream, just that what are many very different dreams all seem to have me in a particular place. Essentially small town-ish in size (although I haven’t been everywhere) it’s sort of architecturally/placement-wise pretty much a comination of London and where I went to university, although there aren’t parts of it from either of those places.
It’s really weird… I could pretty much draw a map of this place, it’s familiar enough. To be fair, I do tend to actively try and remember as much of these dreams as possible, but I wondered if anyone dreams up a consistent location like this.
Absolutely. I have had hundreds of dreams take place at the house I grew up in, which perhaps isn’t too surprising, but I also have some set in a small country village-like place that isn’t actually based on a real place I have been to, but is sort of generic in its appearance.
Dreams fascinate me, especially in their consistency.
And I’ve almost never seen a dream portrayed in the media in a way that matches how dreams actually feel to me.
Oh, yes, I’ve had a recurring dream city, too, with recurring landmarks, consistent enough that I have drawn maps of neighborhoods. It’s not related to any real-world city I’ve ever been in. I love that place, it’s multidimensional and magical and mysterious, and if I ever found a real-world city that is remotely like it, I’d move there in a heartbeat.
But I doubt that there is any real-world equivalent. In dreams, a house is generally a metaphor for the self, I’ve thought of the dream city as a more complex and expansive metaphor for self.
I think I’ll see if I can program myself to pay it a visit tonight…
I have a Dream Version of the Twin Cities that I visit on occasion. Usually in a few key places that I do not live in or usually visit in real life. There is sort of a compressed scale and a lot of differences from the actual city, but it bears at least a passing resemblance. It stays remarkably consistent too, as I once drove past a “state park” (that does not exist IRL) on a dream road that I had not seen in perhaps 20 years, and instantly recognized it in the dreaming and again when I awoke and thought about it.
Then too there is “the party house” which I occasionally visit, which is inhabitted by a number of people that I knew ‘back when’ and is quite large and not entirely logically constructed.
This is me. My grandmother’s house. They’re usually not pleasant, because my grandmother is often in them, and it usually takes a while before I remember that she is long dead. Gives me the willies. That house gave me the willies as a kid, too.
I sometimes have dreams that take place in the same apartment – in my dream, it’s “my college apartment” but in reality, it’s like a mash up of a bunch of different college-type apartments that my assorted friends had back then. But in the dreams, it’s very consistent.
On edit – it’s not at all like my own actual college apartment, in fact.
Not so much a recurring location, but a consistent architectual building style.
ie. Architect on LSD.
Homes that have odd hidden passageways from the first to the third floors, second floor’s existance is a matter of conjecture. Escher inspired creations where going down the stairs can lead you just about anywhere.
Office building where the elevators are cut in whereever is convenient and are seldom square. Maybe there are doors on the car. Or walls. Or even a ceiling. They also don’t stop on all floors. And a different set of floors coming down. And then an entirely different set going up the next trip.
In my recurrent dream, location is everything - it’s interesting and evocative and fills me with inexpressible longing. The people and activities are not important. Some locations are familiar and others new. But I always wind up in the same long narrow knotty-pine paneled hallway, in a line of people, and we slowly file towards the end of the hallway where a man in an undershirt is snoozing in a chair leaning against the wall at the end of the hallway. There’s a window above him. One by one we run and dive through the window, and when I do I land in a shallow pool with duckweed floating in it. Then I wake up.
The difference is probably that you actually miss your cats because you enjoyed their company. While I certainly love my grandmother, I don’t have any pleasant memories from growing up in her house, and I have very UNpleasant memories of the impact she had on my mom’s life.
Having said that, I don’t necessarily think that negates your advice.
It is this: my parents own some property up north, with a very modest cottage on it. My dreams regularly take place on this property, only in my dreams, there are other houses on the same property. Sometimes I never knew they were there, and I just discover them; other times, it feels like I’ve always known they were there, so convincingly that when I wake up, I sort of half believe they exist for a minute or so.
These other houses are always laberynthine in complexity and size, but other than that there is no real consistency - sometimes they are scarey and forbidding, and at other times they are super luxurious and inviting. What is consistent is that they always are much larger on the inside than on the outside.
I sometimes have recurring dream locations. What I have noticed is that the emotional tone of the dreams tends to recur, and this often brings in the same locations.
My recurring dreams are kind of a mashup of what Asimovian and Projammer posted. They occur in a house my grandparents lived in, but sold 20 years ago.
I keep finding a secret passage in my grandparents’ old house (under the basement stairs) that leads to an impossibly huge space - easily the size of a high school gymnasium. On the other end of this space is another passage that leads to a closet all the way up on the third floor. In the dream, when I try to find my parents or my grandparents to tell them about the passage, they’re nowhere to be found.
I’ve had this dream dozens of times since I was a little kid.
I came into this thread to say that any time I have a dream that is located “at home”, it’s the house I grew up in. Not my current house where we’ve been for 5 years, or the place we lived at for 13 years before that, or any of the places I lived once I went off to college; it’s always my mother’s house. I’ve found extra rooms / floors in that house several times (it’s a ranch, so only 1 story in real life).
OK - I have now had perhaps 2 dreams that were set in my current house, and 1 in the previous place; all of those have been in the last year or so though. Interestingly, both have involved finding extra rooms. [freud]Hmmmm, I wonder what that means…[/freud].
I often feel that I was dreaming of a familiar place, but I can’t describe the place at all - no distinguishing features, no idea when I’ve seen it before (in a dream or real life). I think what I’m dreaming is the feeling of being in a familiar place. The dream recreates the emotions of going back to a familiar place, but does not actually depict the place itself.
Then again, I guess it is possible that I am dreaming of a specific and consistent place, I just don’t remember it when I wake up.
My recurring location theme is large houses. When I was younger it was the house we lived in until I was 10, but with a secret expansion that opened up through a ceiling. Sometimes I could find it and other times I couldn’t. Lately the house has changed in most dreams, but it is always a really big house.
Last night it was a house that I rented rooms out in to various people. It seems there were sets of rooms that were like apartments but they all opened into each other so it was one big house…I’m probably not describing it very well but as usual it was a rather odd dream.
There’s a dream city that I visit so often that I could almost draw a map of it, and might one day start to actually catalog. It’s very strange in how constant and uniform it is - the different parts of town, the different locations and buildings - and it’s the backdrop for completely different TYPES of dreams. Even weirder, it’s kind of not really related to any real city I’ve lived in or been to in layout, appearance, feeling, etc.
I have drawn a map of the house that I consistently dream about. It matches no house I can recall seeing, is internally inconsistent and structurally impossible, and yet feels incredibly real and solid when I dream about it. I mentioned it in a recent thread, actually.
I see from this thread I’m not the only one who dreams about a house quite often.
The few times I’ve stepped out of the house in my dreams, it’s always been located in a deserted location – the top of a rugged cliff, a desert (I grew up in the desert, so this at least seems reasonable), a secluded forest, an abandoned neighborhood, etc. I’m sure a psych…er… brain fixer would have a field day with these, but I tend to just sit back and enjoy 'em.
I’m also a huge fan of a genre of movies that I can’t think of a good shorthand for, but which take place in those sorts of locations, which probably has something to do with it.
Tapiotar: house = self in dreams? Interesting. If so, I need to have a few words with my building inspector.
