I had a dream last night where I was walking around my house and all of the light bulbs were burned out. What was weird, other than all the light bulbs burning out at the same time, was that the house in my dream was actually my house. Usually when I dream that I’m at home, it’s not actually my house, it’s just some random collection of rooms that serves as my house in the dream.
I know the answer to the question “Does this happen to anyone else?” is always yes, but I thought I would ask anyway. If you dream that you are at home, is it actually your home? Or is it someplace else that, in the dream, feels like your home?
Lately, it seems I dream a lot about the house where I lived as a child. It’s weird because I left home in 1973 and my folks sold the place in 1979. Apart from looking it up on Google street view, I haven’t seen the place in forever. But I’ve never had a dream that took place in any other place where I lived.
Come to think of it, I very rarely have dreams set at home. But I do have them in other familiar places like school. Usually, those “familiar places” are stand-ins that bear no particular resemblance to the real place. The most haunting nightmare I ever had, however, was set on a bridge on a street a few blocks from my mother’s house, and part of what was so haunting about it was that it was an exact match for the real thing (the other haunting thing about it was that it involved the hopefully-still-far-off death of a loved one).
Actually, come to think of it, another dream that really stuck with me was set mostly in a very realistic facsimile of my grandmother’s living room. It involved time travel, and I had somehow ended up in a timeline where one of my aunts (who in this timeline has a large and loving family) had never married.
I’m jealous of your time travel dream; mine are much more mundane. Of course, given your user name, you were probably destined to have time travel dreams.
Mot of my “home” dreams are an amalgam of a house & neighborhood I lived in in the 2000s with snippets of other houses I looked at buying before or since, hotels I’ve stayed in before or since, and surreal remakings of the general town environment around that house.
Why that one & none of the several others I’ve lived in? Beats heck outta me; it wasn’t particularly a standout amongst all the rest in either duration or features.