Dream home

There is still plenty of stuff to pack, but for the moment I have run out of boxes. Hopefully, more will be acquired tomorrow, but until then...

Tomorrow, we will be visiting Charming Bungalow for our final walkthrough before closing. I am perhaps feeling a bit anxious about this, as evidenced by a recent dream.

Now, Charming Bungalow is entirely vacant, and has been for some time. The seller, a realtor who purchases, updates, and resells homes as a nice side business, has never actually lived there. Occupancy after closing is immediate. However, in my dream, the seller had decided to move his entire extended family in a week before closing. And when we arrived for our final walkthrough, they were all there having a poker tournament.* Piles of clothing and furniture were everywhere, and no one seemed at all concerned about how they were going to move everything out in the three days that remained until closing.

On top of that, the house had rearranged itself, and the downstairs bedroom had increased in size by about thirty feet, and featured a sloped ceiling, stairs, and several layers of carpeting. Another bathroom, with a giant bathtub and a tiny, dishpan-sized hot tub, had appeared. There were some other differences, but I can't remember just what they were now.

I shared this dream with a few relatives and coworkers, and in return, I got to hear some interesting stories. A lot of people dream about houses, it turns out. One coworker, who has done the purchase-remodel-resell thing a time or two herself, said, "Well, when the kids were little, we never seemed to have enough space. I used to have these dreams where we'd suddenly discover a whole other wing, or sometimes just a room, that we'd somehow forgotten about." My mother said, "Remember the linen closet upstairs, at your grandmother's house? I used to dream that it was a bathroom instead."** I periodically dream that a door in my parents' attic opens to a library. Well, not exactly a library, just a nice carpeted room with the walls covered in bookshelves. Sometimes, this dream room is haunted; other times, it's just a bookshelf-lined room. Also, I used to have dreams that Dragon and I had just found a beautiful apartment, with all sorts of wonderful features, and once we moved in, we'd find out that something was drastically wrong with it. Maybe there were no locks on the doors. Or all the walls were glass, or it had been cleverly disguised and was actually located in the middle of the museum or a mall, so curious museum-goers or shoppers could peer in at us whenever they wished.

Anyway, houses are a big deal in many ways. No wonder we dream about them.

*Dragon likes to watch those televised poker tournaments. They have been on frequently lately. Scary that they're creeping into MY dreams now.

**This brings to mind an entirely different type of dream. I'll be running around a college campus, gym, museum, movie theater, or some other large building, walking in and out of bathrooms. Dozens of them. All of them filthy, or crowded, or otherwise unsuitable for use. Eventually, I'll wake up and realize that I need to use the bathroom. I discussed this once with a former coworker, and we both were (oh, no) relieved (sorry) to discover that we weren't the only ones to have dreams like that. As I recall, we practically fell out of our chairs laughing, saying, "And then you sort of start dreaming lucidly, and think, Why the hell do I keep dreaming about BATHROOMS, for crying out loud? Why can't I dream about something pleasant? Oh, wait. I better wake up now."

Boy howdy. If there's a graceful ending after that second footnote, I'm too tired to think of it. Have a nice evening, 'kay?