The dream

At some point in our conversation this evening my friend and I were talking about houses we've lived in, and discovered that we have, at various times, shared a similar dream.

In the dream, you are in a house (or apartment), and it is too crowded and/or small, and you suddenly remember or find a door that leads to another part of the house, usually upstairs, that you had forgotten was there. You cannot understand how you could possibly have forgotten/not known. You go through the door and what you find there amazes and delights you. It is beautiful, and spacious – the perfect room(s) – except usually there is some flaw, large or small. (In my friend's case the flaw was a huge, really mucky fish tank with scary things in it; and in mine, a woman working obsessively on an enormous pile of ironing and insisting that nobody had used the room for so long it was now hers by right.)

This is the outline of the dream. I have had it several times (although not recently), set in several different houses, some of which I've lived in and some I haven't. It is always so real to me that I wake up all excited at remembering the room I'd forgotten was there, and how wonderful! Let's open it up and USE it! Then I wake up properly and the dream collapses, but it leaves me with a feeling of potential surprise and delight. I am disappointed that the dream was not real, but something equally wonderful MIGHT happen.

It was a bit strange to discover that someone else had had my dream, and made me wonder whether this is one of those universal dreams, that everybody has.

Have you ever had this dream?