Strange News from Another Star, No. 5: At home
Real estate in the other world
Bulletin
This is the fifth edition of Strange News from Another Star, an increasingly irregular attempt to work out what the deal is with dreams. Past editions have been about dreams and reality, dreams and death, hatsuyume, dreams and messages, and dreams and distant places. The last edition was all the way back in March, and there are several thousand more of you now than there were last time, so a recap. Everyone knows that there’s nothing more boring than hearing about other people’s dreams. SNAS is founded on the suspicion that everyone is wrong. Some of my readers have been having some really interesting dreams, and every so often I collect the best of them while also offering some loose provisional attempts to understand the shadowy third of our lives we spend in the other world: what that world is made of, how it works, and what it is we’re really doing there.
This is the second in a two-part series on the places and spaces of the dreamworld. Last time we looked at place, this time it’s space. Paid subscribers get some cool dreams about weird houses, hidden doors, and the Room of Immanence, plus a brief ethnography of real and imaginary space and the outlines of a future study of monsters. If that sounds interesting to you and you’re not yet a paid subscriber, click the button below. If that doesn’t sound interesting to you and you’d rather read about politics or whatever, you should seriously reconsider your life.
The next edition will be about the self. One of the pieces of dream-theory that’s made its way into the mainstream is the idea that everyone you meet in a dream actually represents some aspect of yourself. People repeat this confidently. But is it actually true? So far, I’ve received three dreams from readers who have, like Zhuangzi and the butterfly, become someone or something other than themselves. (Paid subscribers can read one of them below.) One person dreamed they were the moon. What is your dream-self like? Have you ever dreamed you were someone else? When you dream, are you looking through your own eyes, or are you watching yourself from the outside? Have you encountered yourself in the guise of another person? Have you, in a dream, ever looked into a mirror?
You can contribute to the next edition of Strange News from Another Star by replying directly to this email, or by emailing my brand-new dedicated inbox at snas.substack@gmail.com, or by mashing your fingers against the button below:
As always, give your name if you want to be named, and include a link to any personal project if you want to be linked.
Some more news:
At the start of this year, I visited The Villages in Florida, the world’s largest retirement community. I came away incredibly depressed. My report on the place has now been published by the Lamp. The piece is extremely long, but I also think it might be the best thing I’ve ever written. Please give it a read.
I reviewed the film adaptation of How to Blow Up a Pipeline for the New York Review of Architecture. It’s a fun film, and it looks lovely. But I think it’s interesting that Andreas Malm was sick of the theatrical, performative, artsy style of climate activism, so he wrote a book telling people to make bombs instead—and the only result so far is an adaptation of that book into yet another piece of art.
In the Telegraph, I wrote about the Christian movie industry, and the awful awful dreck it puts out. The problem with these films isn’t that they’re too religious: in a sense, they’re not religious enough. Instead of seriously grappling with the difficult Christian themes that have inspired twenty centuries of great art, they mostly function as a self-congratulatory endorsement for an evangelical subculture that doesn’t even believe in its own religion.
In the Spectator, I wrote about podcasts. Podcasts suck. Listen to music instead.
I also have a piece in the Spring issue of Jacobin, which is on conspiracy. I’m a huge fan of conspiracy theories, but this piece is about how they all seem to be falling away. Instead of the brilliant, delirious universes of Flat Earth and Hologram Moon, contemporary conspiracy theory is really just incredibly dull, a kind of low muttering monotone about the Elites and their Plans. So maybe it’s no wonder that we are, after the frenzy of the Long 2010s, entering a post-paranoid age.
Finally, I’ll be in the upcoming inaugural print edition of Damage, alongside friends of the Lodge including Amber A’Lee Frost and Dustin Guastella, with an essay on Saudi megastructures—those utterly daft projects like the city as tall as the Empire State Building, as wide as a train station, and as long as Portugal; or the cyberpunk ski resort in the desert; or the enormous hollow cube with another skyscraper nestled inside. Saudi Arabia is, of course, by some margin the worst country in the world. So why is it the only country that still retains the emancipatory ethos of Modernism?
That’s all from the daylit world. Into the night.
Dream of the month
Two dreams of the month this time, since it’s been so long. The first is from an anonymous reader:
Eels name themselves. I watch a brood of eels hatching in a coral reef. They’ve all given themselves accidentally gay names like Hole Guy and BRUTHAxLUVA. (‘Because I like swimming into holes!’ ‘And I love my brothers!’) I think I ought to tell them, but they’re so excited about their new names, they twitch their tiny tails chanting their names and then vanish into the murky sea. I decide not to ruin their innocence, even though I know that once an eel names itself that name is set in stone for the rest of its life. I wake up thinking ‘damn, I should google eels naming themselves and find out more about how it works.’
And another absolute banger of a dream from Jack:
In my dream I am in a waiting room: beige and cream, institutional, 1970s. Big white clock on the wall. A row of windows to my right looks out directly into the dark interior of a multi-storey car park. There is a young man (early 20s) sitting opposite me who is clearly ‘white working class.’ He has thick, black, square-framed glasses and a northern accent. He leans in and says something like ‘the amateur study of philology has led me to want to chop off my penis.’ That's why he’s in the waiting room, which I realise is that of a psychiatric institution. He has ambitions and dreams. He has ideas about language. But no one will listen. He'll chop off his dick to make them listen.
I tell him I don’t think he’s mad and I’ll hear him out. I suggest we go for a walk. He agrees. But he says he quickly needs to use the loo before we go. I stand and wait by the exit while he’s in there. Then I realise with horror—through dream logic—that he’s actually doing it. Right now. He’s chopping off his dick in the toilet.
At home
My friend James Vincent (whose excellent book Beyond Measure is now available in paperback) had a dream about his fridge. In the dream, he was moving all his various leftovers into small tupperware containers and stacking them in a very particular order to free up space. Then, when he woke up, he discovered that his real fridge had the exact same layout and contents as his fridge in the other world. So he repeated the procedure. It really did free up quite a lot of space.
Most of the time, dreams do not work like Vinny’s fridge. The waking world is made of objects extended in space, but the dreamworld is made of thoughts. In the waking world, if one piece of tupperware is on top of another, it just means that it’s on top of another. In the dreamworld, a concept like on top of comes, as James Hillman reminds us, ‘already loaded with significances... ontological, esthetic and moral considerations that are reflected in many spiritual topographies.’ And most of the time, the homes we inhabit in dreams—where upstairs and downstairs mean a lot more than they do in an architect’s drawing—do not exactly match the homes we were in when we went to sleep.
In Jung’s famous house dream, which he experienced in 1909 while bringing the plague to America with Sigmund Freud, he explored a building that he knew to be his home. The dream began on the upper storey, ‘a kind of salon furnished with fine old pieces in Rococo style.’ But then he walked down the stairs, and found that the ground floor was very different. ‘The furnishings were medieval; the floors were of red brick. Everywhere it was rather dark.’ Another set of stairs led to the basement, ‘a beautifully vaulted room which looked exceedingly ancient. Examining the walls, I discovered layers of brick among the ordinary stone blocks, and chips of brick in the mortar. As soon as I saw this I knew that the walls dated from Roman times.’ But there was something even deeper beneath the basement. Jung pulled up the stone slabs on the floor and discovered a cave. ‘Thick dust lay on the floor and in the dust were scattered bones and broken pottery, like remains of a primitive culture. I discovered two human skulls, obviously very old, and half disintegrated. Then I awoke.’
Jung decided that the house in the dream was a map of himself, ‘a kind of structural diagram of the human psyche.’ The conscious mind is on the upper storey: civilised, comfortable, if slightly formal. The savage caverns, where the dead lie unburied, represent something else. In Jung’s dream, he knew that the upper storey was his home, but the basement was foreign, hidden away, not even made by human hands. This was the dream that ended up producing the theory of the collective unconscious. But Freud, being Freud, simply asked Jung whom the two skulls belonged to, and Jung lied they looked like his wife and his sister-in-law. In fact, they didn’t look like anyone in particular. The whole dream, Freud decided, was a sublimated death-wish against Jung’s family. Perfectly healthy.
Freud’s interpretation might have been too schematic, but the modern school of oneirocriticism—which is always basically Jungian, even if it doesn’t know it—has ended up being pretty schematic too. If you ask pop-dream-analysts about how houses work in dreams, they’ll tell you that if your dream is set in a room facing the street, this represents the part of you that is open to the world and other people. A dream in the back of the house, meanwhile, means you’re working through your deeper secrets. The kitchen symbolises creativity, the living room is where you process your relationships with friends, the toilet is fear or shame, while the bedroom is obviously connected with sex. This is all very, very dull. Significance becomes a kind of interior decor for the dreamhouse, a Live Laugh Love decal for the other world.
But there’s one other folk-belief about houses in dreams. Nobody knows where the idea comes from, but several people have spontaneously told me that whenever you dream about your home, it will always contain one extra door that isn’t there in real life. Most of the time you never notice it. But sometimes you do, and if you open that door, you might discover the secret knowledge hidden inside.
According to the dreams you’ve sent in, this one is absolutely true.
Jess lives in a small flat in Manchester. ‘When you come through the front door there’s a tiny vestibule with three doors coming off it. It’s actually not big enough to open the door when there’s more than two people standing there.’ But in her dream, the doors multiplied:
I was standing in the middle of my vestibule, holding a brass bowl filled with gold coins. There are no windows in there and it was dark, so I decided to open one of the doors so the light would shine in and I could see my coins. Only in the dream there were dozens of doors now. I kept spinning around opening one door after another, but each one just opened onto a gloomy Gothic crypt and I could barely see anything. I’m looking for the door to my bedroom with its soft furnishings and warm electric lights but there are too many doors to count, I might keep opening them forever and never find the right one.
Everett Upright, who writes fiction at Ghosts in Glass, also has dark voids opening up inside his home. ‘My indoor dreamspace always holds together 1:1 with waking space, except that sometimes there’s a gravity well under my bed that sucks me down through the bed into an endless black hole.’ Matteo dreamed he was ripping up the floorboards in his apartment. ‘I knew there was a tiny room nestled between the floors in my building, with tiny furniture and a rug no bigger than the palm of my hand. I’d left my birth certificate in a drawer in that room, and I needed it to prove who I was to my friends. But every time I stuck my hand through the hole in the floor it came out bleeding, covered in splinters.’
Another dream, meanwhile, does actually venture into the hidden world behind the ghostly door:
I had a dream last year in which there was an incredibly richly stocked pantry behind my kitchen. I’m frying eggs and I need salt, so I open the pantry door, which is accessed through a passageway around the back of my cooker. (In real life there’s nothing there; the cooker is against an external wall.) I go inside. The pantry keeps going, getting bigger as you walk further into it. Eventually the shelves of dry goods become large gated Regency mansions with fountains in the forecourts and peacocks wandering through the grounds. They all have names like Walnut Manor, Orange-Peel Castle, or The House of Mister Beans. I go inside one of them. It’s spookily empty. The parquet is full of puddles, the ceilings are sagging, and there’s moss everywhere. Eventually I wander back to my kitchen and have the eggs without salt.
I still remember that dream really vividly. It seems connected with some incredible sadness in my life that I still can’t identify. All those beautiful rotting houses someone used to love, and me ungratefully just trying to find the salt. My girlfriend thinks it’s a guilt dream about my mother.
Although maybe the most classic example of the form is this one, from Eli:
I became convinced my brother and sister were holding onto some big secret I wasn’t supposed to know about, but they’d hidden the evidence somewhere in my house. I go through all my cupboards trying to find the documents. Nothing. (Unfortunately I don’t remember if all the cupboards were in their usual locations.) In frustration I storm upstairs only to discover that there’s a bend at the end of my hallway, and round the corner there’s a door I’d never noticed before. I open it and find myself on the balcony of an old Mediterranean-style villa. There’s a bracing sea wind and some high mountains in the distance, a nearby road is lined with cypresses and full of angry Italian drivers honking their horns. I find some wet pieces of paper drying on the railing. They tell me my siblings’ secret, which is that our family is actually directly descended from Hitler and they’ve been trying to wipe out our genetic line.
Of course, the secret door is only one of the hidden dimensions inside your dream-houses. Peter writes that fifteen years ago, he and his wife lived in her grandmother’s old apartment in Cairo:
It’s big by Egyptian apartment standards, in a very central location to where both me and my wife grew up. The building is owned by all the grandmother’s children, but because all but one of them lived abroad now, practically it belonged to no one in particular. We didn’t have a place of our own at the time, and here was this large apartment with some old classic furniture, and we could live in it. It felt like home in a way few places ever did.
I still dream about that place a lot. It’s always changing, but I always know it’s the same place. Most of the time it is labyrinthine, with rooms leading into other rooms that I hadn’t seen before. The whole apartment feels safe, though, like a secret hiding place. There was once a door in it that led to a large hidden apartment within the apartment, it had a cosy daybed and potted plants and windows that let in sunshine. Once it was on a large plot of land with a brick fence and a small and barren backyard. Once it was much closer to the Egyptian presidential palace than it was in reality (which created some dream anxiety).
In fact, grandparents often seem to crop up in these dreams. David writes:
It occurs to me that many of my most unsettling dreams occur in a house where the loft, or attic, is of special importance. Sometimes the attic is that of my grandparents’ house (they each died over a decade ago, but for some reason, we are moving their belongings out now). Their attic reveals vast libraries of incredible literature, paintings, treasures, almost the size of another house unto itself, perhaps bigger than the one below. Sometimes I am amazed to find my Grandad is still alive and pottering around up there, bemused that we all thought him dead. He had simply never thought to contact us, so engrossed in his books was he.
One of my favourites is this very Lynchian dream from Tate. Unlike the others, the secret is right in the centre of the house, rather than somewhere on the periphery. And unlike the others, what matters in this dream isn’t what’s inside this secret room, but the layout of the house itself, a geography that seems to hideously repeat itself across space and time:
In the dream I am an up-and-coming postwar Japanese film director. My (nonexistent) girlfriend and I have travelled to the countryside to visit the home of an older auteur of Kurosawa-level fame. All of his films are shot within a single room in the centre of the house known as the Room of Immanence, always with a single amateur actor and himself as the sole crew member. My girlfriend is cold and distant toward me, and flirts with the auteur. I suspect they’re having an affair. At some point I find her crestfallen, lying on a bare stone slab in the centre of the living room, hair wet. I lie down next to her and ask what is wrong, but she is unresponsive. I whisper in her ear: ‘Will someone be hurt?’ She nods and begins to cry.
There’s a POV shot of the director inside the Room. He is filming my girlfriend. His hand is reaching towards her; she appears frightened. Without breaking, the scene shifts to the interior of a feudal Japanese home. My girlfriend is now in a peasant dress and the POV shot is now of a ghostly hand terrorising her. I’m watching this as my ordinary self, in a cinema with my father. He says he does not understand the Room or its purpose. I explain that the true horror of the Room manifests itself when the fantasy space constructed within it begins to break down, most often when the actor inadvertently steps outside of the camera shot or gets up to use the bathroom. At this point they all experience some indescribable terror, but of what I am not certain.
I find myself in the kitchen of the suburban home of a college friend, but its layout is that of the Japanese auteur's residence, a single storey whose rooms are built out around a foreboding central chamber. He enters with an armful of ingredients, preparing to cook an elaborate meal. He turns on the stovetop and thrusts his hands into the open flame several times, unflinching. Before I can register my confusion he rushes over to greet a newly-arrived visitor, a man in a suit who introduces himself as a film director. He asks my friend if I have ever been inside the Room of Immanence.
A camera, like a room, is a way of sectioning off one particular area of space. A forbidden door surrounds the frame, and something horrible happens when you step out of shot.
The other theme that predominates in your dreams of home, meanwhile, is the home invasion. Stephen dreamed a ‘small antelope-type creature’ inside his childhood home, ‘charging around from room to room, destroying the old furniture inside.’ But when he takes a photo and sends it to his girlfriend, she decides it’s cute, and it suddenly is. ‘After that, it started following me around the house like a dog. I went outside to where a small wood ran up against the house. It followed me and looked up at me with giant, innocent eyes before we both walked into the forest.’ An anonymous reader dreamed that an eco-terrorist kept rolling grenades under their front door, which in the dream had an inch’s clearance underneath it. Outside, the house stood over ‘a large pit full of industrial machinery;’ the dreamer has to execute the terrorist and throw him in the pit. Dimi dreamed a home being constantly intruded upon by perfectly nice but unwanted guests. ‘They have made themselves at home in my place, sitting on my couch, chilling in my kitchen. My flat appears suddenly very large, and as I remove people from one room, more seem to be appearing in the others. I try to get everyone out and start looking for my keys to lock the door, only to find that somehow the guests have started circulating copies between them.’ Alyssa (who does her own dream-interpretation at The Artemisian) dreamed an interesting variant: this time the threat is still there, but she’s the interloper in her own home:
I am at a bed and breakfast. It is a beautiful Victorian house, eerily similar to my real home, but I am staying there as a guest. I am with a group of people, we dance around the common room downstairs. I begin to notice something is off. I can smell smoke and realise there is a fire upstairs. I run up and see smoke billowing from underneath the door of my room. I don’t know if I accidentally started it or someone else, I believe the room may be shared with others.
I am feeling worried about getting my things. I know that there are really important items that I have in there, things I wouldn’t normally bring to a vacation such as important family jewellery and other personal items. I go into the room and I can barely see. I’m becoming overwhelmed by the smoke but I know I need to get my things. I begin to strategise if I can open a window. Before I can do anything I wake up.
In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard writes that ‘the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace… Life begins well, it begins enclosed, protected, all warm in the bosom of the house.’ But he was talking about daydreams. Real dreams, nocturnal dreams, are different: its houses are much vaster and more intricate, much less snug. Marshall McLuhan—who really should know beter—insists that the house is, like clothing, ‘an extension of our private skins to store and channel our own heat and energy.’ He only sees the walls, the rooms, the material sheath around the human body. But in dreams, no place is static.
I think the really important element in Jung’s dream wasn’t the stacked floors going back in time, but the stairs between them. Because almost every single one of your dreams was about the transitional zones of the house. The balconies, the space under the bed or beneath the floorboards, or the attic wedged invisibly between the familiar parts of the house and its roof. Corridors, passageways, staircases, atriums, windowpanes—but most of all, doors. The house encloses nothing. It is always opening out and opening in. It’s not made of rooms, solid divisions of space: it’s made of doorways.
Of course, people have not always lived in houses with corridors, passageways, and staircases. The corridor is a fairly recent invention: until the 1820s, most aristocratic homes consisted of a series of rooms opening onto each other. In fact, for most of human history, our dwellings usually consisted of precisely one room, with no doors anywhere. McLuhan points out that ‘men live in round houses until they become sedentary and specialised in their work organization.’ The round house is an extension of the body and a microcosm of the universe; it’s only once we settle down into permanent communities that houses become square, sectioning off space into discrete areas.
But even then, the dream-house has its secret channels. In 1939, the anthropologist Dorothy Eggan travelled to the Hopi pueblo of Old Oraibi in Arizona to record their dreams. The Hopi are, admittedly, a sedentary people; they live in square houses. Traditional Hopi dwellings have tiny windows set in thick stone walls. Strangely, though, in their dreams the Hopi also fixated on the in-between zones. In their dreams, the Hopi put holes in their houses that were not there in waking life. Rebecca Lemov describes Eggan’s findings in her book Database of Dreams:
A conservative Hopi, Chad, dreamed of wandering down a hallway, a feature not found in Hopi architecture but which he knew from Oraibi High School, and, as he reflected, ‘I have seen many nice houses of white people in which they have hallways.’ His wife, Debbie, about sixty and ‘thoroughly ‘old Hopi,’’ dreamed of visiting a friend and climbing through an opening in the ceiling to find not a room but a beautiful space, where the ‘ground was like rubber sponge’ and there was a pool of water with ‘green grass like the lawn in front of the banaha [white people] houses.’
What is a sponge? A material made of thousands of tiny openings: a hallway. Of course, both of Eggan’s informants compare their dream-houses to those of white people: you can’t ignore the colonial relation here, the social power that houses with lots of rooms and openings have over houses without. But maybe the tecnical abilities of industrial societies just allow us to build houses that more closely resemble the houses in the other world. Even before these transitional zones existed in our real homes, we built them in our dreams. Piranesi’s dream-prisons contain no visible rooms or cells, just endless walkways, cables, pulleys, staircases, balustrades, passageways. Thomas de Quincey’s opium dreams had the same scheme; the ‘pomp of cities and palaces’ were constructed entirely out of in-between spaces leading to nowhere in particular. And people who live in circular huts have the same exact kind of dream—theirs just tend to take place in caves and caverns, grottoes, warrens. The essential quality of dreamspace—which is, after all, just mental space, raw psychic spatiality—is that it’s always interstitial. We can section it off into self-contained units, but in our dreams even those of us who live in square houses find ourselves once again in the buried labyrinth. It might be plastered and painted, domesticated, but walk around in there for too long and you will see the primordial nowhere-cave that has always been your home.
The earliest dream I can remember was about the house. In fact, I can still remember it as clearly as if I’d just woken up. This dream was also a nightmare. I must have been four years old or so, and I found myself walking up to my childhood home entirely alone. The door was slightly ajar, and I stood trembling on the threshold for a moment. Inside, the downstairs hallway was much longer than it had ever been, and much gloomier. Everything had the same arrangement as in the waking world, but this space did not want to let me enter anything as strictly defined as a room. Dream-architecture as an indefinite and terrifying deferral: as I inched my way down the landing, it seemed to extend further and further in front of me. The dinky little hall table was as long as a barge. The tatty old Persian rug added acres. And the kitchen at the far end of the hall was a distant cavern, shrouded in black. From somewhere in the depths of the kitchen I heard a low, steady thudding, like a heartbeat. Something horrible moving around in there, huge and unseen. That thing, I knew, was the source of this change, reaching out from its hole to elongate space against me. I called out: who are you? And the darkness replied, in a voice so low it seemed to be rising up from underneath the floor, all down the length of the hallway: I AM A MONSTER.
I woke up sobbing, and I could barely sleep again for days. A lot of children have nightmares about monsters—but monster is a very bad name for these things that come out of the other world to terrify our toddlers. From the Latin monstrare, to show, to point out, to indicate, to reveal. But the monster is never seen, and it never reveals itself. It’s always hiding behind the door of the wardrobe, or underneath the bed, or at the end of an infinitely long corridor, in the nowhere zones. The only monster that’s actually tangible is the space that moves as you move through it, the infinite openness of the house.