Houses live in us as we live in them. Your house nurtures, protects and regenerates your body and spirit. In your house you are free to dream, let your imagination wander and cultivate inner life. In your dreams the house is a potent image that both reflects and transforms the psyche. Changes in your life are often connected to changes in these inner houses, just as any changes in the house you live in can create inner shifts that lead to outer change. When a client tells me that he/she is buying a new house or remodeling, we explore the changes that are likely to take place in their lives in response to the changes in the houses they live in. In this article we’ll be exploring how to enrich and deepen our relationship with houses through imagination—both the ones we live in and the ones that live in us.
After the death of my father, I had a series of dreams extending over nine months in which my house (not the one I lived in then in everyday reality) was being remodeled. The dreams first focused on rebuilding the foundation, then progressed to the kitchen, living room, and bedrooms. In the final dream of this series, the garden was being tilled and new seeds planted. At this point I discovered a new extension to the dream house, containing rooms that I had not known were there before.
These dreams spoke vividly to the reorganization and transformation of my psyche that was activated by my father’s death. I noticed a remarkable connection with the room that was being remodeled in the dream and the corresponding part of my life. For example, the rebuilding of the foundation corresponded with the early weeks after my father’s death when I felt that the ground had given way. Nothing felt secure anymore, a common experience with the death of a parent. When the dreams shifted to the kitchen, I was going through a period of reassessing how I nurture and feed myself—on both a physical and soul level. The dream of the renovation of the living room reflected the painful tearing apart of old structures to make room for an expanded sense of self. And the dream of the garden being seeded along with the discovery of a new wing of the house were soon followed by some exciting developments that forced me to tap new resources and talents. I felt the same excitement in response to these new challenges as I felt exploring the new rooms in my dream.
You can gain valuable information about what is stirring in your psyche through the inner houses you access through dreams and active imagination. Sometimes the same inner house will appear over and over for weeks or months, as it did for me after my father’s death. This can be a house from your childhood or from some other period of your life. You may have experienced some fear or conflict at this time that is relevant to the current situation. This can also be a house you currently live in or a house that you have never seen in outer reality. Even a house that you know may have different rooms.
Many people have had significant house dreams at some point of their lives—some so powerful that they are still remembered years later. But you can also use active imagination techniques to access your inner house.
The house is more than a box we live in; it is a soul activity to be retrieved from the numbness of the world of modern objects. Each place of the house, each room, each hallway, closet, stair and alcove is a distinct structure that animates different aspects of soul. . . Each room contains a mythic universe.
Robert Sardello
Exercise
Close your eyes and shift your attention to the inner landscape of your psyche. Imagine some setting for your inner house. This can be in nature or in a city or town. Awaken all your senses as you explore this environment. Smell, touch, taste, look and listen. When you feel satisfied that you are fully present in your body in this imaginal place, then look for your house. When you find it, approach it, noticing details as you move closer. Is it small? Large? Rustic? Modern? Once you have reached this house, circle around it, looking carefully at all sides. Find the front door. What does it look like? Step into the house. Look all around you: what kind of room is this? Is the room light or dark? How is it furnished? What is the color of the walls, floors and furniture?
Move on to explore the rest of the house—the halls, any stairs, all the other rooms. Is there a basement or an attic? Start by observing these rooms in as much detail as you can. Then go back to the room (or rooms) that feels most compelling or intriguing to you. It may be that this room relates to a part of your psyche that is activated at this time. Spend some time in this room, looking around and exploring. You can rearrange, redecorate, or renovate this room. Bring in new furniture, paint the walls, put in a new floor, take down or put up walls, open up or close off windows. Another more dramatic possibility is to tear down this house and rebuild a new one.
After you do this exercise, you may want to understand more fully what the different rooms of your inner house may mean symbolically to you. Take some time to explore your associations with a living room, a bedroom, etc as though you were trying to explain what these are to a person from another planet. You can also reflect on the purpose of each room and how each part of the house relates to the whole. Remember that “each room contains a mythic universe.”
A client in crisis consulted me. As we discussed his difficult situation, he realized how much he lived from crisis to crisis rather that from any sense of larger vision. I asked him to create a five-year plan, a task he struggled with: all he could identify was that he wanted to live in Hawaii. I encouraged him to describe his dream house, first to me and then on paper. With eyes closed, he described the house as he saw it in his mind’s eye. He was shocked and excited by how vividly and clearly it appeared to him. After our session, he continued to write pages about the house, describing each room, the furnishings, and the surrounding landscape. As this dream house came to life in his imagination, he was surprised with how easily the rest of this five-year plan fell into place.
If you choose to renovate or rebuild your inner house you may activate forces in the psyche that instigate change in your outer life. I’ve observed that even working on the house you live in has the same effect. Our houses in everyday life work on us as we work on them!
Our house was not unsentient matter—it had a heart and a soul, and eyes to see with; and approvals and solicitudes and deep sympathies; it was of us, and we were of us, and we were in its confidence and lived in its grace and in the peace of its benedictions. We never came home from an absence that its face did not light up and speak out in eloquent welcome—and we could not enter it unmoved.
Samuel Clemens
In her first session, a client expressed her frustration with the stagnation in her life. She wanted change but felt at a loss in how to go about creating it. In exploring this concern together, we discussed the house she had bought years before which was in need of renovation. She had been putting this off but when I suggested that working on her house might just activate change in her outer life, she decided to go ahead. She started with the foundation. In working with the metaphor of the house, she recognized that working with the foundation might well stir up forces deep in her psyche.
She soon discovered that the foundation couldn’t be repaired without extensive excavation of the earth under the house. She realized at this point that the work within would be deeper than she had originally anticipated. Since the space beneath the house was so small, it was necessary to cut a hole in her floor in the middle of the kitchen for the workers to get to the crawlspace under the house. This hole remained open for the months that the soil was dug out and the foundation rebuilt. During this time, my client had a vivid dream in which amorphous things from under the house were gushing through the hole, as though what had been buried in the unconscious was now free to move into consciousness.
Occasionally my client would venture down this hole, crawling under the house to see for herself how the work was progressing. She felt that this was a journey to the underworld, as she crawled on hands and knees in the dirt, coming across old bones and carcasses of animals that had accumulated over the years. The powerful and disturbing dreams she had during these months reflected the close contact with the unconscious that she had established by working on the underside of the house. She unearthed memories of her childhood that had been dormant. As long as the hole remained open, the unconscious forces flooded her psyche. She realized that she could close off the hole if she felt too overwhelmed. But she saw this open hole as an unparalleled opportunity for healing in the depths of her psyche.
Our house in everyday life work on us as we work on them.
Once you’ve made this connection between changes in the house you live in and changes in your life, you can undertake building, remodeling, redecorating or moving with more awareness of what you may be stirring up in your life. You can choose to work on a part of your house with the intention of catalyzing energy and change in a related part of your life. For example, redecorating or remodeling your bedroom may well create changes in your most intimate relationships.
Even a seemingly minor project such as building or repairing a fence can have an impact. A client recently undertook the tedious work of repainting her fence. She realized that in spending so many hours focused on painting the fence (which created a boundary around the house), she was also feeling inspired to set clear boundaries in her work relationships.
As you can imagine, buying or building a house can initiate radical changes in your life. Before you move or build, create a house in your imagination that reflects your dreams. Experience this house fully with your senses A friend who is in real estate asks her clients to make a wish list of the qualities they most want in their house, then to clarify the top two priorities from this list. Her clients often find houses that embody the qualities that they have defined.
It took thirty-two years for psychologist Carl Jung to build his dream house out of stones on the shores of the lake at Bollingen. There was no working plan; the house was inspired entirely by his imagination. He described it as a “kind of representation in stone of my innermost thoughts. . .It might be said that I built it in a kind of dream.”
Houses foster a dance between our inner and outer worlds. As we become more attuned to the nature of this dance, we realize how profoundly the houses we live in enrich our inner lives and how the houses in our dreams can revivify our outer lives. Through the imagination our houses come alive for us; we learn to live more fully in them.
How refreshing and moving to be whisked away by a well written and elegant blog!
ReplyDeleteI so agree - the home that nurtures and comforts, also pushes and challenges us to fulfill our dreams.
I remember sealing off the living room for a remodel, thinking the heavy plastic curtains would keep the impact at a distance. We repurposed the dining room into a great room with a cozy seating area. We learned we could live comfortably in much less space.
When the walls in the living room were torn down and revealed single redwood planks insulated by huge piles of rat and mouse droppings, I stood mesmerized, disgusted. Had we done the right thing by purchasing this funky old house? Was my husband right that we were out of our bleeping mind? Soon after, I had a strong bronchial reaction to the dust cloud of droppings. My voice collapsed into a squeak. I shivered in bed as a fever coursed through my body. My doubts and fears mounted.
The morning I woke up feeling better, the contractor led me into the living room. I was gearing up for more bad news, my husband's anguished face in my mind. The posts and beams were all exposed, revealing a strong bone structure of con-hard redwood. It had a funky exterior, but its core was solid, the foundation sat on a large granite saddle that anchored our home since the 1800's. This house was far from perfect, more walls had to be insulated and re-plastered, the plumbing and electricity were ancient, the floors were uneven, but like a grandmother's embrace, I knew our home could weather all that life brought our way.