You’ve had that dream where you’re wandering through a familiar house and discover a room you never realized existed. You go into the room with a feeling like “how did I miss this room for so long? In my own house?” What does this dream mean?
From Rebecca’s Manderlay to Monster House, from The Haunting (1963 version, please) to Fundamentalist “hell houses,” storytellers and receivers keep going back to the house. In stories, houses are the most disturbing and human of all non-human characters. (Mine is not a haunted house movie, it’s an enchanted cornfield movie, but the ghost house is essential.) Houses are wombs that become scary, sad, and weird with time. I can tell you that the notion that the walls absorb some measure of the past inhabitant’s forsaken souls is true. All houses are gothic, eventually.
I have my location: a house that has been inhabited for a hundred and fifty years, till now. The crumbling plaster walls have soaked up the echoes of creepy, giggling children, drunken piano playing, fatal arguments, and muffled orgasms. Death and ritual were contained in people’s houses before the hospital and funeral home industrial complex took over. The hospital injects drugs to keep us alive when we should be dead, and the funeral home injects chemicals to make us look “natural” when we should be rotting. But even they can’t pacify the lingering spirits loose in a house that’s been around for a while. And even before Poe invented Poetry, we knew that houses can become a sentient beings. The house tempts us with its secrets, and threatens to keep us within its walls, forever and ever . . .
The dream of the undiscovered room means that you are about to discover a new part of your own psyche. Or, perhaps, that a malicious entity is living under the same roof with you, a parasite on your utility bills, maybe stealing one sock from the dryer each time you do the laundry. It signifies your desire to have sex with a stranger. Or maybe it’s God, giving you the square footage you need to grow in your love of Him. Even if it’s just the Shrimp Etouffee, the point is, it happens in the house—that musty, cobwebbed, family place of hearth and safety, sex and ghosts, entrapment and death.
– david warfield
