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Dream I had just before waking this morning:
There was a house— someone later in the dream referred to it as the Lantern House. I never got a look at the exterior; the interior decor was luxurious, colourful, and of no particular era. At the start, the occupants were a middle-aged woman (who was sometimes me) and her mother (who I don’t think was my real-life mother). They were carryovers from an earlier dream I don’t recall, except I think it took place in a printing house.
The mother and daughter were not the owners of the lantern house, which was for the accommodation of guests, more of whom arrived as the dream went on. I think the house got bigger to fit them and added extra rooms. I began to wonder just who owned it, and studied the newcomers for clues. They were mostly young and mostly white. They wore expensive-but-sloppily-casual clothing (high-tech workout gear, that kind of thing) which in this day and age often denotes wealth, but I didn’t get the impression they were particularly rich— they seemed too surprised and happy to be there. I began to suspect the house, if not an afterlife exactly, was some kind of liminal space; and that of the original mother-daughter duo, the mother was a ghost.
The daughter worked in the publishing business and very much didn’t want children: she downed birth-control pills like candy even though she wasn’t sexually active, and was annoyed she hadn’t yet begun menopause so she could stop worrying about all that biological nonsense.
I said the other guests were mostly young — the one who wasn’t looked to be in her late sixties or early seventies, a handsome woman with long grey hair and a slightly patrician manner— I got the feeling she might be some kind of academic, perhaps a historian. As we all headed toward the back of the house, I heard her telling one of the other guests a story about a game she used to play as a teenager, one of those “who will I marry” fortune-telling games that usually involve looking in a mirror in a dark room. In her variation, though, you couldn’t talk to or even look at the lover who appeared in the mirror; you couldn’t ever. You had to marry somebody else even though you knew they weren’t the mysterious figure in the mirror you were really supposed to be with:
“—and just that’s what that fool is doing!” she said of the daughter, who was getting married in the back yard to please her ghost-mother.
We were all out back now— the yard, of course, was a park that seemed to go on forever. I was still trying to figure out how all that worked.
“It’s like a park,” I said to somebody, “Except generally a park this nice, in this weather, would be crowded, and here— there are other people in the distance, but far enough away they’re just... picturesque?” We were climbing a steep incline now; I could see a group in skeleton costumes doing something agricultural a ways off, which was not as ominous in the dream as it sounds typing it out now.
We reached the top of the hill. There was a deep crevice in it, through which I could see a cavern with a large fireplace set into one wall. After I woke up, I realized I still had never seen the exterior of the Lantern House, and wondered if that whole landscape may still have been part of its interior.
There was a house— someone later in the dream referred to it as the Lantern House. I never got a look at the exterior; the interior decor was luxurious, colourful, and of no particular era. At the start, the occupants were a middle-aged woman (who was sometimes me) and her mother (who I don’t think was my real-life mother). They were carryovers from an earlier dream I don’t recall, except I think it took place in a printing house.
The mother and daughter were not the owners of the lantern house, which was for the accommodation of guests, more of whom arrived as the dream went on. I think the house got bigger to fit them and added extra rooms. I began to wonder just who owned it, and studied the newcomers for clues. They were mostly young and mostly white. They wore expensive-but-sloppily-casual clothing (high-tech workout gear, that kind of thing) which in this day and age often denotes wealth, but I didn’t get the impression they were particularly rich— they seemed too surprised and happy to be there. I began to suspect the house, if not an afterlife exactly, was some kind of liminal space; and that of the original mother-daughter duo, the mother was a ghost.
The daughter worked in the publishing business and very much didn’t want children: she downed birth-control pills like candy even though she wasn’t sexually active, and was annoyed she hadn’t yet begun menopause so she could stop worrying about all that biological nonsense.
I said the other guests were mostly young — the one who wasn’t looked to be in her late sixties or early seventies, a handsome woman with long grey hair and a slightly patrician manner— I got the feeling she might be some kind of academic, perhaps a historian. As we all headed toward the back of the house, I heard her telling one of the other guests a story about a game she used to play as a teenager, one of those “who will I marry” fortune-telling games that usually involve looking in a mirror in a dark room. In her variation, though, you couldn’t talk to or even look at the lover who appeared in the mirror; you couldn’t ever. You had to marry somebody else even though you knew they weren’t the mysterious figure in the mirror you were really supposed to be with:
“—and just that’s what that fool is doing!” she said of the daughter, who was getting married in the back yard to please her ghost-mother.
We were all out back now— the yard, of course, was a park that seemed to go on forever. I was still trying to figure out how all that worked.
“It’s like a park,” I said to somebody, “Except generally a park this nice, in this weather, would be crowded, and here— there are other people in the distance, but far enough away they’re just... picturesque?” We were climbing a steep incline now; I could see a group in skeleton costumes doing something agricultural a ways off, which was not as ominous in the dream as it sounds typing it out now.
We reached the top of the hill. There was a deep crevice in it, through which I could see a cavern with a large fireplace set into one wall. After I woke up, I realized I still had never seen the exterior of the Lantern House, and wondered if that whole landscape may still have been part of its interior.
