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  • I knew where the light switches were
✦  TODAY IN DREAM SIGNS
The house you do not know
You have never been there, and you know which door sticks. One of the big ones, taken apart.
I HAD THIS ONE TOO
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🏠
❧
TODAY’S SYMBOL
Get the Guide
MONDAY, 7 SEPTEMBER
Dear friend,
I spent Saturday night in a house I have never lived in, and I knew where the light switches were.
It had a landing I recognised from my grandmother’s house, and the rest of it was nowhere I have ever been, and none of that struck me as odd until I was standing at the kettle.
This is one of the big dreams, up there with running and falling, and it turns up in your letters more than any other place does.
What people always ask is whose house it is, so I want to start with why that question is harder than it sounds.
 
The house you half know
A house you do not know is nearly always a house you half know. Dreams hardly ever play a place back as it stood, they build one out of bits of several, which is how you get my grandmother’s landing with somebody else’s kitchen at the bottom of it.
🚪
Somewhere I have never been
🏠
My old home, wrong inside
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A room I had forgotten
📦
I was moving out
Tap the one that fits
So the house is not a message from anybody, it is made of you, which is why knowing your way round it is the least mysterious part of the whole business.
People have read the house as the person for a very long time, the cellar for what you keep down there and the top floor for what you think about, and I will own that this is folklore rather than evidence.
It does hold up better than most of the old readings, though, because the dream keeps putting people in buildings they own and cannot account for, and that is a strange thing to keep doing by accident.
“ A house you do not know is nearly always a house you half know.
 
The room you had forgotten
The version of this that gets people writing at six in the morning is the extra room, the door you had walked past for years without opening, and it is nearly always described as a relief rather than a fright.
Something in you keeps a list of what has been shut up and unused, and now and then it opens the door to show you the room is still there and still yours.
Which sounds nicer than it is, since the room is usually full of something you put down years ago and have not thought about since.
✦  BEFORE YOU GET OUT OF BED
Tap one to answer it
1
Which rooms did I know?
2
Whose furniture was in there?
3
Was there a door I did not open?
4
Who else lived there?
5
What have I shut up and stopped using?
6
Would I want to live there?
The furniture one is the useful one, because whoever the chairs belong to is usually who the dream is about.
 
Going back in
Houses come back, more than any other dream setting, so if you have one of these you will probably be in it again within the month.
That makes it worth mapping, since people who write the layout down tend to notice the same rooms turning up, and then the one room they never get into stands out on the page.
Mine has the landing and a kitchen and something below the stairs I have never once looked at, which I notice I have now told you before telling myself.
✦  CARRY THESE WITH YOU TODAY
The house is made of me
There is more room than I thought
I can open the door I walk past
Nothing in my own house can hurt me
I can use what I put away
Tap the one you need
✦  WRITE BACK
In every one of these houses there is a room you go into and a room you never reach, and I would like to know which is which in yours.
TELL ME WHICH ONE
I am going to try for the stairs tonight, and I will tell you on Wednesday whether I got as far as looking.
Sleep well,
Dream Signs
 
P.S. I described the landing to my mother on the phone and she said it was the wrong house, that my grandmother never had a landing like that, and then went quiet for a bit and said she had dreamt of it too. Tell me about your house. Then she asked if I had eaten.
✦  TONIGHT’S PRACTICE
📏
Draw the floor plan
Sketch the house from the last one of these you had, badly, boxes and lines. The room you cannot place on the page is the one to look for next time.
TELL ME WHAT YOU DREW
✦  MANIFESTATION TIP
🔑
Name the room you want
Say out loud what you would put in a spare room if one appeared, in plain words, then find the nearest corner of your actual home and clear it.
WHAT CAME BACK
Something happened after a dream? Tell me
 
✦
Dream it. Sign it. Live it.
 
 

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