I opened the cupboard under my actual stairs

✦ TODAY IN DREAM SIGNS

The room you keep shut

Monday’s house, turned forward. What is in there, and what you are allowed to leave behind.

THIS IS WHAT IS IN MINE

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TODAY’S SYMBOL

Get the Guide

THURSDAY, 10 SEPTEMBER

Dear friend,

I gave up waiting for the dream to show me and opened the cupboard under my actual stairs instead.

In it, a box of cables for machines I no longer own, which I have now carried through two moves without opening, and which I put straight back.

You have been writing to me all week about rooms in these houses that stay shut, and hardly any of you say what is in them, only that you would rather not go in.

So today the house looks forward, because a dream that keeps showing you a door is asking you something, and the question is nearly always about what you go on storing.

What is in there

A shut room is not free, since you go on heating it and going round it, and the going round is the part that costs you without ever showing up as a cost.

👤 Somebody I used to be	💼 Things belonging to somebody gone
🎨 Work I stopped doing	🔒 I have never opened it
Tap the one that fits

Most of what people store is one of two things, either something belonging to a person they have lost, or the equipment of a life they meant to lead and did not.

The first kind is not for putting down and I would not ask you to, since keeping a dead man’s coat in a cupboard harms nobody and helps more people than it hurts.

The second kind is different, because the paints and the language books and the running shoes are not memories, they are a promise you keep renewing in the dark.

“	A shut room is not free, since you go on heating it and going round it.

What it asks you to put down

The promise is the thing to put down, rather than the objects, because you can keep the paints and still stop telling yourself that this is the autumn you go back to painting.

Saying out loud that you are not going to is oddly freeing, and people who do it often go back to the thing within a year, once it has stopped being a debt.

Whether the dream is asking for that, I cannot swear to, though a mind that builds an extra room and puts your old life in it is at least raising the subject.

✦ BEFORE YOU GET OUT OF BED

Tap one to answer it

1

What am I storing?

2

Who am I keeping it for?

3

When did I last use it?

4

Is it a memory or a promise?

5

What would the room be for instead?

6

What am I allowed to stop promising?

The fourth one sorts the whole cupboard, because memories can stay as long as they like and promises need renewing or ending.

✦ CARRY THESE WITH YOU TODAY

I can keep what I love

I can stop promising the rest

The old version of me can rest

The room can be used for something else

Nothing in there is a debt

Tap the one you need

✦ WRITE BACK

Two things sit in that room, what you are keeping for somebody you lost and what you are keeping for a version of yourself, and I would like to know which is heavier.

TELL ME WHICH ONE

The cables are going out on Saturday, and if a dream turns up on Sunday about a house full of them then at least we will both know what it was about.

Sleep well,

Dream Signs

P.S. Elena wrote back to say she rang her mother, who listened to the whole thing about the door and then said she had kept the flat keys, and would Elena like them. Tell me what you are putting down. She has not decided yet.

✦ TONIGHT’S PRACTICE

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Open one door in this house

Before bed, open the cupboard or drawer you have been walking past, look in, and take nothing out. Looking is the whole task tonight.

TELL ME WHAT WAS IN IT

✦ MANIFESTATION TIP

🌱

Say what the space is for

Once you have put something down, say out loud what you want in its place, in plain words with a day attached, because an empty shelf fills itself otherwise.

WHAT CAME BACK

Something happened after a dream? Tell me

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