Lost room dreams

I woke up – late – after a variant on the lost room/lost building dream. They happen when I have gone back to sleep after waking, or when I have slept during the day. I open my eyes, fighting to wake and to escape from the dream. I am anxiously struggling to find the lost room, building or, in this case, locker. It takes me a while to realise that I am at home, in my bedroom, and nothing – so far as I know – is lost. By the time I have fully woken, the details of the dream are vanishing like a clearing mist in the sun.

The dreams are recurrent, so I guess the locker will feature again in the future. The first dream of this type that I remember was about a house purchase. I cannot recall if it started before my marriage broke down, or after, but my husband is almost always present. In the dream, we had bought a large Victorian house on a corner plot, dark red brick, several stories high, ornamental tile detailing along the ridge and eaves. The house has some resemblance, I now realise, to the boarding house that my husband’s parents lived in when my father-in-law worked as a housemaster at a public school. My husband and I were holding a party, maybe a house-warming, and, climbing alone away from the party up ever-narrower stairs to the top of the house I found a door leading to a whole other part of the house. I went through it and there were empty bedrooms under the dust and a large L-shaped drawing room, still with faded, tattered curtains hanging. This new wing was on several stories, and I went down stairs to a large cellar. In the recurrences, I show my husband round, me admiring all this new space, he sceptical and withdrawn. I want to develop it but he always says, ‘Later,’ and the door – literally – closes.

The dream still occasionally recurs in a variant form in which I tour the empty wing sizing up the rooms and looking for cracks and rot, all the while telling my husband that, ‘I know an architect who can help ...’. Years after my marriage broke down and we had divorced, I changed jobs, moved towns, and grew used to visiting prospective post-divorce houses and assessing them. I bought a house that needed much repair and restoration and engaged an architect to manage the work. 

This variant on the dream is sometimes mixed up with another that started during the marriage breakdown. I went to work in America for a year and rented our house to tenants who turned out to be less than perfect. In this version, I return to England and visit my tenanted house, but it is not the house my husband and I owned, but the one we lived in as a student house-share. In reality, we never owned this house, but sub-let from the owner.  In the dream, I owned it and I walked round its many rooms with the tenants, commenting on their bad house-keeping. I smiled at them but was resolute. I wanted to get them out and sell the house.

Sometimes this house and its imagined sale comes in to the ‘lost wing’ dream. The tall red brick Victorian house has structural problems. It will be very expensive to repair it. ‘I have a house I can sell,’ I say to my husband, meaning the student house-share.  I am pleased that I have a house to sell, but somehow I never sell it, or never receive the money from the sale, or lose it. Sometimes the dream is embellished with yet another ghost house and when I wake up, I sometimes find myself confused, thinking that I must search my papers for the deeds to this house, or houses, or for the bank account where the sale money is deposited, because the money is now needed to restore the Victorian house. 

Every so often, in dreaming about the Victorian house, the architect – or maybe my husband – or maybe it is myself – tells me that the house is unsafe, the foundations crumbling, and I should knock the house down, or at least knock down the lost wing, but I always procrastinate.

A dream that definitely started after my marriage broke down is set on a university campus. This has some resemblance to my medical school campus, with a mixture of ancient arches and walls with modern multi-storey buildings. But it is much larger than a single medical school, the size of a whole large university. It takes several minutes to walk across its various courtyards or round one of its many buildings. I have a room on a high residential floor in one of the modern multi-storey buildings. I get there by lift. Usually I remember the room number just as I walk by the room door. Sometimes I find the key in my pocket. Sometimes a maid or cleaner, wearing a pink or apricot overall, smiles at me and hands me the key. When I get there, I am at peace. No-one knocks on the door or disturbs me. There are other students in other rooms, but no raucous noise. I lie on my bed and smile, and sleep. Time passes. I feel that I am a natural part of this university. But, quite often, I cannot find the room. Sometimes, I cannot find the building and I wander round corners and down roadways without finding it. I can give directions to other students, ‘It’s down there, through the arch, and up the hill ...’ but I can’t find it myself. Sometimes I find it, get in the lift, but can’t find the right floor, and I wander the corridors and can’t find my room. Sometimes the building is configured like a large modern hotel, or airport terminal. I find the right floor, but I am in a different part of the building and have to go down to ground level again and walk to another entrance. Sometimes there is a connecting bridge between two wings. Sometimes the connection is via a large, semi-darkened dining room where I try, but fail, to get served. They have closed service down, or are only serving staff dinners, or it is a private function. The dining room looks over a large atrium and I can see other people getting on with their work on other floors. 

Today’s dream was also set in a university, maybe the same one where my room is located. I was starting a course, a Master’s course. I am keeping it to myself that I have done previous Master’s courses. It is probably in Oxford, where I work. Rumours go round the students that the course is no good, that the professor who set it up – a name I dimly know as a real person – has bungled, has only set the course up to aggrandise himself, has put no work into planning it. The other students are vaguely mutinous. We are milling about in a large, tall hall, with desks on the ground floor space and a mezzanine gallery lined with bookshelves. It resembles the library at the Royal College of Physicians in London. We pile our belongings into lockers. The lockers are like the lockers at my boarding school where one wall in the common-room was covered with numbered lockers, cubes about eighteen inches or two feet square with wooden flap doors hinged at the top which latched but did not lock. Some of the girls’ lockers were full, some near-empty, some tidy, some a jumble.

In the hall in the dream, we can lock our lockers and I place my favourite textbooks into mine, about twenty or thirty that, in reality, I carry from office to office and never want to lose. I also place personal papers there, the draft of the book I am (in reality) writing, some papers about my infertility (a reality but without any papers), other items. Standing in the hall, near the door, is a tall, thin man, ineffectual and dismissive, who is running our course. I leave the hall for some reason and when I come back I cannot find my locker. I have a numbered key, but the locker with the corresponding number seems to be in the wrong place. When I use the key to open the locker, there are other people’s possessions there. I turn to the course organiser, who waves dismissively and denies any knowledge. ‘But it’s my textbooks,’ I say. I am hesitant about telling him the book titles, because they are not for the course on which I am enrolled, and also I do not want to reveal my infertility to him, or that I am writing a book. I think he will not take me seriously if he knows these things about me. I look through more lockers, then through piles of books on top of cupboards, and realise that one or more of my fellow-students may have taken my books and papers and hidden them. I decide to go back to the ineffectual course organiser and tell him the number of books that were missing and reveal the personal nature of the papers.

Then I wake up.