A House

I fell asleep on the futon today instead of engaging in some of the various enterprising things that I had cunningly listed at school and fully intended to get to today. I think I slept for about three hours, and as I've been craving juice for the past several days, it was probably a good alternative to my intentions despite my chagrin. Heh. I said chagrin. All it really means is that I continue to procrastinate on making my Easter dress and I still don't know French. One out of two of these issues is starting to become urgent.

As I slept, I dreamed, which is far less common than you would think. Usually, my dreams are chopped to bits in the process of waking up, and all I remember by the time I get back to my feet are tiny insignificant flashes in my head of things that never existed. I like it that way, I think, though I do also enjoy the ones that tell a story and stick with me forever. This time I dreamed of a great, big mansion of a house that I had come to live in for obscure reasons. Someone, a friend, needed this house occupied and maintained, so there was another family sent to live in it with me, and I was to look after the basement. I must have a thing for basements.

It took me forever to get my bearings in the house; any time I came to what I thought was an end, there was another door that led a level up, or another room out, on and on and on until I swear the thing had three attics and occupied about a square mile.

There was the room that a girl was going to live in, she was older now, and clearing out all her old dolls. I half expected that when I moved aside the curtain behind the doll house, I would find a tiny door opening into a closet, or possibly Narnia, but it was only a wall, then I turned around and found a door that led to the rafters. My subconscious got a real kick out of my double-take, I'm sure.

The door leading to the basement was too narrow to be used because apparently the cement door frame had become organic, and grew a few extra layers of rock wall while nobody was paying attention, but once you got around this, or found one of the other access points, it went on for ever and ever, almost like a wide dance studio but without any mirrors. It reminded me of an old dream that I had a long time ago, and made me smile.

It was an old house, and it smelled of pine and cedar and rosemary. The stairs were narrow and creaked when you trod on them. The walls, most of them, were painted a deep, rich warm red, and the floor was hardwood with Persian-looking carpets thrown down where appropriate. It was filled with antique furniture, with painted Chinese urns on every mantle, and Indian styled paintings in European frames hung on the wall. There was gilded wainscoting, the occasional animal head mounted on the wall, the now frowned upon tiger rug was placed without ostentation, which is incredibly hard to do with a tiger rug, in front of a marvelous fireplace, and all of it was swallowed and unified in the rich red, red, red of the walls.

It looked like the kind of house that three generations had broken in all at once, and then left alone for a few years, just long enough for it to wake up in solitude and develop an eccentric personality, like a very old man left to his own, quite, pipe smoking devices. It should have been kitschy and definitely not the cup of tea of the chic or anyone with half an inkling of interior design (probably there was chicken wallpaper in the kitchen somewhere), but now that I'm awake, I miss dreaming about it.