The most bizarre recurring dream I've ever had was about my old house in Bordeaux.
In real life I loved that house. It was an old stone townhouse that was right in town. It was on a quiet residential street, but the whole walkable downtown area was just a few blocks away. It was relatively large -- not by American standards, but it was two stories, plus a partially-finished attic for guests. And it was "healthy" in the sense that the basement was dry and the wooden framework holding up the floors was solid. But...
Superficially,
everything was in poor condition. The house was more than 100 years old, and looked it. When we first moved in, we had to replace all of the electrical wiring, all of the plumbing (the pipes were lead), and the roof. We had no money left over to fix up the rest.
Everything was old and a little bit broken, like the drafty windows from the pre-saftey glass, pre-standardized-window-sizes era and the hardwood floors that gave us splinters. It would have been the ideal house for someone with a passion for "DIY" (or at least someone not already overburdened by toddlers + working full-time), but we had neither the time nor the abilities to fix it up. So my beloved house was a constant source of stress.
And that's how it entered my dreams.
In dream world, the house was in poorer condition, with holes in the roof that let in weather and weak spots in the floor for people to fall through. But it was also a lot bigger, and full of strange secret passages. It had whole apartments (that we didn't use) hidden beyond secret panels.
But the weird part was the house in the back yard. Our real-life city yard was about the same size as the footprint of the house itself. But in dream world, the house had a huge back yard, and in the back yard was
an even bigger and older house.
The backyard house was five stories tall and practically in ruins. Since it hadn't been officially used in decades, who knows what had unofficially taken up residence? Some of the rooms had dead bodies hidden away in them. I wouldn't dream of trying to fix up the backyard house -- I was terrified to go in it. Yet, that's not what was weird about it.
What was weird was that the backyard house was
always there, even though it didn't exist in real life. It was a regular fixture of my dream universe, as though dream world were a consistent, warped universe, not just a random walk through making-it-up-as-you-go-along.
Is your dream universe like that?
, will be directing the project, and he's picked a great story to start the ball rolling: "Love, Mormon Style," by Bob Bringhurst!!! This is one of my favorites from his anthology, as I mentioned in 
