Friday 4 March 2011

New rooms



Even if you never find the house of your dreams
you can have the house, many houses,
in your imagination.
And in those houses there are many rooms,
all waiting to be furnished and decorated.



I have a recurrent dream, perhaps it is a common one,
where I am in a house that I know well, 
 it is my own house apparently -
but I happen upon a room 
that I have either never visited,
or somehow forgotten.


Usually it is large and light,
with tall windows and fine views,
filled with beautiful furniture and fabrics,
all of which I recognise as mine.
Sometimes it has a fascinating attic,
stuffed with treasures,
it might have a garden 
with a stream running through it.

I am delighted to rediscover these houses
and sometimes a passage in a book 
brings them faintly back to my waking life.


Those pale light rooms opening out of one another,
full of bright chintzes and spring flowers -
tulips and broom and irises and rhododendron -
were at last really different from the old rooms
with their shut and curtained doors,
red carpets and rich dark covers
and tiny scattered vases of flowers.

Rising Tide by Molly Keane



4 comments:

  1. Oh, I have a similar dream, a familiar yet strange house, often one of the houses my parents bought, with undiscovered rooms, but alas, always shabby or even derelict. Your dream sounds so much nicer!

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  2. I have a recurring dream, very like that but usually with a nagging undercurrent of guilt that I haven't been using and appreciating this wonderful room. In one version of the dream it's a house that I forget I own. I wonder what it means?

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  3. Almost all of my dreams take place in my home town, in my parents' house, but the houses of my daydreams are many...I once bought a copy of Hello Magazine just because I loved the photos of the house and gardens of some young member of the Royal Family.

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