Such stuff as dreams are made on...

Espieside House

I have awoken this morning from the kind of dream that leaves the hungover feeling of uneasiness. The kind of dream that it takes some time to separate out from reality. The relief of waking not quite reaching the psyche's response to whatever dream scape caused the distress.

This is not an unfamiliar feeling for me. I dream vividly. Sometimes beautifully. Sometimes disturbingly. And often I carry the moods -and sometimes scars - of dreaming well into my day. It is something that I have learned to accept as one of the symptoms of having both a rich imagination and finely tuned cosmic antennae. With experience, I have come to recognise the prophetic, the profane, the psychologically significant, the clues as to what I might have been processing in my sleep. And dreams have an uncanny way of dragging up emotional baggage that was otherwise long since laid to rest.

I am particularly aware of the symbolic nature of people, places and objects in dreams.

Something I do dream about - almost nightly - is my childhood home. It forms the backdrop and dramatic setting for both the weirdly familiar and the more surreal events and scenarios that play out in the dream world.  The significance of this is not lost on me. This is place I grew up in with my extended family. The place that housed most of my formative memories, my deep emotional connections. The love of my beloved grandparents who lived and died there.

My family left this big old house a few years ago. I have never been back ( I know it has been changed and developed)  I don't want to see it as it is now, it is enough for it to live in my dreams.

"Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."
Shakespeare