A Room of My Own

All my adult life I've had this dream in which I wander through a vast, labyrinthine building, exploring its twists and turns with calm expectation. Sometimes it's a Gilded Age hotel with rich wainscoting, plush carpets, and huge staircases—located, I somehow know, in the Adirondacks. Sometimes it's a larger and more intricate version of a London bed-and-breakfast where I once stayed, or a space-age high-rise in a smoggy city that feels like Houston, with exposed elevators, multiple towers linked by tubular walkways, and Byzantine "You Are Here" maps. I have also found myself in a Gothic mansion with endless passageways and turrets, a huge Victorian recalling group houses from my student days, and a pumped-up extrapolation of my high school.

Although the setting varies, my purpose is always the same: I am choosing a room for myself. Determined to choose wisely, I take my time. An unpleasant surprise—a grotesque animal, a ghostly presence—occasionally lies around a corner or behind a door, but no matter. I know I can keep moving until I find a room that is small, self-contained, and devoid of all such unpleasantries. I often awake from this dream with the illusion that it has occupied the entire night. Even though I've never made my selection, I always awake refreshed.

What sort of man hunts for a room in his dreams but never finds one? A Freudian would surely have a field day unpacking the anxieties that must inform these endless wanderings through architectural piles in search of a small space. Maybe I'm shopping for a secure womb to return to. Maybe the dream reflects a fear of commitment (I never choose a room) or a massive uncertainty of identity (perhaps I can't choose a room). These are reasonable interpretations, and I admit to having as many loose screws as anyone. But if my endless room-hunting conceals such dark realities, why is this dream invariably a good dream? And why, whenever it is interrupted, do I always try to get back to where it left off? I utter the dream's mantra—"No, this isn't quite right"—and move on, restless but neither disappointed nor fatigued, blandly optimistic that the next room might be the one. It's not a bad way to spend a night.

* * *

My more tactful friends smile and say that sometimes dreams don't mean anything, but I'm not so sure about a dream like this, so frequent and patterned. Lately I've come to suspect that its underlying source is my mental topography, the ur-landscape that I carry around in my head. This inner landscape is a schematized version of the place where I grew up, the glaciated plain of northwestern Ohio. As a child growing up in unrelieved flatness, in a small town surrounded by skies and fields that stretched away forever, I quickly learned that wide open spaces are beautiful and uplifting but not without their risks. My earliest memories involve the wail of a storm siren as our family nervously scanned a purple-green sky before retreating to the southwest corner of our basement. This, at least, was not a dream: every Midwesterner knows that terrible things can blow in from wide open spaces. Although the terrible thing is usually a thunderstorm, it might be a tornado or even, if you had a staunchly Methodist grandmother, "the hand of God"—and who's to say that one can't be the agent of the other?

Grandma's phrase surely accounted for another recurring dream—a very different one—that I had as a child. I would be gazing at the cornfields outside my bedroom window when the postcard-blue sky would gradually darken and a shadow would start blotting out the fields as it approached, transforming them from green to black. When everything was completely dark, a gleaming fissure would suddenly...