House

In the interpretation of dreams, House is among the recurring images that traditional dream-books and modern depth psychology have alike tried to read. It is commonly interpreted as the self and psyche, its different rooms as different facets of the person.

Common readings

A long-standing reading, prominent in Jung's own dream analysis, takes the house as an image of the self, its rooms and storeys standing for different levels and rooms of the mind.

The reading of dream symbols has a long documented history, from the Oneirocritica of Artemidorus in the second century to Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and the archetypal psychology of C. G. Jung. Such meanings are interpretive conventions of those traditions, offered here as ways the image has been understood rather than as fixed or established fact; in practice a symbol takes much of its sense from the individual dreamer and the setting of the dream.

What changes the reading

The particulars of the dream house carry the sense: whose house it is, whether it is the childhood home, and what state it is in. Discovering an unknown room in a familiar house is one of the most widely reported house dreams and is usually read toward unrecognised capacity, while cellars, attics, locked doors and crumbling walls each pull the reading in their own direction. Returning again and again to a house one once lived in tends to be read less as architecture than as unfinished business with the life that was lived there.

Two founding texts of modern dream psychology both put a house at the centre. Freud, in The Interpretation of Dreams, listed the house among the standard dream symbols of the body, and his school read fronts, openings, upper and lower floors with cheerful anatomical confidence. The reading that has proved more durable came from Jung, who recounted a dream of his own: a house of several storeys, each lower floor older than the one above, descending from a furnished salon to a medieval ground floor, a Roman cellar, and beneath it a cave with primitive remains. Jung took the house as an image of the psyche in historical layers, and credited the dream with pointing him toward the idea of the collective unconscious.

That dream, told in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, is the ancestor of the now familiar reading in which the dream house is the dreamer, its rooms the compartments of a life, its cellar what lies beneath attention, its undiscovered rooms unrecognised capacity. The reading is Jungian property, not a neutral fact about houses.

The older handbooks were more literal, reading the fortunes of the dream house toward the fortunes of the household, damage and repair, inheritance and loss. Both registers persist, and a house dream may be approached through either without the other being wrong.