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| “The Kitchen” Carl Larsson |
“For our house is the corner of the world. As has often been said, it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word. If we look at it intimately, the humblest dwelling has beauty.”
- Symbolism.org(1)
I don’t know how many people dream about their home but this is a really common theme for me. Recently I dreamed that there was a room in my home that was like a theater around a rectangular pool; the pool was along one side of the room and there were seats on the other side of the room and to either side of the pool, as if the pool was a stage and the seats were for the audience. The entire room was also a foot or so deep in water – the water must have come up from the pool. My dream showed that the unconscious (the water) is in a somewhat one-sided (rectangular, as opposed to square) theater; I'm “doing” the unconscious – as if in theater – in this blog... but is this bad? Is it good? Is it just is what it is?
The house as a symbol for oneself
The most basic interpretation of the house is as a symbol for the personality; just as an individual lives in a house, so too does our “self” live in the personality. Each room in a home refers to a different part of us.
The kitchen is the place where sustenance is made by someone's hands, with their love; in the kitchen, raw ingredients are transformed into food which eventually becomes a part of us. We sit around the table with family as we are nourished. The bathroom is where you spend time with your shadow material; shit is for your “shit,” all the unpleasant tasks the unconscious pushes you to work through; urine is for personal and private but common embarrassing messes, your "human all too human" parts. The bed and bedroom are for getting information from the unconscious, or for the more hidden parts of you that specifically have to do with sex or aspects of the animus/anima.
There is the front of the house, the part of us that points outward, to the world; the back yard is our hidden playground. We store things in the attic as well as in the basement, but they are completely different places; one may be hot and stuffy – everything rises up there, on the current of hot air – but it’s high up, separate from and elevated from every day life. The basement is in the cool, ancient ground, in the dark, where things are buried.
When interpreting a dream house think about the condition of the house; is it new or old? Clean or messy? Luxurious or modest, or even a hovel? Does the action take place in the front yard (the persona), or the back yard (a more hidden part of the self)? The attic or deep in the basement, or maybe in one (or many) of the rooms? What’s your relationship with the house? Is it a new place that you’re moving into, possibly a new self on the horizon? Is it your childhood home? Are you regressing, or are you nostalgically visiting?
The house as refuge
The home is a place of safety, hidden and safe from the world. To be homeless is to be vulnerable, exposed to the elements and the vicissitudes of life. The walls of our house not only provide warmth and protection from the elements, it also gives us a place of privacy, where we can let down our guard, away from the judgments of others. We share our home with those we’ve decided we want to share our innermost secrets with; we only bring into our home those we’ve vetted, whether because they’re interesting or trustworthy depending on our desires.
Home is a place of belonging. This is probably especially true for people like me, who were constantly moved from place to place, and family member to family member. Others will look at you with pity or suspicion if you don’t have a home. Your house is where you surround yourself with things that express your inner being; the outer world may not see or validate you, but in your home you can express your truest self. A home is a place of one’s own.
The house as a feminine container
Home is deeply associated with the feminine principle; not only has it traditionally been seen as the main sphere of a woman’s power, a woman’s womb is itself our first “home.” Mary and other Great Mother goddesses are the garden in which the seed of Spirit takes root and becomes manifest in the world. Houses are a container, as woman is a container. It’s the body and the physical world, as opposed to the world of power (work) or intellect (education). The concerns of the home are the intimate concerns of family and the heart.
Her ambitions center on the family and her goals are a happy material and emotional life. These simple goals are often difficult to obtain, but she devotes herself to them. Though not necessarily rich in terms of money, she is always rich of heart, and she shares her wealth with all those in need.- “The Queen of Pentacles,” James Rioux (ATA)
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Generosity will become a priority, as will trustworthiness and reliability. You will gain insight into both matters of money and matters of the heart, and through these you can find a path to spiritual enlightenment. The Queen of Pentacles is, in many ways, a bridge between the worlds of the mundane and the spectacular. Step across that bridge once you are ready, and delight in the opulence and pure beauty. Then you can return to the material world to help others find their way. You may not be acknowledged, but you will never be unhappy either.
Six in the second place means:- Hexagram No. 20: Kuan/Contemplation (Deoxy.org)
Contemplation through the crack of the door.
Furthering for the perseverance of a woman.
Through the crack of the door one has a limited outlook; one looks outward from within. One tends to relate everything to oneself... This is appropriate for a good housewife.
Houses in fairy tales
Fire is traditionally the heart of the house, as the kitchen and it’s cooking fire are the heart of the home. Fire is destructive as well as transformative; the house holds the fire in a container, as the hearth holds and contains the fire, keeping it from burning down the house and thereby enabling it’s power to be used by us.
Homelessness is also a common theme in fairy tales; from Vasilisa who successfully avoids being killed by Baba Yaga; to Hansel and Gretel, who find the gingerbread house after being abandoned in the woods by their parents. Women in particular often have to leave home; abandoned by their family, they must make a perilous journey until they find a new home (usually in a castle, with a prince). The millers daughter in The Girl without Hands and the princess in All-Kinds-of-Fur are betrayed by their family, Sita by her husband Rama(2). A home stops being a home, and we have to brave many frightening tasks to find our new home.
Finally there are castles; castles in fairy tales are often an image of the Self. As the king and queen are exalted images of normal people, the castle is the exalted image of one’s “house.” As the Self, the castle is a precious, distant goal, like the Holy Grail. The image of the castle forms a temenos; an enclosing mandala made up of the four protective walls around the Center.
The most significant images in the story are those of the castle and the journey itself, and it is these that must draw our attention. The first is the castle, which Teresa described as being “composed entirely of diamonds, or very clear crystal, in which there are many rooms, just as in heaven there are many mansions.” She related this castle directly to the soul, making the symbolism clear, and placing the journey within the castle into the context of spiritual development. In later discussions with Fr. de Yepes, she clarified that her vision of this castle was of a globe with different “dwelling places,” the middle one being the residence of the “King of Glory.” It is within that center, the dwelling place of the King, that the self and God merge into mystical union, what Teresa called the spiritual marriage. The clarity of the castle symbol as soul and mandala and thus the purpose of the entire journey, is describing in mystical and metaphorical language the same process of individuation that Jung described psychologically.- “A Sacred Marriage of the Imaginal: Jungian Individuation and the Christian Mysticism of Teresa of Avila,” James Liter (Temenos Center)
Two Jung house dreams
Two formative dreams of Jung’s featured houses. In the first one he dreamed he was in the upper story of “his house;” there was an elegant salon with Rococo style furniture and paintings by the old masters. Then he descended to the ground floor; there everything was much older, from the medieval era, dark and heavy. Then he found a door which lead even further down; he found himself in a vaulted stone room from Roman times. In one of the stone slabs on the floor he found an iron ring and lifted it up, proceeding even further down. At this point he came to the deepest part of his home; dusty, with broken pottery and the remains of two, half-disintegrated human skulls. He was still friends with Freud at this point and Freud, of course, interpreted the dream as a buried death wish. Jung disagreed but kept his opinion to himself.
The first floor, the one with the elegant salon, is a symbolic expression of how Jung views himself: elegant, civilized, retaining the best of the previous historical age. But as he goes deeper into himself, he finds there are more and more ancient parts of himself – the medieval and ancient Roman – until he gets to the bottom floor, the only one which is not man-made. Jung eventually came to the realization that the ancient, primitive cave was the collective layer of the unconscious; the place where the archaic figures of the unconscious, the archetypes, live.
To Jung, however, the house represented an image of his psyche. At the beginning of the dream he is on the first floor, in the salon, which represents to him normal consciousness. The remaining floors represent different levels of consciousness. The cave represents the most primitive level of all, the consciousness of primitive man, which still lies buried in our unconscious. It was but a short step for Jung to go from this analysis to his idea of a 'collective unconscious' — a common store of vague racial memories and archetypes. Jung thought that these archetypical images could surface in dreams.- “Jung’s house dream reinterpreted,” Joe Griffin (Why Do We Dream)
[Note: Check out the link for a more detailed analysis of this dream]
The second dream was part of a series of dreams he had while he was looking for the connection bertween Gnosticism and the processes of the collective unconscious. He was sure there was some historical precedent for the ideas he was developing about the unconscious. He started dreaming a series of dreams about a mysterious annex that stood next to his house but that he couldn’t get to:
Beside my house stood another, that is to say, another wing or annex, which was strange to me. Each time I would wonder in my dream why I did not know this house, although it had apparently always been there. Finally came a dream in which I reached the other wing. I discovered there a wonderful library, dating largely from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Large, fat folio volumes bound in pigskin stood along the walls. Among them were a number of books embellished with copper engravings of a strange character, and illustrations containing curious symbols such as I had never seen before. At the time I did not know to what they referred; only much later did I recognize them as alchemical symbols. In the dream I was conscious only of the fascination exerted by them and by the entire library. It was a collection of incunabula and sixteenth-century prints.- Memories, Dream, Reflections, CG Jung
The unknown wing of the house was part of my personality, an aspect of myself; it represented something that belonged to me but of which I was not yet conscious. It, and especially the library, referred to alchemy of which I was ignorant, but which I was soon to study. Some fifteen years later I had assembled a library very like the one in the dream.
The house is an ancient symbol that often appears in our dreams; the need for shelter is an age old one, one that still exists today. When we dream of a house it can mean many things; the feminine, the self, refuge from the elements or from our fellow human beings. The dream will point to the things we need to pay attention to through it’s choice of characteristics of or location in the house. A thorough understanding of this common symbol will help us to figure out what our unconscious is trying to tell us.
How you describe a house says much about the people who inhabit it. Is the house excruciatingly tidy and ordered, or appallingly messy and unhygienic? Is it packed to the rafters with dusty antiques that are slumbering away the centuries, or furnished spartanly with gleaming modern multifunction appliances every bit as young as the new century that birthed them? …- “Houses are People Too: The Structure of a Literary Device,” Geoff Hart
The answer to each question goes far beyond merely describing the house: it defines the people who inhabit the house…
With the home foreclosure rate in America skyrocketing, our economic conditions translate into a true public health concern. Losing one’s home can feel like losing one’s self. Those being foreclosed upon can feel they have let down their families, that they have been “exposed” as failures in the eyes of the community and that the road back to stability is too full of twists and turns to even begin to think about navigating it.- “The Emotional Meaning of Home,” Keith Ablow, M.D.
The nostalgia for the past and attempt to regain this past has given the idea of home the direction of searches or pilgrimmages throughout life. It has a similar symbolism of the Holy Grail Legend as something that was once lost and needs desperately to be regained. But like the Holy Grail, home remains an eternally elusive prey. Of course the search is a ultimately a futile one back into a past where the original home was.- “House And Home”
The distance from "home" then is not always a matter of miles but is also a matter of time. The 1960s song "Homeward Bound" by Simon and Garfunkel is really about an attempt to return to this past time of innocence. The home they sing about is really America of the 1950s.
[T]he ultimate manifestations of private place in a world of public places… enclosed and protected space similar to the mother's womb. In fact it is the first place in each person's life. As an enclosed space it serves to shelter and protect from the outside world.
[S]imply a place where we can express a private and unguarded self in an increasingly public world. As sociologists might observe, the home provides a "backstage" and "private" set to our "public" performances in the workplace. Like the home of the original womb, they allow the private self to develop by escaping from the public world.”- “House And Home”
Just like the city, the TEMPLE, the palace, and the MOUNTAIN, the house is one of the centers of the world. It is a sacred place, and it is an image of the universe. It parallels the sheltering aspect of the Great Mother, and it is the center of civilization. In Jungian psychology, what happens inside a house happens inside ourselves. Freudian psychology associates the house with the WOMAN, in a sexual sense; a house is undoubtedly a feminine symbol. Shelter and security are words commonly used surrounding house. Has a correspondence with the universe, the roof as heaven, the windows as deities and the body as the earth. The repository of all wisdom.- “House” (Dictionary of symbolism)
It’s a very rich symbol, archetypal in fact. Humans seek a secure place that is fundamentally their own in which to live, whether it is the troglodyte’s cave, or the King’s palace.- “Jungian Therapy and the Meaning of Dreams : Houses,” Brian Collinson
Further reading:
House As a Mirror of Self: Exploring the Deeper Meaning of Home, Clare Cooper Marcus (2006)
The Encyclopedia of Magic and Alchemy, Rosemary Guiley (2006)
Posts:
"The Fate of Depth Psychology in the New Millennium"
(1) “House And Home,” (Symbolism.org)
(2) Sita Sings the Blues (An amazing and amusing one woman animated movie - free to watch, and well worth it!)
(Image from the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, Sweden)
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