I have a recurring dream of finding new rooms in my house. The broad details vary. Sometimes I’m in the house I live in now, sometimes in a former apartment, and sometimes in an entirely unique place. And the new rooms I discover vary from as small as a walk-in closet to a space twice the size of the original place. (In one such dream, during grad school, I dreamed I was living in a 250 square foot studio apartment and discovered a spiral staircase leading to a 1,500 square foot arboretum.)

Last night, I dreamed that I found a sunroom, in the house where I currently live, just off the spare bedroom that currently serves as my library (also as a repository for items with no fixed location). The sun room contained half a dozen or so boxes that we had put there when we moved there in 2002, still sealed. I remembered that Carolyn had planned to use it as a sewing room, but since she had given up sewing, I wondered if I could use it as my writing room. I even thought, “This is like one of those dreams where I find a forgotten room, except this time it really happened.”

I’ve learned that this type of recurring dream is common. Freud thought that houses represented bodies, and I guess the new rooms would represent new physical capabilities. Carolyn suggested that the new room represents the discovery of new opportunities, and maybe my subconscious is encouraging me to look for options in my life that I don’t realize I have.

Or maybe it just means I have more stuff than places to store it.