My grandmother's house isn't in the family anymore. Which is a damn shame, since she and my grandfather (who I never met, by the way) built it. Her children sold it after she died. It's a beautiful house; close enough to the Mississippi River that on summer mornings you can hear the boat whistles and smell the water. My siblings and I loved visiting her house, and found it fascinating that it had been split in two. The right half housed my grandmother's family, while the left was rented out to boarders - my great aunt lived there when I was a little girl. If you were brave enough to go down into the musty basement and creep around the corner of the laundry room you'd find an identical staircase to the creaky one you'd just forced yourself down. And if you ran up that stairway and put your ear to the door at the top you could hear what was going on in the kitchen next door.
I have a recurring dream about my grandmother’s house. It features her upper stairway, the grand one - well, it would be grand, if a dividing wall - set off of the living room by glass doors and leading to the second floor - didn’t halve it. In my dream, I always start out at the foot of the dark stairs and climb up. When I get to the top of the stairs I look to my left and see past the huge wood framed mirror given to my mother's father's mother by her father on her wedding day, and notice that in the corner of that wall lies a passageway. This is a pathway leading to the Rooms That Are Never Used. In my dream, I turn left at the top of my grandmother's stairs.
As I walk along the pathway, I encounter variously shaped and sized rooms. Some are furnished like the bedrooms in the main part of the house, with heavy oak furniture and white bedspreads. Others are bare except for angled ceilings and shadows. Others seem like they've been recently used, free from the layer of grey dust that has settled elsewhere. And then there is The Room, the focus of my dream. This room is the Rose Room.
I can't ever stay here very long because I know this room doesn't belong to me yet. So I turn away and run back down the corridor and find my way to my grandmother's stairs, as the dream ends. And that's it. It's not scary or fantastic or revealing, but it's something I dream over and over and over. When I was younger, after dreaming it, I tended to note it in my journal or tell my mom that I dreamt about the room in grandmother's house again, and she’d say "hmm, I wonder where we took you when you were little that you saw a room like that."
Usually, I’d agree with her and then turn the conversation to other things. But I was lying when I’d agree with her, because I don't wonder where such a room exists. I know exactly where it is. It's to the left of the stairs, past the mirror and through the wall of my grandmother's house. Or rather, the house that once was my grandmother's and someday, hopefully, will be mine. Someday I intend to buy that house and build that room if I have to. You know why?
Because it's good to make dreams come true. And with that I end this narrative. Please feel free to dream about whatever it is that's on your mind. I hope your dreams are pleasant, and I hope you like to share them. Because it's a well-known fact that once someone tells you about her dream, you're obligated to return with a tale of your own.
Go ahead.