DREAM GALAXY

Diary & poem of record · Cities & buildings

Treasure exposed in a lighted house

Forest house, location unstated · 3 August 1877

A second time I dreamt, and saw a house built in the midst of a forest. It was night, and all the rooms of the house were brilliantly illuminated by lamps. But the strange thing was that the windows were without shutters, and reached to the ground. In one of the rooms sat an old man counting money and jewels on a table before him. I stood in the spirit beside him, and presently heard outside the windows a sound of footsteps and of men's voices talking together in hushed tones.

Original text — Dreams and Dream-Stories, Part I: Dreams, Anna Bonus Kingsford; edited by Edward Maitland

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Source
Dreams and Dream-Stories, Part I: Dreams — Anna Bonus Kingsford; edited by Edward Maitland, posthumous edition; dreams recorded c. 1876–1887. Part I, VI. The Treasure in the Lighted House
Rights
Public domain (author died 100+ years ago)
Record type
Diary & poem of record
Place
Forest house, location unstated · British
Date
3 August 1877
Uncertainty
Low — Dated first-person diary dream; one excerpt from one chapter.
Imagery
House · Forest · Light · A stranger
Feelings
Unease · Fear

Another way to look at this dream

Notes on the images in this dream from psychology, myth, folklore and semiotics. Each names its source.

House

Whose house was it — one you know, or one you only know in the dream? Which room did you spend the most time in?

Jung · The house as psyche

In 1909 Jung dreamed of a house whose cellar led down into older and older layers — Roman, then prehistoric. He later took it as an image of the psyche, with the oldest layers at the bottom.

C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962)

Phenomenology Philosophy

Gaston Bachelard argued that the house “shelters daydreaming”: the attic and cellar of a childhood home stay with us as places to imagine from.

Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1958)

Chinese fiction Literature

In chapter 5 of Dream of the Red Chamber, Baoyu dreams his way into the Land of Illusion, a palace of cabinets holding registers of the household’s fates.

Cao Xueqin, Dream of the Red Chamber, ch. 5

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Tree

What kind of tree was it, and was it alive, bare, or in bloom? Does it remind you of a particular place?

Jung · The philosophical tree

Jung collected trees drawn by his patients and found in alchemy, and read them as images of slow growth — rooted below, reaching up.

C. G. Jung, “The Philosophical Tree”, Collected Works 13

Norse myth Myth & scripture

Yggdrasil, the world-ash, holds the nine worlds in its roots and branches.

Poetic Edda, “Völuspá”

Tang tale Literature

Chunyu Fen falls asleep under an old pagoda tree and dreams of a kingdom; on waking he finds it was an ants’ nest among its roots.

Li Gongzuo, “The Governor of Nanke” (c. 802)

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Light

Where did the light come from? What did it let you see — and was anything too bright to look at?

Jung · Lumen naturae

Writing on Paracelsus, Jung took up the old idea of a lumen naturae, a “light of nature” within us that illuminates from the inside rather than from outside authority.

C. G. Jung, “Paracelsus as a Spiritual Phenomenon”, Collected Works 13

Early dream research Dream research

Ellis noted the common claim that light on closed eyes sets off dreams, but said he had no decisive evidence and that eyelids guard sleep well. His own dream of a bright light and a huge shadow came after an evening walk into the setting sun.

Havelock Ellis, The World of Dreams (1911), ch. IV

Hebrew Bible Myth & scripture

The first thing spoken in Genesis is “Let there be light”: light marks the start of an ordered world.

Genesis 1:3

All perspectives on light →

Exploration notes, not a diagnosis, a prediction, or evidence of real events.

Dreams that share its images