A Dream - From January 31 2009

I had a dream last night. It wasn’t about Harry, though I do dream of him often. It was about my childhood home in Guelph.

Many of you will know that my childhood home, my Mum’s house, burnt almost to the ground in a house fire in 2005. August 1, 2005 actually. Apparently, that weekend holds a huge energy of significant change for my family. We had just moved into our first home, our current home, on 2 August. The first phone call we received, as the movers were still bringing in the boxes, was from my Mum, informing us that her house had burnt down the day before.

If anyone has ever wondered where I get my strength from, they have not yet met my Mum. She is such an incredibly sweet and kind woman. She waited a day to call me to let me know her home of 35 years had burnt down, because she knew I was moving on the 2nd and she didn’t want to ‘bother’ me when she knew I would be stressed out with moving the next day. It was yet another surreal moment in my life, the first phone call we received in our first home was my Mum telling me my childhood home was gone. It was like the universe said, “Sorry, but you’re only allowed to have one home in the family at a time, so we had to take one away.”

Since the fire, I have had a number of dreams about the house. For at least half a year after the fire, I dreamt about the house as it looked right after the fire, when we were sorting through the remains, figuring out what could be saved and what couldn’t. (Most of the really precious things, pictures & special family mementos could be saved). My re-occurring dream was of sorting through things in the house, looking for something we wanted to save and not being able to find it. In another variation, I would wonder where something was, I would be searching frantically for it, ending up angry that I couldn’t find it. I would wake up and wonder, where was that thing, did we save it, was it lost? I was learning to let go of all of the things that really weren’t all that important. Things that might be nice to have saved, but that, really, in the grand scheme of life, were not so necessary to my ongoing happiness.

After a while the house dream morphed into something else. Next, I would dream that I was coming back to visit Guelph and was just passing by to see the house one last time. I would be astonished to see a light on in the house. I approached, and saw that my Mum was inside. I went in and found, much to my absolute astonishment that my Mum had decided that she could still live in the house. She had swept things up and put up new curtains. She told me, “It isn’t so bad, really, the upstairs was really only smoke-damaged. As long as I don’t go into the basement (where the fire had started and what was really completely destroyed) it will be quite alright, quite livable.” In my dream, I tell her she is crazy, “Mum, you can’t possibly live here! The house is BURNT”.

Sometime in the past year. I am not sure exactly when, the dream changed yet again. This time, when I went to visit the house, (fortunately) my Mum was NOT living there, instead, when I went inside, it turned out that someone had gutted the inside and they were starting to renovate it. From the outside the house looked the same as it always had. But on the inside, it was much bigger. It looked like the inside of an old castle, stone walls, earthen floor, wooden beams, a large fireplace with a huge stone hearth at one end. I was annoyed with the people for renovating the house. Indignantly, I told them that they had no right to renovate the house - we still owned it!

Last night I had a new dream about my Mum’s house. It was like it was sometime in the future. The house was once again, largely the same on the outside, but the side-street (the house was one house away from a corner) was a much busier through-fare than it is now. (It is a residential neighbourhood near the University of Guelph). The house had obviously been renovated. I approached the house from the side - up what would have been the driveway, but there was a new sunroom stretching across the whole side of the house. As I entered, I was in awe, the house had been totally renovated - but turned into a fabulous English Pub. The new owners had imported all of this gorgeous woodwork from England. I wandered through the house/ pub and was thrilled to see the transformation. I remember crying in my dream, “Oh my Dad would have loved this, Mum always said his dream was to retire and run an English Pub”. I left the house and was riding on a bus, not sure where I was going, but I was on my cell phone, telling my Mum she had to see the house now and how wonderfully it had been transformed.

Okay, then the dream got weird, next thing I knew I was sitting with Michael Ignatieff and three other political leaders (though in the dream I don’t know who they were), and Michael is explaining how logical it is about the transformation about the house.

This is the first dream I have had in which the house is ‘okay’ and transformed into something new and good.

It felt significant that I should have this dream on the eve of February 1.

I take it as a sign that, maybe, just maybe, in February we will realize that we are transformed too, but that it is okay, it is something new and good.

Love,
Cynthia

p.s. My mum sold the property to a developer in early 2007 and the house was demolished later that year. The property was severed, with a neighbour purchasing the back half of the lot and as of yet, I don’t think anything has been built on the remaining frontage.