The House, Part II: The Interior House

When I first opened the door to what I would call behind-the-veil activity, one of the first dreams I remember having was of a house.

It was dilapidated.

At the time, I wasn’t doing particularly well, and looking back, the symbolism feels almost embarrassingly obvious. The house was a reflection of my inner world: my psychological state, certainly, but also what I would describe as my spiritual condition.

I have become increasingly interested in houses for this reason. They appear again and again as representations of the self, not only in dreams, but in psychology, religion and mystical writing.

Perhaps one of the most beautiful examples comes from the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic Teresa of Ávila.

In The Interior Castle, written in 1577, Teresa asks us to imagine the soul as a castle made from something like crystal, containing many rooms or “mansions.” The spiritual journey is represented as a movement through these rooms, travelling further and further inward toward the innermost chamber, where God resides.

What interests me is the architecture of the idea.

Teresa doesn’t simply describe the soul as something we possess. She gives it rooms, depth & doors. An interior geography.

More than three centuries later, Carl Jung would use the image of a house to understand the psyche from another direction.

In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung recounts a dream in which he found himself inside a house he knew somehow belonged to him. He began upstairs, in an elegant furnished room, before discovering that there were other levels beneath it.

He went down.

The deeper he travelled into the house, the older it became: from the familiar upper rooms to a medieval ground floor, then down into a Roman cellar, and finally beneath that, into something prehistoric.

Jung came to understand the house as an image of the psyche. The upper portion represented the conscious personality, the part of ourselves we know and presently inhabit. Beneath it were progressively older and less conscious layers, eventually reaching something deeper than the individual: the ancient, collective foundations of human psychic life.

Teresa moves inward, Jung moves downward, and both leave us with the same rather extraordinary idea:

There may be considerably more house than the part of it in which we currently live.

This is what makes houses so useful to me when interpreting dreams.

It isn’t enough to notice that house imagery has appeared in your subconscious.

What condition is it in?

Where am I standing?

Is there another floor?

Is there a room I cannot enter?

Have I discovered a door that I didn’t know was there?

Am I moving upward, downward, inward, or trying to get out?

And perhaps most importantly: what part of the house am I actually inhabiting?

Perhaps the house can represent the condition of the psyche while simultaneously representing our relationship with the spiritual world. Perhaps those categories are not always as separate as we imagine them to be. My house was in disrepair because, in many ways, so was I. There is something strangely hopeful about being shown a ruined house.

Once you realise that the house is yours, you can begin walking through it, and eventually, you can begin repairing it.

References & Further Reading

Teresa of Ávila, The Interior Castle (Las Moradas), 1577.

C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, particularly Jung’s account and interpretation of his house dream.

For anyone interested in Jung’s broader interpretation of recurring symbolic images, Man and His Symbols is also a useful introduction to his ideas about dreams, archetypes and the unconscious.