Natalia Snider is a certified dream practitioner living in Carbondale. She works with people’s dreams and imaginations to facilitate self-healing. Every month, she will analyze someone’s dream in The Sopris Sun. Anyone can submit a dream for personal analysis or inclusion in this column by visiting dreamhealings.com
Dream
Every dream I have, whether it’s about a visit, a memory, a family gathering, an accident or anything else, takes place in the same house. I immigrated to this country more than a decade ago, and every dream I have happens in the house where I grew up and where my grandfather raised me. I can see the entire space very clearly: the floors, the furniture, the bedrooms, the backyard, as if nothing had ever changed.
This house was rented, and during the 15 years I lived there, I lived with my grandfather and uncles who helped raise me. When I was a child, the house was put up for sale several times, but my family was never able to buy it. After a long time and several offers from buyers, the house was eventually sold and we had to move somewhere else. At that time, as a child, I felt a very strong attachment to the home and the space where my siblings and I had grown up.
In my dreams, I often feel sadness, fear and nostalgia, especially when I see my grandfather in the house he liked so much. I’ve dreamed that my grandfather is sick and doesn’t want to leave the house (he already passed away). I dream that people break into the house. I dream that my family is preparing lunch. I dream that I’m in the house, but I don’t want to be there; I want to be here instead. I’ve dreamed about playing hide-and-seek there, and about my friends who live here gathering with me in that house. I’ve even had dreams about events or situations related to the area where I live now (Glenwood Springs), or about people I’ve met here in the Valley, but the setting is still always this house where I grew up.
It makes me very curious to understand why all of my dreams happen in this same place.
Interpretation
This is a very interesting question. First, let’s go over what you may not realize is a common phenomenon, then we will dive into what is specifically unique here to you and oh so magical.
Many dreamers dream inside their own dream world. This can be a whole universe of their creation inside their own self-contained dream realm. Many dreamers that record their dreams have tracked and even mapped these worlds, as they have had dreams in the same locations so often that they get to know their way around these places. To focus in on yours, instead of dreaming inside a whole outside dream world, your home is your whole dream world.
Now, it could just work like that and then we would dive into all the different reasons that this may be the case, but I’m picking up on something bigger here.
Although the dream realm is localized to the dreamer, the astral realm is a shared realm that anyone in an astral or energy body can access or exist in. Dreamers have access to the astral when they are detached from their bodies while sleeping, and more of us traverse the astral in our dreams than we may realize. As anything is possible in the dream realm, some places here are places that act as gateways to other realms or that exist layered upon each other in both places at once. I feel that your home is one of those places that is both in your dream realm and in the astral. Let me explain why.
The physical home that you grew up in was not only important to you but to your entire family. Imagine all of that feeling of “want,” or perhaps “need,” that everyone pushed out into the universe every time that house went up for sale. Then imagine the burst of intensity in that energy when the house sold and everyone had to move. All combined, this amount of energy must have been enormous, and that amount has creating potential. Thought is the first form of creation and can bring anything to life immediately in the non-physical realms. I think this is when your home was first created in the non-physical.
Because your dream world is this house, it points to you being the creator and caretaker of this home in both dream and astral. You most likely created it in both places at once to be a shared space for your family. So, when you close your physical eyes and open your dream body eyes, you wake into this space. All your dreams happen in this space, like anyone’s dreams happening in their dream world.
What an incredible gift you have given your family, especially your grandfather as he can now be in the astral home as much as he wishes. Yet, some of your dreams indicate you may need a vacation. Practice daydreaming and take that vacation. Explore your outside dream world. Break any supposed limits or boundaries. Breathe underwater. Feel comfortably warm in the deepest snow. Speak with the animals. Don’t stop until you feel joy. Then, expand that joy in-
finitely outward.