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I woke up in the middle of the night (well, about 3AM) all psycho weirded out: I was convinced, convinced, that there had been a hole in the foundation of the house I grew up in which I had crawled out through on multiple occasions. I lay awake for the longest time, obsessed with this idea and trying to figure out where it could have been, because it didn't fit anywhere. At the very least it seems to be a recurrent image in dreams I have, that there'll be some place I have to get out of or obstacle I have to pass and that I'll use the secret hole as a way to do it. It's a difficult hole to get through, twisting to the right, hard, and then scraping under a rock and doing a right angle turn vertical, so that I have to bend my back hard, and I'm afraid I'll get stuck there. Sometimes I do and I have to wiggle a bit. The hole is dirty and nasty, with spiders and all, it's tricky and dangerous, but it gets me ahead of whoever's pursuing me. In last night's dream I had to get under a mountain, and I knew I could get to the other side much more quickly with my route - the pursuers would have to go around.
When I told Eor about this, in the morning, he laughed. "You and your secret passages and hidden rooms, you're always dreaming about those things."
"Well, yes, but maybe that's because the house I grew up in did have secret passages and secret rooms."
Not passages like hallways, but secret doors. There was a hole in the back of my parent's room which went through into the closet of the apartment on the other side. And before my father made that part of the house into an apartment there was similar-sized hole with a wooden door that went through one wall of a small room into another room the same size or bigger - a bedroom-sized room with finished walls and it's own window. I've always wondered what that room could have been used for. My mother thought the house could have been used to hide escaped slaves. I've sometimes wondered if they had an insane relative they wanted to keep a secret. And leading out from the end of the room my brothers and I had there was another square hole that led into the barn. My father built a new landing for it so we could climb out and up into the barn loft, and that landing was where he put a lot of the books, so it was my special place. Hypothetically, if a landing had existed before, a person could have scampered from the barn loft, through the hen loft (which became our bedroom) and the room that became my parent's bedroom (which may have been a hired hand's room or a storage room), through the closet, dash quickly through the hall from the one bedroom to the other and into their bolt hole at the entire other end of the house - so it was a system that gave a small person quite a bit of independent mobility through the top of the house.
"But," said Eor, "You know what a dream analyst would say about tunnels. They'd say it was a birthing dream."
"I know. And because I know I'm afraid it might be."
"On the other hand, maybe you're Herne the Hunted. That's a very rabbit thing to do - bolt down a hole to escape."
I was enchanted by this idea, although a rabbit in fear of my life is not usually what I feel like in those dreams. Sometimes, but I think not usually. I wonder if this coming to my consciousness now might have to do with the mention in "Microserfs" of Bugs Bunny's rabbit hole. One of the characters says that the job at Microsoft was an escape route for him (having grown up gay in a small town and not knowing what to do with himself) and that he feels (after leaving Microsoft and going into a start-up thing with his friends) that he is coming out the other side of the rabbit hole. (Although I'd argue that what the story turns into at the end of the book is almost Wonderland-ish, if we're talking about rabbit holes - it gets a little fantastical at the end. One of the characters who comes in near the very end IS, I swear, Tank Girl.) I just have to figure out how to put my hole in my pocket so I can escape any time.
I should perhaps mention that I often have bad dreams about the old house, but not, that I recall, about the actual secret doors and room. Usually the dreams are about being trapped in it (snowed in with hords of zombies outside was one of the best ones) and having to clean it up. Those dreams are always centered in the kitchen, as generally life did center around the kitchen, and involve the place being a mess and me knowing I'm the only person who's likely to clean it. This hole in a wall of the cellar idea seems to be predating of other dreams of holes/tunnels, but I guess I have no way to prove that it is. It might be my attempt to create an escape rout from the messy house.
Hm.
When I told Eor about this, in the morning, he laughed. "You and your secret passages and hidden rooms, you're always dreaming about those things."
"Well, yes, but maybe that's because the house I grew up in did have secret passages and secret rooms."
Not passages like hallways, but secret doors. There was a hole in the back of my parent's room which went through into the closet of the apartment on the other side. And before my father made that part of the house into an apartment there was similar-sized hole with a wooden door that went through one wall of a small room into another room the same size or bigger - a bedroom-sized room with finished walls and it's own window. I've always wondered what that room could have been used for. My mother thought the house could have been used to hide escaped slaves. I've sometimes wondered if they had an insane relative they wanted to keep a secret. And leading out from the end of the room my brothers and I had there was another square hole that led into the barn. My father built a new landing for it so we could climb out and up into the barn loft, and that landing was where he put a lot of the books, so it was my special place. Hypothetically, if a landing had existed before, a person could have scampered from the barn loft, through the hen loft (which became our bedroom) and the room that became my parent's bedroom (which may have been a hired hand's room or a storage room), through the closet, dash quickly through the hall from the one bedroom to the other and into their bolt hole at the entire other end of the house - so it was a system that gave a small person quite a bit of independent mobility through the top of the house.
"But," said Eor, "You know what a dream analyst would say about tunnels. They'd say it was a birthing dream."
"I know. And because I know I'm afraid it might be."
"On the other hand, maybe you're Herne the Hunted. That's a very rabbit thing to do - bolt down a hole to escape."
I was enchanted by this idea, although a rabbit in fear of my life is not usually what I feel like in those dreams. Sometimes, but I think not usually. I wonder if this coming to my consciousness now might have to do with the mention in "Microserfs" of Bugs Bunny's rabbit hole. One of the characters says that the job at Microsoft was an escape route for him (having grown up gay in a small town and not knowing what to do with himself) and that he feels (after leaving Microsoft and going into a start-up thing with his friends) that he is coming out the other side of the rabbit hole. (Although I'd argue that what the story turns into at the end of the book is almost Wonderland-ish, if we're talking about rabbit holes - it gets a little fantastical at the end. One of the characters who comes in near the very end IS, I swear, Tank Girl.) I just have to figure out how to put my hole in my pocket so I can escape any time.
I should perhaps mention that I often have bad dreams about the old house, but not, that I recall, about the actual secret doors and room. Usually the dreams are about being trapped in it (snowed in with hords of zombies outside was one of the best ones) and having to clean it up. Those dreams are always centered in the kitchen, as generally life did center around the kitchen, and involve the place being a mess and me knowing I'm the only person who's likely to clean it. This hole in a wall of the cellar idea seems to be predating of other dreams of holes/tunnels, but I guess I have no way to prove that it is. It might be my attempt to create an escape rout from the messy house.
Hm.