My dreams occasionally feature common themes across them. One theme that pops up frequently is that of hidden rooms in houses (and no, I have no idea what it means...can't say that I care really). Sometimes it's even to the effect of an entire house hidden within a house.
How these things are not noticed from the outside is beyond me but upon waking, I find the concept most fascinating.
A simple example would be one an unused door, say behind a swinging bookcase, reveals a narrow stairway between the outer wall of the house and the wall of the room. The stairway is just about as wide as a person so the fit is snug but atop it will be a small open room and a window looking outside. In one dream, the room, not much larger than the small bedroom of a two bedroom apartment, there was a chair, an endtable, and a television on top of some shelving with either books or a videogame console. Honestly I forget.
The puzzle is how the furniture got up there since it would be too wide to carry up the stairs. It suggests, in this case, that it was brought there a piece at a time and assembled on the spot. There was another narrow staircase but I did not go up it to see where it led and a small door leading to what I felt was a toilet, but I did not check. I guess the idea was that this was a room where you got away from the house's remaining inhabitants for a while. But still, pretty cool.
Other dreams featured what, upon reflection, must've been impossible architecture. The thing about my dreams is, so long as I don't think about what's going on too much, they'll continue. If I try figuring something out well, I guess that's too much brain activity to remain in a dream. Dreams like these I tend to "go with" because I'm in awe of what I've discovered.
I remember one such dream where virtually an entire house was hidden within a house. Well, I shouldn't say "hidden" so much as, rooms would reveal seeming inaccessible places you could get at, but not through the known doors.
Think of a videogame where you can see parts of a level you have not reached yet. The old first-person shooter Doom would do that a lot. It would also create "enemy only" areas which you could see but could not access without using the "no clipping" cheat.
One example would be another stairway room like described in the previous dream, but it overlooks the kitchen this time instead of being wholly isolated. Or there'd be stairways leading up (or sometimes down) to rooms otherwise not attached to the house's "normal" rooms. In other words, a house within a house. And these rooms would be fully furnished too but in a style or with older appliances suggesting the current owners were unaware these rooms even existed.
Some of these dreams suggest that these rooms were built and furnished first and then the rest of the house was built around them kind of like how banks are built around bank vaults.
The hidden houses would be accessed through crawl spaces whose access could be found under a carpeted floor or by finding another such trap door in an attic and climbing down a laddered shaft to reach them. Another access would be a hidden half door or sliding wall inside an apartment closet leading to another closet which, when exited, reveals a mirror imaged version of the apartment but unlike the main apartment, there's no door leading to the outside...or is there? I seriously don't know. It's not like we get to continue our dreams the following night...
Weird shit, but damn I want to live there or become rich and eccentric enough that I could have such a place built.
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