Dream: We arrived at our family holiday home down a steep mountain road, overlooking a valley of the sea. An oversized lorry blocks the road behind us. It’s like a lobster has entered a lobster pot. It’ll struggle to get out. Not my problem.
A brick bridge carries a road and a building overhead. Under its high arch, there is a plain, dark door upstairs. It leads into a series of floors. Some of these floors are at least four storeys high, which is our family holiday home. By that, I mean my siblings who used it over the course of a couple of decades. This trip includes my sister, who will arrive at some time.
There’s also a white door. This used to be a public WC but is no longer.
I meet or am met by two women: one, my lover; the other, her friend. My lover is like Juliette Binoche as Tereza from ‘An Unbearable Lightness of Being’. Any thought of my being anything other than a single man is far from my mind. And yet .. I had arrived at this destination with my wife, who is still far behind with the car! Has she gone shopping? To meet our adult children or friends?
The entire story is spent, comically and unfortuitously, deciding, hoping, or willing this couple to make love, as is their clear desire.
Think of this house, built into the mountain, as two tall townhouses knocked into one. Each floor has a window at either end. Several high sash windows line one side, facing away from the mountain. One side has no windows at all, and takes the steep stairs. Whitewashed walls are the theme.
However, where will the young lovers base themselves? There are plenty of beds, maybe four on each floor, mostly doubles and some singles. Privacy during the day, anywhere, looks close to impossible. Each floor is open-plan, long and thin, and walk-through, with cubby holes, incomplete partitions, and old furniture. The place is shambolic and looks like a wonderful, chaotic, bohemian space. There’s a different throw on every bed. The floors are wooden. The walls are whitewashed stone. Paintings, furnishings, prints, vases, and books all suggest France, or Italy, or Malta, or a mountainside by the sea—the Mediterranean.
In a set of stages, the young lovers try to take over a bed and a room of their own. They want to consummate their love. However, as more guests arrive, it becomes increasingly unlikely. Just as they throw their bags down, someone else arrives. Interruptions often include platitudes. They say, “What a lovely place you have here.” They add, “You must have such lovely memories.” Indeed, I think. We are eager to make another lovely memory right then. We are keen to have a baby too. The girlfriend/lover partially undresses, and I only get his shoes off.
On the top floor, I finally extracted myself from a conversation that could go on forever with two women. I think I’ve done it and rested a heavy iron hat-stand against the door, hoping that will suffice. The floor below this room features a kitchenette at one end. There is an alcove with a double bed. A single bed is located in the open space between the rooms, along with another double bed. She is under the sheets of one bed by now and, by all accounts, naked.
I’m keen to join her. I want to remove my T-shirt and sit on the bed. Two men enter the room. One is older, and the other is younger. Both are dapper and a couple. They find their way to the far end of the room. They start to peruse the paintings. I talk to them and politely ask them to leave, but it seems they are guests.
I catch the young woman’s eye. She is my lover. With a despairing look, I say this is never going to happen.
And the house phone rings, and someone says, “My wife wants to know about the car.” It’s only parked for two hours. Reality returns. It then feels like random strangers have been added to the people coming in. They think they are in a popular antique shop that has just opened. I realise my hat-stand is against one side of a double-door: I never properly blocked it. I realised that this floor would be for my sister and her family. The one below is for my wife and my family. Either way, at the moment, there aren’t enough beds to go around. We seem to be in the middle of an artist’s open house art wave.
Jungian Interpretation
The dream left me with a clear structure, even before interpretation. There had been an arrival, a descent into a known place. There was a house—multi-level, inherited, open. There was Eros: urgent, mutual, fertile. There was an interruption, diffusion, and social multiplicity. And there was a return to practicality, to the call of the car, the wife, time.
From there, I began to work with it in a Jungian way—not to decode it, but to enter it again. The process was not linear but spiralling, returning to key images and asking them questions.
The descent felt like a return, not a danger. A sense of belonging, of Cornwall, of the Alps, of familiar places revisited. The lobster pot image became less about entrapment and more about systems people enter—some by choice, some by circumstance. I recognised myself as the lobster that once climbed out. It had grown wings and flown. Then it settled again when the wings withered.
The house became unmistakably psychic. I identified with the top floor. It was the place closest to light and view. However, I saw that no space was entirely mine. The structure was rich but lacked containment. Everything was accessible. Everything could be interrupted.
The lover became central. Not just a woman, but a presence: playful, mischievous, desiring, childlike. An impish ideal, a female trickster, an intimate of the creative heart and soul. She was not in conflict with my wife in the dream; rather, she belonged to a different temporal layer. The dream seemed to stretch from my twenties to my forties, holding different versions of my life simultaneously.
The failure of consummation was not repression but diffusion. Too many people, too many roles, too many possibilities. No room could be closed. The boundary I attempted—the hat-stand—was symbolic, insufficient. I recognised similar patterns in waking life: reliance on timing rather than structure, negotiation rather than exclusion.
The house itself shifted in meaning. It became a gallery, a curated space, a place others moved through and observed. I noticed similarities with my own writing. This includes my blog. Life becomes material, turning into something seen rather than simply lived.
The call about the car brought me back to Logos. Responsibility, time, structure. “Be where you are happiest,” I answered, but even that felt like a partial response.
From there, the questions became more precise. What would a room of one’s own look like, not as fantasy but in reality? What must be excluded? What is the true lover? What is the real boundary?
My answers pointed to something unexpected: the real interruption was internal. Not the people, not the house, but the activity of my own mind. I did not need absolute isolation. I needed structure, a buffer, something that held space without shutting the world out. I recognised a desire for a muse, something bohemian, free, enlivening.
Two nights later, without trying to recall anything, a second image came. I woke from a dream on a mattress on a roof above the Mediterranean. White sheets. Open sky. And there she was, curled against my lap. Not naked, not urgent. Just present. Asleep. With me.
Everything had simplified. No house, no interruptions, no urgency. She was already there. The energy had shifted from pursuit to presence. From desire to relation.
This changed the work entirely. The question was no longer how to reach her, but how not to disturb her. Could I let her sleep? Could I remain without turning her into something—drawing her, writing her, using her?
I tried to re-enter that state. To sit with her. To ask, gently, if she had chosen to be there. She did not answer in words. She touched a finger to my lips. We walked together. Silence was not absence but fullness.
The imagery evolved. We became the same age. Then we became trees—companion trees, beech and oak. Separate yet entwined. Eventually forming a single organism, silver and gold. Then flowering, seeding, and dispersing.
Another version: we remained folded together, transformed into something fungal, sporing into the air.
Both sequences ended the same way: dispersal. Completion that dissolved into multiplicity. The pattern repeated. Union, transformation, release.
This led to a refinement. The issue was no longer an interruption. It was that I did not stay with what emerged. The psyche completed the cycle but did not stabilise it. Everything became wind.
So I returned again, this time stopping before dispersal. Holding the image at the point of union. Asking what remained.
The symbols shifted. Intertwined creatures. A yin–yang form. Companion trees. Then deeper still: neural networks, fungal systems, a brain branching into organic growth, a tree mirrored in its roots.
The pattern became unmistakable. A living network. Eros not as an event but as a structure. Not something to express, but something organising itself.
At this stage, the question changed again. Not what does it mean, but where am I within it? Am I the observer, the trunk, a branch, a root, a node?
I noticed the pull toward absorption, toward becoming the system entirely. And with that, the need to maintain position, to remain in relation rather than dissolve into identity.
Looking back over this process, I see a movement. It goes from a crowded house to an open roof. It changes from pursuit to presence. It transitions from image to structure. It moves from something that could not happen to something that no longer needed to happen in the same way.
I began wanting a muse. What appeared was not something to use, but something to relate to. And then, something larger still: a system in which both of us belonged.
I find myself now less interested in concluding than in continuing to notice. In returning, occasionally, to that roof. To the quiet. To the sense that she is there, whether I reach for her or not.
And perhaps the question is no longer whether she will appear again. Instead, it is whether I can remain long enough and still enough. This allows whatever is already present to reveal itself without being turned into something else.
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