apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

Wow, in the past I had a really similar reoccurring dream. I don't think I have had it since I bought my place. I wonder why it went away?

wow! yes, many, many times. Kate, it's like you're describing my dream and my groggy waking up reaction to a 'T'. The only additonal descriptor I would add for mine is that the extra rooms often have been somewhat hidden away in plain sight for years.

I have had this dream many times but it usually involves me finding the extra rooms by following my cat under the bed and discovering light coming from beneath the baseboard or from the back of the closet which I follow to huge, light-filled spaces. (Note to self: find apartment with more windows...)

That's a pretty classic dream for big-city dwellers. I haven't had it in a while but definitely did in the past.

That's a nice positive version of the new-discovery dreams I have, which are always anxiety dreams, like: I find out I am supposed to go on a huge trip, but I haven't packed and can't find my passport.

i have had this dream once and it was really nice, but my mom has a variation of this dream all the time and its not so much. instead - she keeps discovering more and more and MORE space. at first its exciting because her first house (where this first started) was tiny, but then as more rooms appeared, more people started showing up and she just gets overwhelmed. she can never find her way back and people keep asking her for things.

thats her worst nightmare. i've seen her after shes had one of those - she looks like hell. scary stuff!

The newly discovered rooms are the unexplored chambers of the self.

In my version, here's what I discover in the extra room:

http://leblogdesbeauxgosses.m6blog.fr/images/medium_david_beckham.jpg

Yikes, Meg! Never heard that take on it before.

I have this one too! I live in a decent sized house in Vermont. I often have the dream where I have at least one extra room. It will be full of furniture and nick-nacks that the previous owner left behind and we have never discovered before.

I also have the one where I am packing to move or go on a trip and there is sooo much stuff I can't get it all together...it's clothes and dishes and make up and tons and tons of stuff. :)

I didn't used to have the dream. But back when I lived in the city, we (in real life) bought the apartment next door and broke through. Someone who came over afterwards said, "Wow, isn't that everyone's dream? To break down a wall and discover more rooms?"

Oddly, now that I live in the country in (a little bit) more space, I just had that dream the other night, and it was kind of like Meg's mom's dream, where I kept discovering more rooms, but I also discovered that a whole lot of people (50? 60?) had arrived and were expecting food and entertainment, which just were not available.

When i was growing and until i left for college i never had my own room: i slept in the living room on the couch and had a desk in my brother's room. often i used to day dream about finding a hidden secret door in the living room wall, which would lead to a tiny hideaway for me.
anyone else here had no personal space as a kid?

yes....
I have this dream too.
oh how i wish it weren't just a dream!

Carl Jung talks about this -- something about discovering or needing to discover new aspects of self. Sorry I don't remember more...

Oh my gosh! I have this dream quite often! Usually it's a massive bathroom or huge closet or even an entire living room that my roommates and I "forgot" about. And then I discover it and am all, "Man, I have all this space, why aren't I using it??" Sometimes the space belongs to my roommates and I get really upset that I don't get more space like they do. I'm always very disappointed when I wake up, even though I live in a ok sized place for my city.

I've had it too! I can't believe so many people had similar dreams. It's more fun than winning the lottery. I haven't had it much since we moved from a studio to a one bedroom though.

i'm not a psy-chologist, but i do believe that when we dream about "home", it is usually a reflection of ourselves at that time. i used to dream about living in a nice place but the living room was packed full of old luggage and boxes [yes, "baggage"]. after a few months of self-work, i started dreaming about the same house, but without the baggage. it was so sunny and spacious!

I have these dreams a lot. My favorite part is how I am always like "now why haven't I been using this space before?"

Also, sometimes in my dream, my place is very acurate, other times I am living in a completely different space. Sometimes the "new space" is a huge cavernous loft like space, other times it is just an additional room.

I had also heard that the dreams are supposed to mean something about self-discovery. I think it is just that I would really, really like another room.

I have this dream often as well. There is always some undiscoverd space, through a closet or behind a bookcase or even underground. Sometimes the house is the house I grew up in or a house I've been given as a gift. It's never where I'm currently living. Also, unlike other dreams I have, the memory of these houses or the undiscovered space seems real and I never forget them.
The only other dreams I have that compare is a fictional city I visit over and over. I can draw a map of it, including the bus routes and freeways and I know my way around about a 10 sqare block downtown, including where everything is in one of the department stores.

I just had this dream a few days ago!!!! My place apparently had a whole other wing! Too good to be true.

I've had these dreams before in the past and they started once we purchased our own place.

I've had versions of the dream many, many times over the years. When I was very young, the triggering event was often falling in love (obviously I couldn't envision sharing my precious space!) My first apartment (very compact) was in a classic turn-of-the-century building full of wonderful characters who became my family. Moving to NY I gained more space, but I never severed my ties to my old building. I still return to visit my friends there from time to time, and to this day (30 years later) I occasionally dream that I am living once more in that apartment, always reconfigured in some fantastic way, yielding more space and interconnecting with neighboring apartments through previously undiscovered doorways.

i used to look up my dreams in a dream journal analysis book (my 8th grade best friend gave it to me and i stuck with it for a few months before getting bored). i used to have variations on that dream a lot, and that style of dream, of finding new rooms in your home, is very common. it basically means that you're either looking for new opportunities in life or within yourself, as others have explained.

it can be exhilerating, but very disappointing upon awakening!

Yes, I have had this dream many times always extremely pleasant. As some have pointed out, jungians would tell you they are dreams about the self (or Self as they say). You may want to read "Man and his symbols"
http://www.amazon.com/Man-Symbols-Carl-Gustav-Jung/dp/0440351839
a little passe but it is truly a classic and has been enormously influencial

I had a dream where I found an entire FLOOR of our brownstone that I had overlooked. It looked like the rest of our house when we first moved in so, naturally, my first thought was, "F---. More cleaning..."

And in that new room stands a Stowaway Canister Vacuum
designed by James Dyson & Co. that retails for $500.

I have a similar dream all the time -- in addition, I often have these weird dreams where I still have possession of an old studio apt near my current place.

And it get's even weirder -- I sometimes dream that I take a new place, but keep my current place -- then get all paranoid that I will lose the old place and really regret it, so I move back. Crazy, I know.

Egads -- AT as confessional!

when I was a kid, it was a secret stairway up from my closet in my room - an attic filled with antiques and of course toys. I would dream of this place repeatedly, wake up to go check, and pure dissappointment.
in my more adult years, I had a similar dream before I moved into my current apartment (but after I signed the lease), that the wall between the bedroom and the living room was a large doorway, and I kep repeating the name "Kate" when I woke up. Months later, as I was putting artwork up the wall, I noticed patches that could have been a doorway in its past life (it's a building from the 1880s) - so who knows, maybe someone named Kate used to live here and probably way before this "room" was made into a "one-bedroom apartment"...

Oh yeah. I have these dreams all the time.

The room that I discover is like a time capsule from the 70s- shag carpet, sunken living room, a bar with the mirror tiles behind it (with that marblized gold stuff in it), macrame wall hangings, ashtrays everywhere and everything is harvest gold and brown. It's pretty barftastic.

i read somewhere once that this is the most often reported dream that new yorkers tell their therapists.

I had this dream more than 30 years ago when I was sharing a tiny one bedroom aparttment on East 83rd Street in Manhattan. I still recall it vivdly. I found the room by going through the apartment's only closet and there were ten of them. (rooms, not closet.)

Careen quoth: The only other dreams I have that compare is a fictional city I visit over and over. I can draw a map of it, including the bus routes and freeways and I know my way around about a 10 sqare block downtown, including where everything is in one of the department stores.

You too, eh? Unsurprisingly, I'm more conversant with my city's libraries, used book stores, flea markets, and restaurants, but that's because I'm paying more attention. I've held jobs there that I remember with such great vividness that I have to remind myself it didn't really happen.

I've often wondered if it's actually a different city for different people, but unless everyone has good map-drawing skills, how would you ever prove it either way?

I've had versions of this dream for years, not always pleasant. Sometimes, I'm in an apartment that is mine, but completely unfamiliar. It's frequently an attic space, full of strange passageways and dark stairwells. There's always a porch I just discover, that's apparently always been there, but I've never seen. Sometimes, the entrance to my apartment collides with the entrance or a room of someone else's and theres a moment of panic about how to get back inside my home.

I don't usually go for dream-analysis, but if I were to keep a record, I bet I have these most often around the time of big change, or anxiety over a decision.

It's as if we were separated at birth - I've had this dream so many times, I can't even begin to tell you! How wild that there are so many of us out there with ostensibly the "same" dream. It's so strange to hear you describe it. It's one of the only recurring dreams I have that I can remember in vivid detail long after the fact. The thing is, it's such an amazing dream, that I can't stop thinking about it, even after I'm awake and have managed to work out that it was, in fact, just a dream - all of those rooms to design however I please, and I never knew I had them!

Great NYC dream...

i've had that & i don't live in ny. i can remember having it since i was a little kid. i think it's b/c i was alone allot as a child & i loved exploring places down to the detail. i hated the home i lived in. so, the thought of a new space where my parents hadn't messed it up felt like a glass of cold water.

sometimes, i'd only find a new cabinet. sometimes, it was a new room. sometimes, it was a door to an entire space full of rooms.

now, i wake up occassionally being confused as to where i am. i know it's my apt, but the rooms are all mixed up for a bit.

maybe it has to do w/ me moving so much. it's way over 26 times now & i'm 26.

I try to practice the discipline of gratitude. I try to refrain from complaining and whining. I think I succeed, except for one area in my life.

The size of apartments here makes me insane! I detest living in such small quarters. It's not that I need more stuff; indeed, some serious purging is in order. Still, I need more moving-around room. Oh ... and I'd like a room of my own, a la Virginia Woolf, so that i could be entirely by myself.

Oh boy, I have this dream freakishly often. However, I'm always amped, which is a nice departure from my normal anxiety dreams. I remember the last space I 'discovered' had *two* extra kitchens, and a many, many rooms for me to redecorate.

I'm also a city dweller, but not a New Yorker....

YES! Different variations...I go out to my balcony and find another door to a huge apartment....and in the dream I wonder why I had not found it before... and I immediately set about re-decorating. Sometimes in my explorations I discover that it is part of my neighbor's apartment...sometimes not. I had no idea others had this dream as well.

Wende - My city is located on a large lake similar to the way Chicago is situated on Lake Michigan, although I've never lived in Chicago. The park, library and large university are on a hill overlooking the city, similar to the way Beacon Hill overlooks Boston, although I've never lived in Boston. The flea market and antique mall are downtown, an excluse neighborhood runs north along the lake the the suburbs are north of the city limits. Going north, you eventually reach the Pacific Ocean and I did live two blocks from the Pacific many years ago.

I started having dreams about finding an extra room after moving to a small apartment in Hoboken. I had lived in a three bedroom house that had belonged to my grandparents in the midwest right after college and the experience spoiled me. It was a lovely old home but my friends had moved on to find jobs out of town. And I always wanted to live in New York City. (Hoboken was next door, affordable when I moved here 17 years ago and I have family in town.) So I got rid of most of my furniture and belongings and still this place was filled with the things I thought were essential. My books, music, clothing and cooking accessories plus what I thought was a minimum of furniture which crowded these three rooms.
I started having dreams of finding another large brightly lit room (often the size of this apartment) behind a bookcase or inside a closet. I don't think this was a psychological dream about my personality - I just was longing for more space!
I got inspired after becoming a regular reader of Apartment Therapy to throw away a lot of things I thought I couldn't live without. Now there is far less clutter and I haven't had any dreams of finding more space in a long time.
Does anyone else here redorate in their dreams? When I was young and had a bad dream about being chased, a visiting aunt told me to go back to bed and turn around and confront the chaser. This planted the idea of being able to control my dreams. I actually have had very few nightmares since then. I often could put a voice in at least saying stop if a scary situation arose.
But where the control usually comes up is in the decor of my living places in my dreams. If I have the idea that a place in my dream is where I'm living and I dislike the way it looks I'll order it to change. I've done this for decades. Once I ordered a bathroom to change four times before I allowed a dream to proceed. If it was going to be my bathroom and I was dreaming it, it was at least going to be a bathroom I really liked.

Did anyone ever see the episode of "Futurama" in which Fry has to become roommates with Bender, who's a robot and so lives in a tiny closet? At night he goes into the closet and shuts himself off and Fry has to curl up on the floor next to him. One night Fry notices a tiny door. He opens it, and there's a huge, gorgeous loft with giant windows. Bender says, "Oh, that's the closet"...
I have had that dream too, by the way, unrelated to Futurama. But ever since I saw that episode I always think of it.

Mmmm. This is a dream I don't ever recall having, although I wouldn't mind borrowing P2's.

I do keep daydreaming though about doing an extreme makeover on my parents old house in Minneapolis, which I've already sold.

Yes!!! I have this dream pretty often, but never often enough. It's a feeling of total elation when I realize the additional speace (which is always lovely, with lots of architectural detail and light) was there all along and that I can now inhabit it.

Oy -- I really need to do the cure.

When I can't go to sleep, I pick a room belonging to a friend or relative and redecorate until I fall asleep. Works every time.

Oh, yes, I have that dream all the time. It's right up there with the examination nightmare and fear of falling, but it's the opposite of a nightmare. I suspect it dates from the days of cavedwellers who had cave envy. I even dreamed that a friend's large Victorian house suddenly opened to a new green parlor, and some years later, when the dentist who had a suite in one wing retired, there it actually was when she reclaimed the office!

As always the elation I felt upon waking from those heavenly dreams would quickly dissolve into heartbroken tearful sobs at the realization that the extra bedroom or loft space that I had found behind my closet did not exist. The reality of still living in a small cramped, 2 teens to a bedroom apt on the upper east side was at times too much to bear. The increase in value of our coop was not enough to buy up significantly in the "city" therefore we were trapped. Then one morning while wiping up the tears it occured to me that maybe the dreams were a sign, a sign to look for the answer across the river somewhere, maybe even perhaps Brooklyn! Those dreams gave me the strengh and courage to ignore my naysaying friends and to break out of my "Manhattan is everything" bubble and move my family to a glorious brownstone in Cobble Hill. Well, that was 4 years ago and I have'nt had those dreams since. The elation I feel at waking now carries on uninterupted from one day to the next...

argarg,

i know that episode of futurama and it reminded me of my "discovery" dreams too!

I used to have this dream all the time and in my case it was for a laundry room. I love my condo (1070 sq feet) except for the tiny kitchen and laundry center in the half bathroom. In all my apartments I rented I always had a laundry closet with my own full-sized washer and dryer so I could hang clothes, fold clothes, keep next load ready. The original laundry center in the condo was so tiny it could only wash about 3 towels at a time. I finally have a full-sized laundry center and stopped having that dream.

Since I've been reading this blog about NYC apartments it makes me much more appreciative for the space I do have!

I often have this dream too. I also dream often that I suddenly remember that I have a second appartement and that I should go there too. I wonder what it means!

I've never had the dream, but don't look a gift horse in the mouth.

It's more than you had when you fell asleep, and it doesn't cost a thing.

I live a block from the ocean, but alas, no views. In one of my dreams, I discover a little alcove off my bedroom with a window that looks over the sea...

I've had this dream, too. Usually, in the dream, I'm living in a huge Queen Anne Victorian house that's mine (haven't seen anything exactly like it in real life).... and then I discover a whole new wing or floor that I hadn't known was there... and so on (there's a lot of opulent neglected stuff in it, it's a complicated layout, and so on).

It's about the untapped/hidden/undiscovered potential in yourself or your life. And your relation to that potential (terror, calm, joy, beleagueredness, relief, and so forth, as people have expressed above).

Careen and Wende, I have a "dream city" too! Mine has a downtown with offices and shops, a more residential uptown, an area sort of like Brooklyn (commutable area across a river), an area more like the Hamptons (nice resort area within driving/train distance), and a weird, more rural area that has an amusement park in it!

Most of my dreams involve going from one area to another via subway or car, always facing huge pileups and other obstacles. Although on occasion I have had dreams where I am going to open houses and am considering issues like how nice the building is and what the commute is like as I go from one apartment to the other.

I've also had the "wow, look at this space I forgot about" dream, but never with my actual apartment; instead, it's usually a dreamworld-only place where I've just moved in. And yes, I end up decorating that space by the end of the dream most of the time!

Exactly my dream. Strange.

Carren and eeeck -- These are sounding like different places, as my city has a downtown with a river and Richardsonian Romanesque buildings. The main library is downtown, as is a park, but not a huge amount of shopping. There's an antique-and-restaurant district north of downtown and a freeway that runs up the west side, with confusing branches north of downtown into some warehouse-type areas. Office parks are to the east, out big suburban roads. There's a university neighborhood that's northeast of downtown before getting to office-park-land. There's a really nasty mountainous highway that goes to the Pacific Coast, and there's at least one small town nearby with its antique shops downtown.

Now that I describe it, the place sounds remarkably like Sacramento, a region where I have lived.

I can't remember having that same dream, in the literal sense, but my old apartment was 284 sq.ft., and had one entire wall that was mirrored, which was wicked weird, but it kind of helped make the smallness bearable, because it felt, in a way, as if it were larger. For instance, with my back to my old Murphy bed, I could look through the mirrors, and appreciate the paint treatment I had done on it better, because I was twice as far from it as I could have otherwise been.

So, when I got my new place, which was almost exactly twice as big, the entire living room of my new place is kind of like it would be have been if I had been able to have stepped into the mirror of my old place, and inhabit it.

So, I'm not sure if dream-come-true scenarios count, but that's really how it feels for me.

I have that same dream too (usually abandoned living space under the attic) but I also have a recurring dream where I am apartment-shopping and find the absolute perfect apartment, and then discover it is at the top of a high-rise (which I am afraid to live in).

Over the years, variations of this same dream recur for me too. Typically during the dream I am pleasantly surprised to find new rooms accessible from my usual living or working space, which I explore during the dream. Then I am mildly disappointed when I awake and realize the discoveries were only my imagination.

So we humans have the same desires and thoughts, and our brains process them the same way.

I usually discover an extra balcony or garden space that's all green and flowering (I'm especially prone to this before spring has truly arrived).

It is universally accepted that a dream about one's dwelling is a dream about one's self. I am amused by the number who think it is really about a new physical room... This site is not called Apartment THERAPY for nothing, people. Draw back the curtains, throw open the windows, become who you are.

never had that dream - but have taken lots of time over the years to open up undiscovered, or purposely locked closets of my mind all the time to clean up - try it - it is worth the investment in your mental health - then maybe you guys won't all be having this dream...

I had that dream a lot in my previous apartment. It was always a huge room that I had somehow never noticed even after living there for years. Once it was an enormous room with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the ocean, even though my apartment was on Broadway on the upper west side.

I always loved those dreams. I don't know why I don't have them since moving.