I just finished up the task I set for myself today…basically catching up on a lot of home office filing I hadn’t done in ages, and cycling old files I don’t need to keep in the office into storage containers I’ll put under the basement stairs later.  Paid bills, records and notifications, purchase slips and other miscellaneous paperwork that you need to keep track of in adult life.  My pack rat gene serves me well in this one regard: I keep everything when it comes to all that stuff and I keep it well organized.  Well…mostly.  I had a pile of almost a year of it I hadn’t gotten around to filing.  This holiday break is time I set aside to catch up on all that stuff…and move some things off into storage so I can have room again in the front office.

Anyway…I finished up the task I set for myself today, which was reducing the pile of unfiled paper to nothing and moving some old files off into storage.  So I sat down for a moment and let my mind wander a bit.  I find when I’ve spent hours concentrating intensely on something I just have to do that.  I just sat for a while with the iPod plugged in and flitted around on the web looking at this and that while my mind wandered.  My thoughts drifted back to that recurring dream house I mentioned in the post a few back, and I started pondering it for a bit, and this time the pieces all clicked into place and it finally hit me what the significance of the house is. 

Anyone who knows me personally reading this…think about it for a second.  A little house…a rowhouse…yet an unattached one.  Solid but needs some TLC.  Almost completely empty, except for an unused kitchen a basement full of random parts, a rickety but well used workshop that’s not really part of the house, but sort of tacked on as an afterthought, and a private den off the basement that doesn’t even seem to really be part of the rest of the house, where someone seems to have spent the better part of a life doing nothing except watching TV and snacking.  There’s even a phone next to the comfy chair.  And the rest of the house is empty.  Empty.  Even the floors are bare.  And the second floor makes me apprehensive.  And I’m not even really living in it.  I know I bought it…I know I need to move in at some point…and yet I haven’t.  I just keep checking on it from time to time, wandering though it occasionally, and wondering about the person who left that stuff in the workshop and the den, and avoiding the second floor like death waiting to jump out at me up there.  If you know me…think about it.  It’s all there.

Dreams are amazing things.  If the conscious mind is the waves on the surface, then dreams are the shadows dancing around in the water below.  I’m surprised now that it took me so long to get what that house represents.  I wonder if it’ll stop appearing in my dreams now.