Dreams are a different place indeed.

Buildings.

About twelve or so years ago the first of these recurring but changing dreams occurred (as far as I remember, of course). The environment was all that mattered. It was a room I used to rent in the second floor of a woman's house, with a partly sloped ceiling leading to a three foot high wall that cut off the eave area. The space in the dream was largely the eave space which was inaccessible from the living space.

The continuity with the dream that would follow it are more an issue of feel than precise detail. I knew it was the same dream, sort of.

Over a period of time, I began to realise that various buildings with which I had certain amounts of intimacy were being kludged together into one complex structure of some sort which I would pass through. Some came from before the space I first noticed, and some have come after.

One early one I remember particularly well is a sort of interpretation of a place a friend in college owned. He ran a bicycle sales/repair shop and record store and lived in the first floor, and the second floor was made up of about five apartments, in two of which I lived for a few months each. These were small, ill kept spaces, but acceptable considering the cost and my lifestyle at the time. The strange part about this place, and it keeps getting stranger as I go back there, was that after walking down the hall between the first two apartments, on the right was a third, but on the left was a "missing section" of the building, where trash was piled and the like on the ground below. There was a rickety staircase leading down from a clumsy door at the end of this corridor section. This is the part of that building that figures most prominently in these dream.