House prices have been a recurring theme for some of my dreamers recently.  In many of their dreams the value of their house plunges in value. The house that they have been dreaming about may be their current home, or the one that they grew up in, or in the case of wealthier dreamers who own multiple properties, it is usually the house that they consider to be their main home, or the one that they identify with most.

When we dream of a house, particularly a building that we consider to be home, we are often dreaming about our self.  Carl Jung used to refer to the dream house as ‘the mansion of the soul’.  The homes that we dream about when we are asleep are often the most accurate reflections of how we are feeling about ourselves.  When we dream that our homes are plunging in value, then in waking life we are often concerned about our own self worth and value to others.

One of my dreamers who owns a number of beautiful properties in variety of desirable locations related how she kept dreaming that the value of her house was falling.  In her dream, she had been alerted to the plummeting property price by her personal assistant and decided to go to the house and do something to help renovate its value.  When she arrived at the house, she realised that it was the house she had grown up in, and was shocked to see how dilapidated it had become.   Parts of the roof were missing, windows were smashed, and the garden was overgrown.

She felt an overwhelming desire to enter the house, but found the front door to be firmly locked.  She remembered that she had a key to the back door in her Hermes handbag, but could not seem to find it, no matter how much she rummaged.  In desperation, she tipped the contents of her handbag on to the garden path and joyously saw her key appear in the upturned heap of her possessions.  She grabbed the back door key while the wind blew her valuables across the garden.

She battled her way through the undergrowth to the back door and let herself in with the key.  The door opened into the kitchen and the house was chilly with seemingly no one at home.  As she stood in the cold kitchen she thought she heard a noise from upstairs, and walked through to the hall and made her way up the rickety staircase to what had been her bedroom.

There on the bedroom floor was herself as a young girl, surrounded by paints, brushes and jars of water, absolutely absorbed in painting a picture on a sheet of paper on the floor.  As she approached her younger self she become aware that she was now seeing the painting through the child’s eyes.  The painting was of a simple and colourful house, with words like ‘Friends’, ‘Happy’ and ‘Love’ painted on the windows.  The picture started to run and dissolve as she saw her own hot tears dripping on to the paper.

She woke up and she felt the actual tears running down her face, feeling sad and lonely that although she owned many houses built from bricks and mortar, she still had to find one that was built on love and happiness.  As we explored her dream, we returned to the awareness that such a house potentially still existed, and somewhere she had the key. 

At our next dream session I encouraged her to paint pictures of simple houses, and to write on these paintings what she valued most about herself, rather than the value of what she owned.  By the end of the session, she had expressed her own values and declared what made her feel valuable to herself rather than what financial value she appeared to present to others. 

We often externalise our worth by investing it in properties and possessions rather than investing our time and energy in our own passions and joys.  As the small print warns, external worth can decrease as well as increase, but the more we invest in our innate properties then often the wealthier we become.