The Stairway Dream -=Satinka Istari=- First, I should tell you I can remember having this dream at LEAST 3 times a year from the time I was about 9 or 10. 1989 - my 40th year - I only had it once. I don't quite know if that means it's being resolved, or if I was just to immersed in other things to deal with it. My grandmother's house was an old 2-story white frame with a concrete basement foundation. It had a cement slab porch with white columns on it, and which was screened from the nearby street by a forsythia hedge along the porch. The front yard sloped down to the sidewalk and street; the back yard (it was a corner lot) was actually a square back and a narrow side yard, all surrounded by boxwood hedge. Oak trees and a hickory tree (huge!) and one large stone (my "mother rock") were my playground as a child. Inside the house, it was a typical older midwestern home: the front door opened into the livingroom, with a staircase directly in front leading to the second floor. Clockwise on the 2nd floor landing were a linen closet, the largest bedroom, the 2nd bedroom, the back bedroom, and the bathroom. Downstairs, the left wall of the living room was common also to the dining room. Beyond that (to the right) was the kitchen, with a screened in porch containing the back door, and a stairway down to the basement. Halfway down that stair was the "side door" outside. All in all, a very typical house of the type built around 1920. The dream runs thusly: I am about 9 or 10 years old, sometimes younger, never older. With my teddy bear (a gold fuzzy one, wearing a red bow collar), I come down the stairs, through the living and dining rooms and into the kitchen. No one is around, and no sound indicates any activity. I'm frequently dressed in courderoy pants and a t-shirt type top, sometimes (but rarely) in pajamas or a dress. I open the pantry door, which is just above and to the right of the basement stairs. Getting down flat on the floor, I slide under the bottom shelf (about 6 inches from the floor), and into a hole I know exists in the back corner. When I get through, Teddy and I are in a strange area: This is the inside of the house as it would be if it were maybe 300 stories up and down. The walls are there, but there is a lot of room between them, and there are long, narrow staircases going up each wall, connecting all the floors, and sometimes running level all along a wall, like a catwalk. It's twilight or a bit lighter, but dull looking, and very quiet. There are people on the stairs. Most of them are men - sometimes in groups of 3 or 4, mostly in singles and pairs. They never talk above a whisper, but they do talk to each other. The men are dressed in suits - gray or brown or black. For some reason they remind me of a caricature of undertakers. The women are in dresses and heels, with fancy hairdos and makeup on. Men or women, they seem to always be walking up or down like they're going someplace important. I always have the feeling that I should not be found by these people, so I hide BEHIND the stairs (on the wrong side - where I shouldn't be able to stand, but I can. I can even climb the stairs over on this side). While I'm hiding out on the wrong side of the stairs, I can see into the rooms in my Grandmother's house. It's like there's a small hole in every room. I can see people sitting and talking, or eating, or watching tv and drinking beer... I can hear them talking, but I can never remember what was said. I know I have to be quiet, because I don't want them to know I can see and hear them. When the "strange" people on the stairs are gone - I have never recognized one of them as anyone I ever knew - I can come out and go to another part of the stairs. I can just dissolve through the stairs to the other side if I see someone coming I don't want to meet. Each part of the stairs is a different room, but they're all in my grandmother's house. Sometimes I'd see a room on one stairway, and see it later on another stairway decorated differently, but with the same people or activity in it. These dreams tend to come about 3 times a year, but there is no correlation as to when they show up. So far, no coorelation between anything I've been doing and their appearance, either. I do not ever remember leaving the pantry the way I came in - I usually wake up still on the stairs, and that's how I always remember it. Any ideas you have on this one will be greatly appreciated! (I can correlate parts of it to my natural shamanic abilities, but some of it seems to be more environmental or psychological(?)) -=Satinka=-