I had the house dream again (I start every one of these posts the same way).

This time, it wasn't a locked room full of looming menace, but a whole other house. It backed up to ours, and was an old rotting thing, a nearly classic haunted house. The siding was warped and green with decay. The windows were black holes. My bedroom faced it and every time I was in there - dressing, trying to sleep - I felt the house was watching me.

There were other unsettling things about my house. For instance, it was connected to all the other houses by a long galley with openings but no doors, so the neighbors (or anyone else) could wander in without barrier.

It's been a long time since I've had one of these dreams, but like always, it lingers with me.

I haven't had the house dream in a really long time. That I can remember anyway.

(I think that tag link isn't accurate; I've talked about this dream more than that. I'll have to check through tags and the archive).

The most evil house is still so clear in my mind, and that dream happened over ten years ago.

This one wasn't so bad. Instead of the creeping horror of what was lurking behind the closed doors, it was more a feeling of perplexed curiosity. Like "Why does my house have all these doors, that doesn't make sense" type of feeling. Usually I'm too paralyzed with fear to open the doors, but this time I did it.

It led to a whole other house that reminded me a bit of my aunt's house. Hers was built on the side of a mountain, so every room had stairs going either up or down in relation to the hallway. It was beyond split level. The bedroom I stayed in had stairs going up, but then to get to the bathroom, you went down a set up stairs and then up a few more.

Anyway, the dream house this time was huge and old and full of stairs, too. But not terrifying.

I've been having this dream for years, and I don't know why it's so terrifying. I always dream that I live in a house where there's part of it closed off. In the closed off part, evil lurks, the kind that makes me weak with fear.

The odd thing is that the house in the dream is never the same. The first one I can remember was a perfectly normal house, but the attic was terrifying. In another dream, there was an addition to the house that was the source of fear.

Last night, it was the upstairs of the house that was locked away. I went up there and screamed at whatever demons lurked and waved my white-gloved hands at them. Then I stomped back down the stairs, still quaking with fear, but pissed off about the whole thing.

I woke up at that point and never got any good sleep the rest of the night.

Once I lived in an ancient farmhouse in North Carolina where the landlord had put a padlock on one of the rooms upstairs. I have no idea what he kept up there. We didn't go upstairs much, because the house didn't have either central heat or air, thus there were very few days when it was comfortable. Unfortunately, I think the evil!house dreams predate that time.