#subbasements

I dreamed I was in an ordinary house, which had many levels of basement.  The place was very familiar; I woke up feeling certain that I’d dreamed of it before.

The first subbasement was an ordinary finished room, with a white rug and some leather couches and a TV -- the ordinary sort of TV-watching room that someone might put in their basement.  I don’t remember what the second one looked like; it didn’t appear in this dream.  But the third was an empty room, also with a white rug and white walls, though the rug was stained and the room was kind of dirty and looked like it had been uninhabited for a long time.  There were dark stairs leading even further down into another subbasement, but the floor of this room felt soft and unstable, and I was afraid to go any further in.

All the subbasements had an ominous sense of foreboding, which increased as you went further down.

In this dream, I was exploring the first subbasement (the one that looked like an ordinary TV room) with my friend Ben.  The feeling of foreboding was unusually strong.  I hadn’t mentioned anything strange about the place, so I felt validated when Ben said “it feels like we’re not alone in here; this place feels very wrong”.

I was standing on the stairs, looking down into the room, where Ben was standing.  And I was about to reply, when all of a sudden, a pair of hands grabbed me from behind.  We really were not alone!  I screamed for help in the dream, which caused me to wake up.  It was 2 in the morning.

Then I went back to bed, and dreamed about the same place again.  This time, the subbasements were in a house that I was renting from my manager.  And this time, they weren’t nearly so scary.  They felt totally normal, except for the third subbasement, which still had a rotten-feeling floor, and didn’t seem quite right.  But I ventured on into the fourth subbasement, which turned out to be the lowest.  It had a little bedroom off to one side, and a washer / dryer in the main landing.  The bedroom had a window, and the main landing had a sliding glass door leading to outside.  It wasn’t fully underground after all; it turned out the house was on a very steep hill, which is why there were so many subbasements.

I decided I was going to live there on the bottom floor, because it was super cozy.  Then there was something about the building actually being a schoolhouse, and me needing to clean it, and trying to get it all cleaned before some guests arrived.  And other people were cleaning it faster than me and I was mad at myself.

My family had moved to a house with many subbasements. We could go down as far as the third. It had a dark green rug and I think perhaps some couches? I’m not sure.

There was another staircase leading down into the fourth subbasement, but the stairs felt creaky and unsafe to walk on, so we had never gone down there, and didn’t know what it contained. We didn’t even know how many subbasements there were. The stairs just stretched down into darkness.

One day, it started raining, and there was some kind of problem with the house because the third subbasement started accumulating puddles of water, in sunken-down low areas of the floor. The water would pool on top of the increasingly soggy green rug.

I was thinking to myself that we needed to do some repairs on this house soon, before the third subbasement’s floor had rotted and it became unusable too.

But doing those repairs seemed like something that was feasible. The subbasement was ours, we could change things; it was not a vast impersonal House-of-Leaves-type force that was beyond our control.

And then, one day, I went down to the third basement while it was light out, and found that when I looked down the stairway I could see into the fourth basement. The whole thing was lit up with natural light (which doesn’t make any sense because it was deep underground, but oh well). I could see that the stairs were unfinished, and so were the walls; the wooden framing was in place but nothing else was. I could also see that the fourth subbasement was the lowest one.