Cleaning Dreams

Lately I've been having dreams about cleaning my house. In my dreams the house is really dirty - open bags of trash spilling out onto the floor, many years' layers of dust on the furniture, gritty chunks of dirt and sand between my bare feet - and I sweep and pick up trash and dust and it makes no difference. New bags of trash appear and disarray enters through the back door and I can never stay ahead of it.

Last night's dream was of cleaning the couch (this is relevant in the real world because we are getting a new couch, and I have to clean the old one in the hope that charity will take it). I take the couch outside and begin to clean it, and find that _____ has pushed all the cushions in among the trash. I'm taking them out and trying to scrub out dirt and lawn clippings and rancid dirty diaper smells.

Like Monica from Friends, I love to clean, and I love when my home is clean. But I can't help but wonder if there isn't some deeper meaning (this is how I'm also like Phoebe from Friends).

My dream book (10,000 Dreams Interpreted, by Gustavus Miller) says that to dream of sweeping denotes "that you will find favor in the eyes of your husband, and children will find pleasure in the home. If you think the floors need sweeping, and you from some cause neglect them, there will be distresses and bitter disappointments awaiting you in the approaching days."

Bummer.

Women Who Run With the Wolves, by Estes, explains that "all these motions of 'home-keeping,'....offer ways to think about, to measure, feed, nourish, straighten, cleanse, order the soul-life."
"For many women, this task requires of them that they clear a time each day for contemplation, for a space to live in that is clearly their own with paper, pens, paints, tools, conversations, time, freedoms that are for this work only."

Vasalisa sweeps Baba Yaga's yard. She is keeping "unusual ideas clear and ordered. These ideas include those which are uncommon, mystical, soulful, and uncanny."

Since The Kid was born, my house is never as clean as I would like - thus, the anxious ordering and sweeping in my dreams. But I would also like to think that since The Kid was born, his delight in meeting the world for the first time has given me a window into the magic of the soul again... the delight I used to have when I was young. Perhaps The Kid is The Key to churning up my creative ideas, to setting them loose.