Added: 11/21/2005 |
Houses homes reflecting inner selfGenerally we imagine how houses look like, but do we think of them from the point of view of parapsychology? "Everything in the unconscious seeks outward manifestation..." asserts Carl Jung. If the houses homes we live in are so significant, what about the houses we imagine? It is considered that the houses we imagine reflect who we are. How we imagine our dream houses? What do our wishes say about who we are?
For the psychologist Carl Jung, building a house was a symbol of building a self. In his autobiographical Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung described the gradual evolution of his home on Lake Zurich. Jung spent more than thirty years building this castle-like structure, and he believed that the towers and annexes represented his psyche. When he was a child, he wanted a house shaped like a doughnut. Rooms would be arranged in a ring around a central courtyard, and the courtyard would have a glass roof, a steamy climate, and exotic tropical birds. All windows in this house would look inward at the courtyard. No windows would look outward at the exterior world. This was an introverted, perhaps egotistical, house. As he aged, his dream house reshaped itself. Instead of an inner courtyard, it developed sociable porches and big bay windows. The house of his dreams reflected who he was becoming.
For a professor of architecture at the University of California in Berkeley, Clare Cooper Marcus, houses homes are as a place of self-expression, a place of nurturance, and as a place of sociability. "Can we know more about who we are by looking at where we live?" The answer for this question we will find in her book House as a Mirror of Self, in which she analyses the meaning of "home". She has written extensively about the relationship between dwellings and the people who occupy them. Marcus spent years looking at people's drawings of memorable childhood places, and her book draws on Jungian concepts of the collective unconscious and archetypes.
A psychological survey has been made concerning people's dreams of houses homes they wish to live in. As there are too many people, the more different their wishes. What say their fantasies? Some of them have achievable dreams... They described practical homes that could exist in the real world, such as one of the houses villas: one dreamt about home that would be on a beach on the Florida panhandle. It would be raised off the ground for parking underneath. There would be wide decks on the upper two levels on three or four sides supported by pillars and railings. It would have lots of windows on the beach side only. It must have three or four bedrooms and three baths, very open, and have lots of storage space.
Others described homes that are surreal and haunting: one such house would be like living inside an aquarium. One could walk out and through rooms and spaces that weave through a representative eco system that was a live habitat for tropical salt water fishes, a coral reef environment. Sunlight would filter through and around the house. The house itself would be a traditional looking three bedroom beach cottage like in the Caribbean Ocean. The aquarium would be set up to mimic the natural environment where the fish would live. The fish would swim back and forth throughout the house. The house would only be one story high with pitched terra-cotta Spanish tile, cement stucco finished on concrete block walls, wooden window shutters with vented slats, a front verandah that wraps around the house, long overhangs for the roof, and tropical vegetation around the house.
And, some of them took a witty approach. Here is an amusing dream house: it has two really big eyes, a cold wet nose, and it knows how to bark on command. It will have an Olympic size swimming pool on each side of the house. No chimney, to keep Santa Claus out.
So we are satisfied that the houses homes people are dreaming of are as a mirror that reflects their inner self. What house you are dreaming about?
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