A house appears briefly on a renovation programme, accompanied by the casual assertion that it belongs to Western Australia, though almost immediately another certainty begins to displace the first. It is not there at all. It stands around the corner from your mother’s house, on a street already known before the programme has finished naming it.
What follows is not quite a journey and not quite a correction. Television gives way to walking and the distant image becomes a place beneath your feet. The street unfolds with the strange familiarity common to dreams, where recognition arrives before observation and places are known before they are seen.
The neighbouring house has been renovated in ways that remain within the ordinary grammar of renovation. New surfaces attach themselves obediently to old ones. The lines hold. The proportions continue their quiet negotiation with memory.
The family home has entered another order of alteration altogether.
A turret rises from its centre, while additional rooms seem to have attached themselves over time at peculiar angles, as though the house had continued developing long after construction was complete. The impression is not of design so much as accumulation, of a building that has passed through several versions of itself and retained traces of each one.
It is the number that lingers afterwards.
Five bedrooms.
Not because there is anything remarkable about five bedrooms in themselves, nor because the dream appears interested in what such rooms might contain, but because the number arrives with the peculiar density that certain details possess in dreams. It settles there without explanation and remains afterwards, carrying less the quality of meaning than of insistence.
Only then does attention move towards the joins.
The walls and ceilings fail to meet one another properly. Small openings remain where surfaces should have closed against weather and season, and the concern that emerges is unexpectedly modest. Not collapse or ruin, only rain. Whether rain enters through these unfinished places. Whether it has already entered. Whether the house has been living with these openings for some time.
There are houses in dreams that conceal, houses that imprison, houses that invite exploration. This house does something quieter and perhaps stranger. It appears to have outgrown the coherence that once held it together, not through damage but through extension, through additions that continued until the original structure could no longer entirely account for what had been built upon it.
By morning the house has receded but the joins remain. The thought returns unexpectedly during the day: the unfinished meeting of wall and ceiling, and the possibility that somewhere, during ordinary rain, water is finding its way into places that were never designed to receive it.
Somewhere around the corner from your mother’s place, a building continues quietly adding rooms to itself while the sky gathers above it.
Notitia Health
Explorations in dream, memory, embodiment and the unseen architecture of the inner life.
Notitia Health 
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