I once read somewhere that every time you dream of a house, that house represents you -- your personality, your psyche, your issues. What the house looks and feels like, as well as what happens within its walls during your dreams, are said to be important indicators as to your current state of being.

I can buy that. I've always dreamed of houses, or rather one particular house. I only know that it is the same house because of dream logic, as I've rarely been into the same room more than once, but it is the same house nevertheless.

This is a house that is an epic study in impractical grandeur and limitless confusion. It sprawls and twists on for what seems like miles, and it has many floors. The ceilings are so high that you feel a suffocating sense of disorientation when you stare directly up at them. The rooms are scattered with dust-covered, calcified relics that I'm certain were once lush examples of the most exquisite antique furniture.

Various doors open out onto panoramic vistas that it seems crazy to think of as yards or gardens, but that is exactly what they are. One of them is a field of golden wheat that glitters and undulates clear to the horizon, scattered here and there with marble limbs and torsos that were once parts of statues so grandiose that they fell just short of vulgarity. Still another is a field of leafy greens that grow in authoritarian rows and give off the opiate-like fragrance of indolence in dizzying waves. Others I have not yet visited, but I am certain of their existence all the same.

This is a house that it is easy to become hopelessly lost in, because nothing obeys the laws of practicality or logic. Sometimes I follow stairways for long stretches, and they wind up leading to nowhere at all -- just an anti-climactic wall covered in peeling wallpaper. Other times they just drop unceremoniously off into nothingness or lead illogically back down to the floor I just came from.

Many of the rooms and gardens have been forgotten for long periods of time and are inhabited by a populace of ghosts, mice, and spiders. Some of the floors are fragile and precarious because of rot and termites. Then every so often I will stumble unexpectedly into a room that is meticulously cared for -- every surface gleaming and fine, every window thrown open wide to let in the light and the birdsong -- and I sit and breathe for a while.

It's odd to consider that when I dream of this house, I might well be walking around inside of my own head -- tripping over some things in the dark, marveling over others in the glittering euphoria of discovery. It's a frightening experience at times, but I absolutely love that when I'm there, I make sense. I understand that house when I'm asleep, and I understand myself. It's only in the daylight that it becomes an undecipherable enigma.

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