My dreams lately have been full of shootings, stabbings, and death, but I wouldn't say I was having nightmares. Any outright horror in them has been subdued, like in a classic Hollywood crime story. I generally feel tense, not afraid. Using the language of movie genres, maybe I should call them suspense-mares.

One thing they seem to have in common is that many are set or begin in Victorian houses chock-full of bedrooms with dark-stained wood wall paneling, well-worn hardwood floors, cast-iron beds, chamber pots, and ornately carved fireplaces with roaring fires. And when I say houses full of bedrooms, I mean exactly that: the only rooms in these houses are bedrooms. Even the hallways, stairwells, and closets seem to have been adapted to bedrooms.

To be clear: these houses are not scary to me. I'm not trapped; I can leave the building any time I want. And I almost always approve of the tasteful layout, furnishings, decor. I'd willingly live in any of them. (Though, as my family will attest, I have unusual taste in residential architecture. Mom has long called eclectic houses with outdated designs "Walter Houses." Finances aside, I've never been able to understand why anyone would want to live in a house that looked like anyone else's.)

According to a quick Googling of the dream symbology of bedrooms, "a bedroom in a dream symbolizes your private inner self." Okay, if you say so. But what if it's all bedrooms all the way down? Am I just an especially deep person? Or so narcissistic that I'm just a Droste effect of navel gazing to infinity?

If my brain is trying to tell me something, I wish it'd just come out and say it.

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