non-recurring dream

I was watching the home decorating channel and they showed a clip of a guy knocking out a basement staircase, as part of a renovation. It made me think of being in a basement with no stairs, and how what was several seconds ago so easy that you took it for granted, i.e. getting up to the next floor, would now be impossibly challenging unless you had thought to take a ladder down with you first. And even then, to climb a ladder to get between floors in your own house would certainly be much more challenging that just running up the stairs.

This thought reminded me of a recurring theme that I used to have in lots of dreams - that I was living in a house where you had to climb ladders or edge along precarious ledges to get to the top floor. Or where you had to squeeze through an impossibly small opening to get to one of the rooms, but the assumption was that you'd do this all the time. There's one I remember in particular because I think I woke up wondering about it, where I was in a new house, and I went up a white staircase that got smaller and narrower as you went up it (Alice in Wonderland-like), and then there was a tiny sort of round opening at the top of the stairs to the right, off the floor a ways, and that was what you'd have to squeeze through to get to the bedrooms. This dream is probably all about wombs and birth and sex and inaccessibility.

Another theme that used to occur over and over was having to go up a step that was way too high, or a ledge that was way too steep, sometimes as the last stair in a staircase, it would be higher than my body was tall. I think I used to climb up okay, but then wondered how I was going to get down, and would be worried about the dramatic and very far drop and whether I would hurt myself. In all these dreams there'd be another person going ahead of me, not checking back to see if I was getting along okay, not offering any help, sort of with a "What?" sort of attitude. These dreams I think are about being safe.

I don't have any of these sorts of dreams any more. No dreams where architecture is either prohibiting access or making me unsafe. So, whatever else one can say about my current hermit life, I seem to have have gained a sense of security.