Ian Wallace Interpretation:
Aspect of myself that embodies a unique talent I had almost forgotten about but now seems hauntingly familiar to me
Dream: There has been something unusual happening in your attic and you aren’t quite sure what is occurring up there. It is almost as if there is something spooky going on. You hear floorboards creaking when you know there shouldn’t be anyone in the attic, you hear murmuring voices and sometimes all the stuff stored in there seems to rearrange itself in odd ways. You are scared to go in there in case you encounter a ghost, but you know that you will have to investigate it sometime soon to give yourself peace of mind.
Meaning: When you dream about an attic, you are often thinking about some of your memories and ideas in waking life. Different rooms in a house represent different aspects of your character and since attics are to be found at the top of houses, they tend to symbolize what is happening in your head. The attic is often used as a storage space and the contents tend to reflect plans and projects you have stored away for future use. These are often ideas you have had to abandon in the past because of your circumstances at the time. But something has now happened in your waking life, which has brought these plans back into mind, and is making you restless to explore them. The creaking floorboards are steps you need to take to bring your ideas back to life and the voices you hear are the thoughts you would really like to express to others. The attic contents rearranging themselves show that you are playing around with different permutations of your ideas and reorganizing them into new and innovative plans. Exploring your hopes and ideas from the past can feel scary because it brings to mind all the people you could have been, and all the things you hoped to have achieved in your life. Although you thought you had abandoned these hopes, you have been storing them away in your headspace, waiting for the right opportunity to use them.
Action: The message from this dream is that you are becoming aware of some old thoughts and ideas that are starting to come back into your mind. You may have completely forgotten about these ideas but something has triggered them and brought them back to life. Rather than closing the door on them and hoping they will just fade away, try opening yourself up to the possibilities they might bring. It may seem difficult to give form to your thoughts and flesh them out but the more that you explore and understand them, the more tangible they will become.
Background: We often use a house to symbolize our self in dreams, and the space at the top of the house is used to represent the headspace at the top of our bodies. Like an attic, we often consider our head as a storage place where we keep things that we hope to use someday. In the same way that we rediscover possessions stored in a loft, we often talk of ‘dusting down an idea’ or ‘bringing a plan out into the light of day’. The word ‘attic’ can also refer to the epitympanic recess, the small upper space of the middle ear.