If you follow me on Facebook or Twitter, you may have seen that last night I dreamt I cleaned out my closet and got rid of a lot of stuff.
When I woke up this morning and remembered the dream, I was kind of amused. I’ve been determined to get organized this fall, so I’ve purchased a lot of storage boxes (which are now sitting in my kitchen). I figured the boxes were calling to me.
But the more I thought about the dream, the more I realized it went deeper than that.
In the dream, I was in my parents’ house in my old bedroom. The closet had a small section close to the bedroom, but it also had a larger back room (this was some closet!) I knew that I had forgotten about that back room and I hadn’t been in it in thirty years. I knew that it needed to be cleaned out, so I opened it up and went in.
The back room of the closet was very large – larger than the rest of the house (hey, it was the TARDIS of closets). It was filled with row upon row of stuff. Bookshelves and books, clothes and furniture. All of the things I’d purchased over the years was there – books, record albums, clothing, tapes. It was all piled in there, moldy and rotting. Precious little could be saved – it had all sat in this back room forgotten. Now it was all useless.
People I knew were helping me clean up and they were taking boxes and bags away. Everything in that room – wheelbarrows of stuff – was either going to be sold in a yard sale or trashed. Quite a lot of it was trash.
I looked around and started to cry. So much money spent for things I had let molder in the closet. They were locked away, apparently safe, but they had been forgotten and left to rot.
I’ve been thinking about this dream, and it occurred to me how much money and time and effort I spend acquiring things I just stuff in my closet. Not only physical items, but other aspects of my life are acquired, shoved in the closet, and left to mold, forgotten.
I’m still trying to understand everything the dream was trying to tell me. But I guess one lesson is, you can keep something, try to protect it, squirrel it away, and all it will do is clutter up your closet.
Sounds like “Hoarders”! I have dreams of opening up my closets and finding outfits that I had worn before and liked (and was pleased I could still fit in them), as well as outfits that I had never worn before. Some of them were hand-me-downs and some of them had price tags on them. In almost every scenario, I am getting dressed to go to high school!
Interesting blog : )
@Valerie Watts Eichlin: I have this fantasy that one day I will have clean closets – and a clean house, come to that. It will be very peaceful and very zen and the cats will all behave and not hiss at each other. Then I look around…. yeah. LOL 😀