Attic

The dream dictionaries reach for the attic and hand back a tidy parcel: old memories, the past stored away, the mind, things you have forgotten. The image is filed under head and closed. But an attic is not one place. There is the attic crammed to the rafters and the attic swept bare; the one you climb toward eagerly and the one you avoid; the trunk of inherited things and the locked room you were told never to enter. James Hall warns against exactly the move the dictionaries make. To list motifs and their meanings, he writes, is “to move in the direction of a ‘cookbook’ of dream interpretations, which would be misleading as well as inappropriate,” because “all dream images are contextual” (Hall, Jungian Dream Interpretation, 1983). So the attic resists the parcel. The only useful questions are what is kept up there, and whether you go up to find it or to flee something below.

Begin with the architecture, because the attic only means anything in relation to the rest of the house. Gaston Bachelard makes the house a vertical creature: “Verticality is ensured by the polarity of cellar and attic,” and the two poles “open up two very different perspectives for a phenomenology of the imagination” (Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 1958). The attic is the clarified pole. “Up near the roof all our thoughts are clear,” he writes; the rafters reveal “the carpenter’s solid geometry,” and even a dreamer there “dreams rationally.” The cellar, by contrast, “partakes of subterranean forces” and “the irrationality of the depths.” To dream of the attic is to dream upward, into the lit and intelligible part of the house — which is precisely why what it conceals is more troubling than what the cellar conceals.

This is the house Jung walked through. In the dream that first gave him the idea of the collective unconscious, he stood in the upper story of an unknown house that was nevertheless “my house” — a salon “furnished with fine old pieces,” precious paintings on the walls — before descending stair by stair into a medieval ground floor, a Roman cellar, and finally a cave of bones and broken pottery (Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 1963). His interpretation is the foundation under every attic dream worth the name: “the house represented a kind of image of the psyche,” and “consciousness was represented by the salon” up top, while each descent reached “the more alien and the darker” strata beneath. The upper rooms are where the waking ego keeps house. They are furnished, inhabited, lit — and they sit on everything the dreamer has not yet gone down to meet.

Which is the trap Bachelard catches Jung confessing. He cites Jung’s own parable of the frightened householder: “Here the conscious acts like a man who, hearing a suspicious noise in the cellar, hurries to the attic and, finding no burglars there decides, consequently, that the noise was pure imagination. In reality, this prudent man did not dare venture into the cellar” (Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 1958). The attic, in this reading, is where we flee to. “In the attic, fears are easily ‘rationalized,’” Bachelard notes — the day’s experience can dispel the night’s. An attic dream may be the psyche climbing toward clarity; it may equally be the psyche climbing away from the basement it will not enter. The same image holds the courage to remember and the cleverness of avoidance.

The ancients had already built this verticality into the body itself. R. B. Onians shows that for Homer and the early Greeks the head was holy — “seat of life,” “seat of consciousness,” the part that “contains the soul” and even holds “the power to prophesy” (Onians, The Origins of European Thought, 1988). The skull was the upper room of the person, the loft where the life-stuff was stored. Plotinus raises the same scheme to cosmic scale: “in every living being the upper parts — head, face — are the most beautiful, the mid and lower members inferior,” and in the universe at large “above them, the Heavens and the Gods that dwell there” (Plotinus, The Enneads, c. 270). To go up, in this old grammar, is to go toward intellect and the divine. The attic inherits the prestige of the head and the heavens — and inherits, too, the temptation to mistake height for wholeness.

That temptation has a name in the post-Jungians: the flat life lived only up top. Marie-Louise von Franz describes a man whose “world of consciousness was not round, but flat,” his field of awareness “like thin ice over the abyss of the collective unconscious” (von Franz, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus, 1970). A person who lives wholly in the attic — all clarity, no descent — has built thin ice and called it a floor. Robert Johnson restores the personal weight of the image: the dream-house “represents your ego-house — the field of consciousness of the ego, the world the ego builds up around itself, made up of what you know, what you think, what you believe, and the walls erected to protect you from the unconscious” (Johnson, Inner Work, 1986). An attic, then, is the topmost chamber of that built world. What it stores is whatever the ego has set above ordinary use: the cherished, the obsolete, the inherited, the deliberately shelved.

So when you climb the attic stairs in a dream — and Bachelard insists they are “steeper and more primitive,” bearing “the mark of ascension to a more tranquil solitude” — the question is not “what does the attic mean.” It is: what did you put up here, and why up here? Is this the salon where consciousness keeps its good furniture, or the height to which you have fled from a noise in the cellar? Are you opening the inherited trunk, or sealing it? The attic gathers the past not to bury it but to keep it within reach, one ladder away. The dream is not telling you the past is over and stored. It is asking whether you are willing to go up, lift the lid, and bring something back down into the lived rooms of the house.