Morning of April 28, 1973. Saturday.

As with most of my online dream journal entries, this was the original title when first recorded in 1973.

There is a white convertible (early 1960s Cadillac) that travels north down Highway Seventeen (this is the most outstanding dream element other than the house itself). It is an unfamiliar car to me (in terms of knowing anyone who has one) and seems to be part of a movie scene. I view the scene directly from above at first from a sort of skewed perspective to the right (not quite “two o’clock”) rather than as straight from “top” to “bottom”, again, from an implied straight down from above camera view. As the “movie” unfolds, it seems to relate to a haunted house on the opposite side of the highway from my Cubitis home, slightly north and between my family’s and Brenda W’s home in distance.

However, there is more to it than that. Not only is the house “haunted”, it actually moves around on its own, and seems to imply that the house is “alive”, as if it is some sort of slug-like creature with a man-made house as its “shell”. A few people seem to vanish in town, and some detective work is done. In fact, a main aspect of the fictional “movie” seems to focus on detectives and their ideas about what the house really “is”.

Later on, another unknown person comes to town and is able to “stabilize” the house somehow. It then turns out that the house was not really haunted in any sense, but was simply moving to different areas relating to the environment and how many people were in a given area at any one time. Thus, it is sort of like the “opposite” of a haunted house in that it was “afraid” of people or at least wary (for example, it had a tendency to “crawl away” if too many cars were parked in a specific area). The people who had supposedly vanished were living in the house as a sort of “vacation” from other people in the region with no threatening aspects from the “house creature”.

In the last scene, a factory has been built in the area the house had been “grounded” in. Three chimneys are billowing black smoke. The outer walls of the house are slanted at about a forty-five degree angle away from the pollution and noise. It cannot get away, though. There is a sense of melancholy.

Part of this may have been some sort of play on “living room” to “living house”? It may also be vaguely linked to the song line “…and they all lived together in a crooked little house”.