I don’t know if it’s because I’m writing about characters who live in a castle, but I’ve recently had three dreams about large houses.

The first one, a few nights ago, was supposedly my parents’ house. It was a huge rambling old place, very long, with difficult arrangements for getting to the upper rooms. (Structures in my dreams are often like that; there are rarely stairs, and more often ladders or poles or awkward climbing onto shelves and out windows.) It remained surprisingly consistent for a building in a dream as I went back and forth between its rooms for purposes I forget entirely, except that it grew in length so much that eventually there was a railway line, external to the building, connecting each room to the next.

Another night I dreamed of an actual castle. It was ruined, and I can’t remember much more than that, except that in the same dream there was another house, where I had left a small black cat without any food. The cat was very thin, but ok. In the same yard where I had left the cat, I had also left Condoleezza Rice. Condi was also fine and didn’t seem offended by my neglect.

Last night I dreamed about another house that was also supposedly my parents’. This time I had to show it to a hostile woman for some reason to do with valuation and taxes. The house was very large and the rooms ran the gamut from poky, grotty and poor to palatial. One of the latter was huge and full of tables laden with fancy glass dinner services, vases and other ware. The hostile woman, who had already showed some signs of warming admiration in previous rooms, became wildly enthused over the stuff on the tables. My mother appeared and started showing her around. The woman and my mother got along wonderfully and taxes were not mentioned again. The whole paradigm had changed, entirely getting rid of the initial tension and anxiety.

I’ve suddenly remembered a dream I had weeks ago where for some reason I visited two middle-aged lesbians in Broadmeadows, an outer suburb of Melbourne. Their house was much bigger on the inside than the outside and contained an immense formal reception room with an irregular oval ceiling whose biscuit-coloured plaster mouldings resembled close pleats all drawing towards a central medallion shaped like the opening of a cowrie shell, only closed, with tightly meshed teeth. So it was a sort of ceiling/sealing-vagina dentata. I have no idea why I dreamed of that.