A Brief Geography of the

House
The architecture of dream-space
Catherine Hansen

René Daumal was one of the young leaders of a group

that called itself “Le Grand Jeu,” devoted to a scrupulous
“experimental metaphysics” and to a pursuit of all that
hides in plain sight at the edges of the ordinary. Around
1930, he was troubled, and ecstatic, to find that someone
else had dreamed his dream. As evidence, he presented a
number of phrases and passages from Gérard de Nerval’s
Aurélia which, found in manuscript at the scene of
Nerval’s suicide in 1855, begins, “Our dreams are a
second life.” The features of Nerval’s account that so
startled Daumal were stairs, rooms, and dark corridors—
on the face of it, features just as common in dreaming life
as in waking, and not terribly specific. But it is with a “mad
certitude” that Daumal recognized, in these obscure lines,
“the blood of my blood.”

It is not precisely, one realizes, that the two have dreamed

the same dream, but rather that they have visited the
same place—as if dreams were composed not of
archetypes but of “archeplaces,” or as if every individual
dream were a discrete point of experience within a
common locale, a penlight moving minutely over a dark,
endless, but unchanging landscape. Thus, in his essay
“Nerval the Nyctalope,” Daumal marvels that this dreamer
and madman of a century before “knew the Castle with its
countless hallways, cut by endless stairways.” He hears
Nerval’s words as if hearing his own heartbeat:

“I was” (he says, but it is just as much I who speak) “in a

tower, deep into the ground [profonde du côté de la terre]
and so high into the sky [si haute du côté du ciel] that all
my existence seemed destined to be spent climbing and
descending.”

He has seen, as Nerval has seen:

The Palace full of stairways and corridors in which the

Same awaits us, in which I have not finished wandering,
lost, and for how many centuries to come? The Tower, the
Castle and the Mysterious City of the dead.1

Daumal further avers there are others, beyond himself and

Nerval, who know “the Castle of corridors, the maze of the
City of the dead, and especially what light—light without
sun, of course—reigns there.”2

The larger entity in which these sub-entities all

duplicitously dwell has been given several names. Daumal
calls it a “country,” while other visitors have called it a
“cavern,” or a kind of bardo. I prefer “house,” a word that
lends itself to usages like “house of heaven” or “house of
the dead.” Unlike the Palace, Castle, Tower, and
Catacombs that it contains, the House, in its indefinite and
potentially infinite volume, does not imply any specific
interior or exterior architectural vocabulary beyond the
simplest: walls and thresholds, and perhaps doors, a roof,
windows.