(Female, early 50’s) I had this really weird dream where I was a newspaper reporter and also about 25 years younger. I was sent on an assignment to this large mansion out in the country, and I was to interview someone who lived there. I drove far out of the city, in a vacation area in the mountains with hotels and cottages all around– a place that had been popular long ago. I knocked on the door and waited a long while before someone came. It was a very old woman. Evidently she was the person I had come to interview. I followed her up three flights of stairs to a small room. It was barely large enough to hold a single bed and a nightstand. Everything in the room was old and faded and dusty. Even though this was a huge mansion, this was the only room of it that was hers. I didn’t quite understand.
I asked her lots of questions, trying to figure out her story. I discovered that she had been living there for more than 50 years. She’d had a summer job when she was young, and something happened and she could never leave. “I’m 75 years old now,” she said, “and when the phone rings, I have to go down 3 flights of stairs to tell him.”
Who?
The “him” turned out to be some boy she had an affair with that summer. Now he owned the hotel. Why did she stay here? What reason did he have for keeping her around or did she have for not leaving? Who was punishing whom? I couldn’t get her to answer those questions directly.
Another strange thing was that there was no phone in her room. Where did she answer these phone calls for “him?”
When the old woman was tired of answering questions she pulled up the window shade and revealed this huge beautiful green golf course he’d built. “That’s all new. It’s his too. But I’ve never been there.”
I couldn’t figure out how she got stuck there, like she was stuck in time and unable to change.