Tank!

For years, I've had recurring dreams (or at least dreams around a recurring theme) of houses.  Houses of friends, houses I'm considering buying, houses I'm looking after for other people, sometimes hotels I'm staying in.  They're never real places, that is, places I can identify from real life, but in each case the import of the dream seems to be centered on wandering through the house and observing its characteristics.

Last night's house was one I had decided to rent, so most of the dream centered on my happy inspection of the house - it was old and in some disrepair, but had great space, lots of light, and gave the overall impression was that I was very happy to be there and looking forward to bringing my things in and making it my space.  There was also a sort of tangent at one point where I found out that I had two roommates, one of whom was from Africa and spoke only French, but even that came across as positive - they each had their own separate wing of the house, and the African roommate was clearly going to be a connection to an interesting and diverse neighborhood. 

But the most striking image of the dream appeared when I went out to the back yard.  I could see a couple of older houses nearby, similar to ours but with badly crumbling chimneys (which made me suddenly concerned about ours, though it turned out to be in good repair).  Just past them, on a bit of a rise, there was a tall apartment building, with a small common yard - in which someone had built a life-sized tank (yes, a World War II-style tank) out of stained glass.  And its gun was aimed directly at our house - I was somewhat taken aback by that, because it seemed vaguely threatening, even though the sun was shining through the long tube of glass and reflecting bright colors off the turret.  A stained-glass tank!  (In the dream, I was most perplexed about its connection to the apartment building, since that suggested that it was either a coordinated effort between lots of people - unusual - or that someone had convinced the whole building to let him use their common space for his art project - just as unusual.)  So I shrugged and went back inside to start figuring out the best place to put my desk.

Internet, I defy you to make any sense out of that one.