Just slept through the day (whoops) and had at least a few dreams, two of which I remember a fair bit about.
It is now 6:20 PM, I think I went to sleep at around... half past four in the morning? Ugh. Anyway.
In the first dream I was travelling through some unfamiliar part of Australia with my mother and my half-brother (the tolerable one). It was a very green, wet sort of countryside, almost like England or something- but I distinctly remember knowing it was Australia due to my thoughts on later events. I'm guessing it was in a hinterland kind of area, like the mountain range I lived on for part of my childhood (the shitty part).
I can't remember why we were driving or where we were trying to get to, but we stumbled across the entrance to some place. The details of just how it was set out is a little hazy, but there were lots of big, stately old houses on a huge old property. Most of the houses were partly surrounded by stone walls, kinda like the base of a round medieval tower or something.
There was some sort of central 'office' on the property, we went there and discovered that these were the family homes of all sorts of old families; where many generations of them had lived over the years. Mum asked them about her family name, of our relatives in the US, and the lady we spoke to gave us directions so we headed that way to check it out.
We thought at first that these houses were just replicas of the original buildings, since it seemed such large and old houses would be impossible to move at all, let alone overseas, but as we drove through the place we saw them being moved, somehow just placed up on these flat vehicles with lots of wheels that I can't remember very well.
It was kind of freaky, really, that these ancient homes were just uprooted and shipped to another country to be part of a collection... but then, if the alternative was some evil company demolishing them, this was definitely preferable.
We eventually reached the section we'd been directed to, which actually contained three different houses belonging to families with similar names, which may-or-may-not have been our actual relatives with a more archaic surname.
Anyway, we wandered into one of these houses, which was actually lit and furnished, absolutely fascinating and it just felt... old, like you could almost feel the memories of decades or even centuries pressing against you like a fog.
At first we thought the place had been done up on the inside to replicate how it had actually been back in the day, but then we were surprised again, as we realised people still lived in the place. I approached a doorway into a dark bedroom only to see someone actually shift on the bed, and realised the place was inhabited.
It was kind of spooky. Well, very spooky, looking back- not sure how creeped out dream-me was.
I ended up sitting at a small round table in the kitchen, reading some letters (these looked old to me, perhaps they actually
were left there as a historic thing) on the table, which began to reveal a tragic story of a suicide/attempted suicide in the family, where one girl wrote to another of her plans to end her life, and then there was another letter to her mother.
Can't remember exactly what they said or why she was so distressed, or even if I found out whether she went through with it. In fact, that's pretty much all I remember of the dream- I don't even remember if the dream continued long enough for us to speak to the people in the house.
Sorry.
I might post the other dream later, right now I need to go do stuff. It's a lot shorter, anyway.