By Emily Steer
As a child, I was captivated by CS Lewis’s 1950 novel The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I longed to be the morally muddled Edmund — the cause of a Turkish delight addiction that still remains to this day — and was fascinated by the sprawling country house where the story’s action begins. Set during the second world war, the four Pevensie siblings are sent from London to escape the Blitz in the house’s warren of winding corridors and empty rooms. More than anything, I desperately needed the titular magical wardrobe and its portal to the fantasy land of Narnia in my own home.
I used to walk into my parents’ wardrobe, breathing in the smell of antique wood and tightly-packed fabric, and press against the back, hoping it would reveal an alternate world. As an emotional, sensitive child, I was urgently drawn towards the wardrobe’s promise of escape — the possibility to slip into another universe and discover a different version of myself.
Offering far more than simply a physical transformation, this magical portal in the home also encourages a psychological change in those who pass through it. Although it is worth noting that Lewis himself favoured the teachings of Christianity, it’s hard to resist a psychoanalytic reading of the novel. When they enter the wardrobe, the children go further into their own psyches, breaking away from their reality while also finding the space to fully process it. In Narnia, they struggle with violence and destruction that parallels the adult world, but this happens inside the wardrobe, still contained within the safety and privacy of the house.
The desire for such a portal in my own home has never truly gone away. Over the past few years, I have had recurring dreams that my house has rooms I never knew about. Sometimes I find entire corridors of bedrooms decked out in the style of Victorian stately homes; at other times, hidden doors reveal nightclubs and underground playgrounds; sometimes I walk through a doorway to find a room that fills me with fear. The rooms usually offer a sense of adventure and excitement, and I understand quickly upon waking that I am held within the four walls of my own terraced London house. It is an inherently grown-up realisation: while my dream mind retains the limitless creativity of my childhood, my adult reality is rather more routine.
These dreams began when I started training to be a psychotherapist. At first I was unsure of their meaning but, after consideration, I began to see these rooms as representing parts of my own mind that were beginning to expand. For example, when I occasionally open a dream door that reveals a terrifying supernatural force, I wonder what might be surfacing that I am not able to deal with just yet.
If I could choose any home imaginable it would be loaded with portals that I could explore: a chance to walk between worlds and experience the expansive potential that Lewis’s rickety old house promised my young self. In lieu of this, the traditional spaces that characterise London’s psychoanalytic consulting rooms — enabling the mind to run free while the body stays fixed — will have to do.
Photography: W Disney/Everett/Shutterstock; Don Smith/Radio Times/Getty Images
