The Basement archetype often refers to our Unconscious, which stores within its unknown depths, the long file of our living memories, some of which may be unpleasant and entirely repressed. In our dreams we may experience unspeakable horrors which seem to be hiding in our Unconscious basement. These forces are impatiently waiting to return to our surface lives and they seem to seek dreadful revenge. In dreams, we sometimes experience a turning point in our repressed emotions.
We are confronting our own hidden fears which suddenly need to re-emerge into our conscious psyche. The basement represents consternation tinged with acknowledgement and most importantly, an engagement of our own demons. In the therapeutic sense, the dreamer is expressing a need to free his Shadow figure in the basement, this to undo its presumed fearful and vengeful harm. When our darkest secrets are brought into the light of day they often lose their real impact. This is because their impact was predominantly based on their internal suppression anyway. We may need to consider what event in our waking life is causing us to confront our own demons at this point of time. Is it a positive force, or a negative one?
In dreams a basement will hold all the things that go on underneath the surface, or the things that you do not wish to share with the rest of the world. A basement is pail of a larger structure and this reminds you that it is part of the reason that your life is structured the way it is, in other words the issues that you keep hidden from the outside world give rise to the patterns that your life seems to follow now.
What is in or going on in the basement will help you to understand what is really going on underneath the surface of your own facade, it is usually where we store our junk or the stuff we do not wish to deal with. Because the basement is the lowest part of a building this explains how it is the junk that we store away that makes us feel low or depressed.
