The advertisement on the side of the car said: ”Own Your Dream”. In Australia, this ”dream” can only be one thing: a house. The ad was for a property developer, claiming intimate knowledge of our private unconscious, and hoping to sell it back to us (with a competitive rate of interest).

Perhaps this is partly why the governor of the Reserve Bank, Glenn Stevens, had such difficulty explaining our high house prices last week: they’re fuelled by more than rational, calculative marketeering.

The dream of property is pervasive and powerful, and Australians want to own it in monthly instalments. We’re willing to risk ridiculous, enormous mortgage debt for the privilege – recently sitting smugly at seven times the average annual wage.

The irony is that this dream often isn’t so very dreamy. It’s quite ordinary, in fact. For many, the reality of home ownership while earning an average wage means long working hours, anxiety, insecurity and legal enslavement.

Studies report some home owners spend more of their time in the office than in the overpriced houses they work to buy. And the stress of keeping up repayments, monitoring interest rates and budgeting for crises is affecting many – including children. Last year, almost a million Australians were suffering ”mortgage stress”. Research even points to a long-term decrease in mental health for many home buyers, particularly men, and buying a home often keeps many employees in jobs they loathe.

The necessities of work are nothing new – there’s no such thing as a free brunch and latte. But in a wealthy, supposedly progressive country, it’s concerning to see such quiet indenture. It’s all part of the calculation: we might not be happy or gratified, but it’s the sacrifice we make to own the suburban dream (in 30 years).

Buying a home isn’t necessarily touched by reverie – it’s matter-of-fact, dull and sometimes brutal. Is this as good as our dreams get? Is this what we must settle for?

No, not always. Twentieth-century psychologist Sigmund Freud offers a helpful reply to this. The modern master of dreams never owned his home. He was a long-term renter, like many of his generation. He worked very hard, but spent his ”mortgage money” on antiquities: statuettes, vases, figurines. His ”grubby gods”, he called them.

His office in Berghasse was filled with these expensive, evocative objects – they fired his keen, avid imagination, inspired his dreams and the reflections they afforded.

In this sense, Freud’s home was not a dream to own, it was a place to dream. His office, and its menagerie of antiquities, offered him a place to meditate, reflect, analyse; to explore the astonishing vicissitudes of the human condition. The investment was psychological, not monetary: he committed himself to the study, its stuff, and the patients’ psyches entangled with each.

This, I believe, is what’s missed in the propaganda about ”owning the dream”. It forgets that the dream is something we do, not something we purchase on a 30-year contract. And perhaps more worryingly still, this contract, and the sacrifices it demands, can diminish our real dreams; the ones we glimpse between meetings, petrol stops and late-night television.

I’m not suggesting everyone should ditch their mortgages – it’s not like renting can’t be oppressive (waiting for the inevitable ”dear tenant” letter). The vital thing is to question the ties between property and flourishing; to reassess what is genuinely valuable, rather than simply accepting what is ”done”.

The point is this: Freud devoted his home to his work, we often devote our work to owning a home. But the urge to ”own the dream” can become a distraction from dreaming itself; from spontaneity, innovation, reflection and clarity.

We start to nod our collective, terrified heads at dead phrases like ”downward pressure on interest rates”. We begrudgingly use our property to refuel and sleep, or to lower our taxes, but not to enrich our imagination or sharpen our intellect. Our horizons narrow, even as our floorspace widens.

In a way, the developer was right: we should ”own” our dreams. But not simply as commodities, or unthought ambitions. We ought not simply to buy them, but to really possess them. The first step is not to consult a mortgage lender, it’s to reclaim our fantasies from all the peddlers who purport to sell us our own psyches.

Dr Damon Young is a philosopher and writer. He is the author of Distraction: A Philosopher’s Guide to Being Free.

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/dreams-dont-come-in-instalments-20090817-enl4.html?page=-1

Part 1 looks at the housing market.


Click here for Part 2 The Bailout