Wow, thanks, R4ven.
I might just add that your concern about this wonderful ark-house being so close to the road would seem to deepen the desire to distance yourself from your rootlessness.
I started my dream journal back-when as an assignment for a weekly dream interpretation workshop that I joined. Most people think they cannot remember their dreams, but actually, we can train ourselves to remember multiple dreams per night with persistence and practice. I gave up the dream journal after several years, but I remember some basic interpretive guidelines from the workshop leader, who had a diploma in Jungian psychology.
1. We are all of the symbols and people in our dreams.
2. Rather than look to dream symbolism books for answers as to what a particular dream element means, ask, "What does this particular theme or element mean to me?"
3. When people appear in dreams, a known individual shows that you have brought to consciousness what that person symbolizes to you. With strangers in a dream, their meaning is more obscured.
Interestingly, I just had a dream very early this morning, with symbolism similar to yours! I dreamed that my husband and I were traveling on some country roads--probably on foot. We passed some people who were Roma (Gypsies): some on foot and some traveling with carts, although they were very fair-complexioned, with blue eyes and grey-blonde hair. Then my husband and I were hunting for an apartment or condo to buy [for some unknown reason!] We looked through several very quickly, then spent a fair bit of time in one that was in an apartment block in a city, and overlooking a river. This apartment consisted of a linear series of white rooms, and the wall surfaces had a bit of a sheen to them. There were many bedrooms, and most the beds were unmade or there were even people sleeping in them. The family was at home, an older woman was cooking a meal, and apparently they were entertaining relatives. Despite the general untidiness, I liked the place a lot, and it had a kind of sleek modern look; but we found that the asking price was in the $500,000 range, but our top price was in the $400,000 range. Once we were outside, the building had changed to a small single-family home, and I could see that it was surrounded by old warehouses with no other residences in sight; and that the riverbank was muddy, with old pick-up trucks parked by it. I suddenly doubted that I would feel safe coming home alone at night to this house.
It is hard to know the precise time of a dream, but I cast a chart with an approximation. I note that the traveling and Roma components very Mercurial, whereas a home with luminescent white walls is very lunar, especially with the images of a mature woman cooking and and other people sleeping. The "white" Roma seem also lunar. Like you, I knew that this house did not belong to me, although I had a strong interest initially in buying it. I would read this dream as indicating some tension about whether I can really feel at home in a place, no matter how much I might wish to. Natally I have moon closely opposite Mercury.
Rivers are ruled by the moon or Neptune. An image of decaying old warehouses and slum-like settings, as well as fears of lurking violence, seems Plutonian. I often have similar images of decaying or slum-like settings in my dreams--places I find very distasteful, yet redolent of a neglected history.
My transits for this dream are: moon square sun and mars, Pluto trine Saturn (rules architecture and buildings), Neptune conjunct sun and Mars, and Mercury/Mars trine Pluto. I also did a midpoint composite chart for this dream, and found a close sun-Mercury conjunction, as part of a wide stellium involving Chiron, Mars, and Hekate; with a Cancer moon as the most elevated planet and widely conjunct the MC.
