Buying a home is supposed to be a dream come true, and a non-stressful process. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a worried person on the mortgage posters at my local bank. Those happy, smiling people all look as if they came from a relaxing vacation at Club Med where no one has bad dreams.

After going through the home-buying process twice – and having bad dreams both times – I can only surmise that for some of us the process of buying a home is actually a little more worrisome than we would be lead to believe.  I wasn’t able to find a study on the stressfulness of buying a home in the United States, but a survey this year in the United Kingdom found that one in four homeowners said buying a house was “the most stressful experience of their lives.” It topped starting a new job, having a child and getting married.

Has home buying gotten more stressful?

This may be more true now than ever, especially since buying a “short sale” can be a process that drags on for months on end and tighter lender requirements are affecting even those with the most stellar credit. I can easily see those concerns converting into the kind of dreams that involve giant snails eating your house or an angry army of numbers storming the property.

I’m sure the real estate agents and lenders I worked with never intended for me to feel stressed.  But even under more normal circumstances the process of buying a home typically involves an enormous investment of our time and money. We drive around neighborhoods, visiting house after house to find “the right” or “almost right” home. Lump in the stress of competing with other buyer offers, negotiating with the sellers and poring over loan documents that seem to be written in a some  puzzling dialect – and that surely adds up to some stress that can bubble up into our subconscious states.

Bad home dreams may be way of coping with stress

And it apparently isn’t a one-time thing.  The first time I bought a property, I had a bad dream that the roof collapsed shortly after moving inside the condo. The UK study reported that 41 percent of respondents said that buying their second home was equal or more stressful than buying their first. It should have come as no surprise, put in that context, that the purchase of my second home would elicit another round of bad dreams of the fiery inferno type.

Of course, having a bad dream isn’t necessarily a bad thing, even if it involves your upcoming home purchase. Bad dreams can serve as a sort of pressure cooker valve, allowing us to vent worries when we aren’t dealing with them during the day, according to psychology researchers. The good thing is that I’m happy to report that the nightmares ended after I finished the process. But I’m still curious to know: What kind of dreams have you had about buying a house – good or bad?

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