Brian's Journal - A Dream Return

Victorian iguanas (08/23/2022)
The dream:
I am in a white Victorian-style house which is one of the largest and tallest in its coastal town and is adorned with square towers capped by flared (bellcast) roofs. I am with Richard, I think, and we are heading up to the top floor. We open a door and ascend rough stone steps surrounded by sloping dirt, as if we were in the basement rather than on an upper floor. We emerge into a wide hallway where a dozen or more large lizards, dark brown, heavy and sluggish, are lying on the floor and on a short flight of steps leading up to another hallway which is open on one side to the room below. As I continue up those steps one of the lizards, this one mostly green, comes after me and attempts to nip at my legs. The lizard is fairly slow moving and its jaws are fairly small so I am not too concerned, but when it rears up and attempts to bite me in the belly, I grab its snout, clamping its jaws shut, and shove it back down the steps.
After, or perhaps before, the lizard incident I find myself in a top floor room brightly lit by by windows on all sides except where tall glass-fronted cabinets are filled with china plates of different patterns displayed side-by-side on little stands.
Seeing the leafy top of a tree out a window, I step outside onto a small lawn with a border of dense pale-orange grass. I don't see any birds in the bushes around the lawn but there is someone in the window of the house next door. Turning to go inside I find that in order to reach the door I need to climb across a burned-out porch. The floor is gone and the posts and stringers are deeply charred. After some effort, I am able to figure out how to swing myself across by holding onto the charred posts. I feel some urgency to get back into the house because Richard called out to me saying that it was time to go.
My interpretation:
Prominent in this dream are the lizards which in the dream I identify as iguanas but which lack the spines along the back of iguanas. The lizards instead resemble a cross between a Gila monster and a Komodo dragon, larger than the former but more sluggish (and less dangerous) than the latter. As a symbol, they are clearly related to the alligator in the dream last February as well as to the Komodo dragon in an earlier dream that month. In each successive dream in which they have appeared, the dragon lizards have become less threatening, a progression which is also represented by the names by which I have identified the lizards. Iguanas are pretty harmless despite their appearance, which may reveal that Christianity no longer threatens my sense of well-being, at least most of the time.
Otherwise I am at a bit of loss to understand this dream. The big Victorian house, the stone steps, the china cabinets, the charred porch and Richard are not symbols which seem to fit together. The first three might possibly refer to my childhood home in Jackson, and by extension to my life apart from Christianity. The charred porch - a burned bridge? Richard probably indicates that the dream as something to do with Adventism, or Christianity, as do the lizards.
The colors brown and green also appear in this dream of people in church. Although my understanding of the symbolism of those colors remains tentative, they may represent the characteristics which made Christianity so compelling for me. Green represents the appeal of idealism. Christianity offered me the ideal of perfection of character which if achieved, would ensure eternal safety through the irrevocable approval of God. Brown on the other hand represents the belief system espoused and enforced by the church. Christianity threatened me with eternal destruction if I failed to conform to that belief system. In the dream the green lizard was more dangerous than the brown ones, indicating perhaps that I found Christianity's appeal to idealism more compelling than her threat of distruction.