I’ve got zero training in Freud or any other psychological interpretation philosophy, but I’ll give it a shot.

The sprawling, ill-defined house is NOT your own, so you’re on someone else’s territory. It sounds threatening, especially when you add in the malevolent people who make polite sounds and have polite faces, but who are actively threatening your loved innocent ones: your children and your dog.

It seems that you’re threatened by someone or some group who is a threat to your family cohesion. It’s interesting that your husband is not in the dream at all, so he is neither help nor hindrance. Because it’s not your house, but some other house, my best guess is that the threat lies either in the community or at work, and my personal guess is that the stress and the threat lies at work. Something about work - even if it is the loss of the job that would threaten to cause instability at home - has created a great deal of stress for you. End of guess!

maybe you simply feel that every time you manage to protect your children from “something bad” something else pops up again and you have to protect them again and again and again?

As an example, if the “something bad” is a Hollywood movie, although it looks nice and appealing and harmless from the outside, there are bad things on the inside that you would rather not expose your children to ? (like you have said about the movie Hairspray?)

or maybe you are afraid some people trough this blog might find a way to ” locate” and harm your children ?

If I take your dream description line by line,

“Each time, I was in a sprawling, ill-defined house ” ;

this blog taking expansion ( sprawling means expanding right ? ) could be represented as a house in your dream, it is figuratively a second house for you.

” owned by ostensibly nice but, in fact, selfishly malevolent people” ;

although the people who leave comments here do not own this place, they kind of live in it , maybe there is something selfish about peope “crashing” your blog and “living” in it un-invited?
and maybe you feel you are not in complete control over who “lives” in this second home of yours that is your blog?
and because anybody can be anyone they pretend to be on the internet, maybe you are afraid some of the commenters who seem nice are not so nice in reality?

Maybe all those things get all mixed up in your dream, the blog, Hollywood movies et cetera…

and maybe I have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about !…

I’m pretty sure Freud would say the state of the house is indicative of the tidiness, or lack thereof, to be found between the ears of the people who own the house.

That might occur because you were thinking about something and this, along with Thanksgiving, triggered a family+X theme. Your subconscious may be putting pieces together that you are not aware of.

For example, if there were anyone at Thanksgiving that you didn’t want to talk politics about or if extended family came over, then you may pick up on the themes of insecurity, avoidance, a home setting, and so forth.

Siggy, a psychoanalyst, made an interesting note about Freud on Sanity Squad. He said something to the effect that Freud couldn’t believe in all these sexual abuse stories, so he classified them as fantasies. Then the squad made the point that fantasy has far less impact on a person than reality.

So just be aware that Freud probably had his own issues he has to deal with, as he is dealing with the dreams of others.

Very sketchy recollection of the squad cast but that is how it is. Memory is a fickle thing.