(While I wrote this, I was reminded of a memory: sitting at the kitchen table in the house I grew up in, on a Saturday morning while Becky and I ate pancakes, and she was telling me about her dream. She went on and on and ON until I couldn't take it anymore and went to my room to get away from her. Clearly I wasn't a nice big sister, but that's not the point. The point is that this post might read like someone going on and on and ON about their stupid dreams, so feel free to go to your room to get away from it. Metaphorically. Love you Beck!)

One of my reoccurring dreams: I’m in a tiny, dirty old house and I have to climb to the top of the steep stairs without a railing, go into a room, go into that room’s closet, and find the hidden door. Behind the door is another tiny staircase—I have to lie on my belly and scoot up—that leads to a dark attic with a low ceiling. So low I have to lie on my back. As I am making this journey I know I am moving toward some unspeakable horror, but a compulsion propels me toward it. The horror is not the fear of falling or even the claustrophobia. It is something much worse, but my dream never lets me see it. I wake up, every time, before whatever bad thing that is going to happen happens.

After this dream—which always happens in the middle of the night, it’s not one I wake up from in the morning—I wake up with my heart still pounding and my legs burning with adrenaline and my hands shaking. The terror of whatever happens next is a very specific feeling, slimy and dark, with a smell like a rotting onion. It is a fear that feels attached to my childhood self, so part of it is to do with not understanding what is happening. What might happen.

What did happen?

I think I know the origin at least of the dream house. It’s a little house that was down the street from the house I grew up in. I have a very vague memory of a friend living there for a little while, six months maybe, and of going there once or twice. It was an old house, the kind with wood frames on the windows and a tiny kitchen, and an attic with a low, sloping ceiling. When I try to push for more memories—who was this friend? Why did she move so quickly? What kinds of games did we play?—there is nothing else. The memory just…drops of, like a cliff ledge in a cave, right into a darkness that has something in it.

Last night I dreamed another reoccurring dream that also deals with houses. I used to have a version of this dream a lot when all of the kids were still at home. Its details vary, but it goes like this: I am somewhere in my house when I find a door that leads to a room I had forgotten existed. The room is framed in, with unpainted sheet rock, and it’s full of various things, dressers I remember from my childhood, stacks of photos no one ever took, that yellow and grey floral mini skirt I loved in tenth grade. Those little treasure boxes my dentist used to give us to put your tooth in for the tooth fairy to find, each one full of baby teeth (or sometimes adult teeth, bloody molars with long, intact roots). Broken jewelry, broken mirrors, broken chairs.  But I don’t care about what’s in the room—I mean, I do care, I am overjoyed to find all these things I thought I had lost—mostly I am thrilled that I found the room. Because once we clean it out, someone can move there, and we’ll all have enough space, and everyone can spread out and not annoy each other so much.

I haven’t had that dream at all since Nathan left for the army.

Clearly, the origin of this dream was my anxiety that I wasn’t giving my kids what they needed, and my worry that my baggage was preventing that giving. And I also think it was a literal (as literal as dreams can get) illustration of how badly I wanted more space for everyone.

In last night’s variation, the room I found was off of my kitchen. I had to find a ladder to get to it, and climb on top of the cupboards, but then it opened up. It was still full of old things (most noticeably a jewelry box where at last I found my grandma’s ugly ring) but as I examined it I said out loud: This can be my space! There were windows and high ceilings—it was full of light—and even a half bath, and little cubbies where I could put books and fabric and paper, and a perfect box window for my writing desk, and if I opened one of the windows I could touch the high branches of my sycamore tree. I immediately started cleaning out the junk, skipping through my perfect space.

When I woke up I was filled with happiness.

And yes, I know exactly the origins of this dream, too. It speaks to our frustration right now, which is wanting to move but being unable to find the perfect combination of the right house in the right place. But more deeply, it is about my frustration with Kendell working from home. I am never alone and it is so not good for me. I need solitude and silence. I need the absolution of an empty house, because if no one is home I don’t feel guilty for indulging in my hobbies. I need the absence of anyone needing anything from me. (If that is selfish…I don’t know what else to do but to claim my selfishness. I need solitude. It is a part of who I am. I love my people and I love taking care of them, but I also need to take care of myself.) And it is also about guilt, because if I went to work full time, we could afford the house and the location we want, so in essence it feels like it is my fault that we are still in this house. My dream just giving me a room lets me have what I need (space away from everyone else) without much cost. (Just paint and carpet!)

This morning I lay in bed, thinking about those dreams. How they connect—houses and the spaces inside them—and how they don’t. How memory and objects overlap and entwine. How crazy but also understandable our psyches can be. How my mind just wants to keep on trying to figure out what’s next, what’s right, what happened, how to flee or fix. I don’t often bring an actual solution out of a dream (but I am working on a poem with the words “malina kittikitina” which I did bring out of dream language), and this dream of my perfect space is the same. I am still in this imperfect house, still frustrated with my lack of breathing space and light, still unsure of what step to take next. But that happiness that seeped out of my dream—that happiness. Like the terror from the dark house, it was very specific. It was a happiness that built upon an idea that finding what I need was a possibility, was a thing The Universe wanted to give me, was a thing I could have, too.

I wish that happiness could be found here on earth and not just in dreams.