“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
I have had a recurring dream for the past three years about having to sell the home that I love. The reasons are always unclear, and variations exist where sometimes there is a necessary move, sometimes an external impetus, sometimes even my deceased parents appear, which when that’s happened underscores the notion that I don’t have any agency in the matter. Whatever the circumstances, in the dream I always have to sell the home that I love and leave. And I don’t want to.
Emotions that are felt within a dream have become a fact I pay close attention to. The emotion in this recurring dream is one of immense, all-consuming grief. It feels heavy in the dream and heavy in my body.
I will never have another home that feels like this home.
I will never care about the way the light plays throughout the day anywhere else.
The sense of sanctuary and safety will never be fully realized similarly again.
There have been mornings where my eyes were swollen shut from this dream, as I had been crying and my eyelids became stuck, not wanting to see the day start that began with such a vision.
Anyway, I’ve been mystified as to the meaning and origins of this dream. I’ve been disturbed as to why this dream, why do I keep having it, what gave birth to it, what can it be trying to say to me?
Jungian psychology calls the home the archetype of the self. Home is a mirror of the psyche, our inner world. All homes have a façade and an interior; a public face and a private center. This recurring dream exclusively involves the interior; in the dream, I never see the outside of this home that I mourn the loss of so completely. If I’m following the logic of this line of thinking, the house is me and everything that I contain: my personality, my drive, my hopes and wishes, what I do, what I make, how I think and feel, what kinds of people and experiences I love; the home is my center of being.
Back in the waking world, the season has shifted and a rupture has occurred in my twenty year relationship. My husband says that we have lived with these fault lines for years, and that in the past several there has been more and more seismic activity. The tectonic plates are shifting, and we are moving definitively and irrevocably in different directions with each tremor. I have bound my life with this person literally, figuratively, fiscally. We have moved across oceans together, had a child, buried parents, shared experiences, pain, growth, love, barbed words. Bought a house and made a home. During the periods when the ground quakes beneath us, like now, our realities and experiences of those realities are misaligned. It reminds me of when you search for the focusing point with a rangefinder camera, trying to align two versions of the same picture into one. Except here the aligning mechanism is broken.
He has said that I have more capacity for conflict, and perhaps that’s true. Maybe it’s also true that I just have more capacity period. The latter I view as a strength.
Like all marriages of a sustained duration, ours has seen some shit. What’s happening now feels different than past moments, and this quake is still sending aftershock after aftershock. I don’t yet know the outcome of what is currently ongoing with us, but I know what that dream has been trying to tell me these past few years. I am trying to make sense of and peace with its meaning, but it is hard. And heartbreaking.
