Dream House: The House on Sudbury Road

February 27, 2017

No, it wasn’t the physical building itself I lost; it was the part of me that I kept there. In my dreams, I traveled to that house, its rooms and contents expanded in my sleep and became the symbolism of my dream language. When I was alone in my mind, all the days shut up in my room, my mind wandered and I could picture going up the front steps through the light red door, and the way the light filtered through the dusty transom panes. How beautiful abandonment could be. In the detritus and decay, I lay the parts of me that I kept hidden. In waking life, I had to abandon the rejected parts of me, the feminine parts, the sensitive parts, my freedom, my dreams, vulnerable things. There was my shelter, my alter.

Anna Newman was my friend and she was this fragment of my psychic being, the dark side of my moon. I thought that if I shut up those parts of myself, because they had this place to exist, that I could return to them later. No, now it is gone, a part of myself is lost. And a time in my life that I feel I was not fully able to experience, I can not go back to.

In the absence of a psychiatrist, the house taught me to accept myself. It was the afterlife, the only place my dream soul could survive when I cast it out. That’s always what I meant when I said “dream house.”

Farewell dream house, trust, self-awareness, female intuition, safety, dreams, spirits, Anna, solitude, afterlife, staircase of shoes, typewriter in the attic, ominous twangs of the grandfather clock at midnight