I dream of houses

In my dream, I return to the house I left in Indiana to find it crumbling and caving in. It’s no longer my home, so I break the glass in the door to gain entry and when I’m finally inside, it’s filled with my memories. So many trinkets, toys, and treasures of a lost life that I guess I didn’t pack up when I loaded up the truck and moved myself and my kids to New York.

I start filling my pockets with a bone broach my mother gave me, a pony bead bracelet my daughter made, the extra cups and saucers from my grandmother’s porcelain tea set. How could I leave these precious things in Indiana?

I make my way to the attic to find the roof caving in. When I left this home, this space was partially finished. My father helped lay the subfloor. I learned to finish drywall. It would have been my space for art and writing and music. In my dream the rafters are bare and the shingles lie shattered at my feet. The Indiana sky is angry grey-green. I expect to but don’t hear tornado sirens.

A woman points a gun at me. She says to get out of her house. It’s not me, but it is me — young, scared, alone, broke, broken, with two babies clinging to her legs. “I used to live here,” I try to say, and then the spell is broken.

In my dream, I’m at my grandmother’s house in Ohio. It is before my grandfather died and my family gathered for a holiday, for a meal, for no reason except to know each other, back when we did. Sometimes it’s when my grandfather died — I wasn’t there. I was so young but I so clearly remember my grandmother telling the story, shameless trauma and pain like that something I’d never seen, the memory seems like mine. He’s being wheeled out on a stretcher. His organs are failing due to late-stage ALS. He’s trying to speak but he can’t. The house goes quiet. Dark.

But most often in my dream, I’m in a house that’s too small to contain us. How can we live in this tiny house? It’s too small for my trinkets and toys and treasures, let alone my grown-ass kids! No one will be happy in such a tiny house and I’m upset and anxious. Then I remember a door in the house I forgot to open. When I do, it leads to more rooms — spaces that aren’t cramped and cluttered. It’s a whole house that unfolds, room after room, and there’s a place for everything I need and everyone is comfortable. Everyone is happy. But sometimes the house unfolds into other houses I’ve lived in. Sometimes it unfolds into my grandmother’s house. Sometimes the unfolding house dream leads me back home to Indiana and I find her again — myself but worse off, back then. A past life.

In the Tarot, you rarely get to “house” level achievement until you’re level 8+ Cups and Pentacles. Seems like there’s a pretty big gulf between having a house and wandering in the cold outside a church. Haves get a home/castle with a freakin watchtower, family, a few dogs, and an old man in the bushes. Have nots huddle in a canoe. Even the Empress — the archetype of motherly domesticity is lounging in a park. I’d speculate the High Priestess has a house, but that’s strict #girlboss vibes she’s projecting; no screaming toddlers at her feet.

I looked through the deck for the moms who have it all but there is no model that fits my situation.

In a way, that is oddly comforting.

I could never do it all and it made me miserable. Sorry, let me revise that: I can’t do it all and it makes me miserable. I rent a beautiful house I love in a place I really like, but all the houses I’ve ever been in have been temporary shelters, stages, and phases that I’ve outgrown, been estranged from, or abandoned. Maybe everyone who has run away from home feels this some if not most of the time. Maybe chasing that feeling of home in a house is the wrong idea. The Empress says we come from the garden, and eventually, to the garden we return.

In the Lenormand, a house is a house. Neutral. There doesn’t have to be baggage or sentiment attached. That’s why I like the Lenormand.