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Your Childhood Home
This listing is for your childhood home, except that it isn’t your childhood home, exactly. The living room is where it should be, of course, but as you turn around, you suddenly find yourself in your bedroom instead, which isn’t right. Is it? No, you’re right – your bedroom has always been here, one wall missing entirely, with a breathtaking view overlooking a vast and fathomless ocean. Perfectly normal. You hear the sound of barking dogs in the distance, and wonder, with a strange surge of terror and delight, if you’ll be allowed to go outside and play.
Your Workplace
This conveniently located commercial space is tilting, tilting inexorably to the side as your boss screams at you to fix it before you are swept away on a tide of paperwork. You are carried off to a lush green island in the sun where everyone is happy and fulfilled.
Your High School Science Classroom
Featuring standard classroom laboratory equipment, state-of-the-art for a date approximately 15 years prior to your attendance at that school. Furnished with five rows of two-seater desks with that black, rubberized surface. You watch as wisps of white fog billow across the desktops, slowly enveloping the room, as your chemistry teacher opens the container of liquid nitrogen and beckons you to drop something inside. You search your pockets. An apple, a cup with a long, jagged crack in it, a dark, shiny beetle that immediately flies away. You plunge your hands deeper into your pockets, panicked now because you do not have anything good enough. You look into the container as though it may offer guidance. Deep within, as though at the bottom of a well, you see the first person you ever went out with, looking up at you and saying something you cannot hear.
Your First Apartment
Cozy two-bedroom fifth-floor walk-up comes complete with exuberant sense of freedom and adulthood, absentee roommate, and significant cockroach infestation. You knock and shout through your super’s door to try to get him to do something about the roaches; when he finally opens it you are surprised to discover that he has turned into an enormous insect himself. You complain to him that on top of everything else you find his transformation extremely derivative, and he reminds you, rather rudely, that this is YOUR dream apartment, after all, and that if you don’t clean out your unconscious soon it’s only going to attract worse pests.
A Suburban Mall
Extensive retail shopping complex with no current tenants, returning to the market. Number of anchor store units: unknown. Total number of units: unknown. The flickering lighting system cuts down on your electrical bill and adds a certain ambience. This space features a fully-integrated PA system, or at least you think it does; you keep hearing a faint buzzing sound you can’t quite locate, somewhat like an amplified mic left on. Incredibly spacious: you never noticed how sprawling, how labyrinthine shopping malls were until now, did you? How windowless? An abandoned retail shopping center is called a “greyfield,” you recall, because of all the acres of grey, empty space surrounding it, distancing it from other places, other human activity. There is a sign posted further down the corridor you find yourself in; the lights flicker again as you approach it, squinting hard at the lettering until you suddenly realize you can’t read. The buzzing grows louder.
The Room You Lost Your Virginity In
Please note: this listing is just for the room itself, and does not include the rest of the building it is in, which feels like it has fallen away entirely. This intimate space measures perhaps 300 square feet, but somehow seems both much smaller and shockingly wide open. It brims over with authentic, even overwhelming period detail, such as the spot of chipping paint on the doorframe that you found yourself focusing on – couldn’t have been for more than a minute or two, probably – when you weren’t sure where to look. The room also boasts your virginity itself, which continues to be lost in the couch cushions along with handfuls of loose change.
Their Hospital Room
This single-occupant hospital room is equipped with up-to-date amenities to make their stay as comfortable as possible. And then there are the bouquets. The bouquets they received during their stay here – longer than anyone could have expected – have multiplied infinitely, putting down roots and sending up long green vines and oversized blossoms. The room is filled floor to ceiling with vegetation, thick and damp and still, sticky with fragrance. You must push your way through it until you make it to the foot of their bed. They look up at you, with eyes full of love and pain and a terrible clarity that you know wasn’t actually there at the end, and you feel that bottomless grief rise up in you once more.
A Perfectly Fine House
It’s a perfectly fine house. Tan, maybe. 2 or 3 bedrooms, something like that. Stairs going somewhere. Doors that lead to rooms. Oh, and hardwood floors! Yes, gleaming hardwood floors, beautifully preserved, in every room. You inhale the aroma of lemon-scented floor cleaner as you lean in for a closer look at the impossibly gorgeous, spiraling wood grain, which forms patterns more intricate than any you’ve ever seen in wood before, patterns like old lace. The well-polished floors shine so brilliantly that the firelight is reflected almost as well in them as in a mirror. Oh, right – the house is always on fire. All of it. You hadn’t noticed the flames flickering all around you at first. You are sure this will not be a problem, and return your gaze to that gorgeous floor.
A Difficult-To-Assemble Tent
This affordably-priced tent, purchased during an online sale and not yet used in real life, is in your dream situated on the campgrounds of a national park you and a motley assortment of friends, family, people long gone from your life and perfect strangers appear to have driven to. This tent will provide what feels like hours of frustration, as you struggle to read the instructions, hammer in stakes, and install the poles with a mind-numbing level of detail and a clumsiness akin to working underwater. When you finally get it set up properly, you lie down inside, looking up through the suddenly open ceiling to see the glistening night sky inviting you in like a pool lit up at night. With hardly a moment’s hesitation, you and your companions dive in and swim among the stars.
The House You Will Grow Old In
This is the house you will grow old in. You only have a moment to look around – the light is hazy, but warm – and then everything shifts and you wake up, and forget.
***
Tags: advice, dreams, katie naum, oh man i relate to this, real estate
The Home of Your Childhood Friend With Whom You Are No Longer In Touch
The house is exactly as you remember it from 16 years ago and for an instant you are lost in the comfort of the old brown carpet and the worn gray couch next to the TV. Then, with sudden panic, you recall that your mom told you the neighbors redid their whole first floor and none of it looks like this anymore. At the same instant, you remember that you haven’t even spoken to this friend, this person who was your bosom buddy in grade 5, with whom you shared crushes and caught frogs, in about 12 years and she’s gonna think it’s REALLY weird that you’re in her old house again.
Also: what IS it about dreams set in the classrooms of my old high school? Your description of the science classroom dream was bone-chillingly accurate for me.
I love this. Amazing.
What a terrific concept–this was awesome! I want to read a magical realism book set in each of these spaces.
Damn, dude. I went from howling over the Kafka to prickly-eyed over the hospital room. Well done.
The building that contains every building on your college campus, including a dorm room that is supposedly yours and does look like a dorm, but not like any you’ve ever been in before, oddly enough. You keep getting locked out of it. To get back in, you have to take a winding path through the downstairs and a series of secret hallways, and along the way you meet a number of elementary school friends who have not seen your roommate lately but will let her know you’re looking for her if they do. The smell of wood smoke is in the air.
I have HAD that mall dream! Ugh, what is that? So creepy.
Ahhhhhh holy shit.
Also my dream apartment always features a door I have never noticed that leads to either a) a huge empty room b) a second apartment I own or c) a room filled with everything I’ve ever lost. Are those included?
OMG I would LOVE to enter a room full of all the things I’ve ever lost. That American Girl wallet/purse with $25 babysitting money YOU WILL BE MINE AGAIN.
I’m hoping one night the door will reveal a cab, and inside the cab will be the pink backpack with all my homework I left in it when I was 7.
In my dreams, my childhood house has a door I’ve never noticed before in the spare bedroom that leads to a crawl space/secret room. I’m always delighted to find it.
In my dreams’ childhood home, that room is like Jeanie’s bottle and is in a corner of the basement and is outside of time.
I have that too! as does my boss’s boss (who mentioned it in a meeting once–as a throwaway “this normal dream thing” comment–& everyone besides the two of us was like “whaaaa?”).
I also have former high school friends–people I’m not in touch with anymore but don’t really have a lot of unfinished business with–crop up a lot as tertiary characters a lot. my only explanation is that they’re from an era of my life when there was a consistent cast of people who were just sort of “around” in a way that doesn’t really happen in college/professional life.
*clapping*
“Oh, right – the house is always on fire. All of it.”
Advertised as “well lit”
Reminiscent of Synecdoche New York…
I don’t see the listing for the room under my stairs that inexplicable contains an entire forest, with a meadow at it’s centre. At the centre of that meadow is a single tree that reaches to the heavens.
Goooooooood good good good good. This was good. Very good. I’m going to read it again now.
So good! I have nothing insightful to add, just more goods.
The three most important qualities in a piece of unreal estate? Unheimlich, unheimlich, unheimlich.
What about the car of your dreams, which is actually some kind of public transport you’re trying to get to the airport in and/or an airplane that is somehow also functioning like a bus on a road?
Oh, see whenever I enter a car, it drives great along forested roads where I grew up, and then for no apparent reason, I have to veer off into said forest because the car is no longer under my control and I wake up just as I am about to finally hit a tree.
The cars of my dreams are almost all driving already, with me in the back seat and nobody in front. I always just crawl into the front seat and take the wheel and somehow everything winds up fine. As messages from the subconscious go, it seems benign enough; what I can’t figure out is why it needs to tell me this so often.
Aw man, I drive in the backseat in my dreams all the time but I always end up crashing because my feet can’t reach the brakes. Jealous!
The car of my dreams is continually just driving off the edge of the Altamont Pass.
Beautiful.
Did reading this feel like playing Myst to anybody else? Evocative and discombobulating!
if you don’t clean out your unconscious soon it’s only going to attract worse pests.
I KNOW. (sobs)
I wonder if there’s an Ask a Clean Person for this
I feel like these are all locations in a horror video game I played once.
“Oh right – the house is always on fire.”
CAN’T I HAVE ANYTHING? *sobs*
So good.
So good.
Everyone is so nice here! I love The Toast. Thank you, everyone!
I’m always in my high school except the pool is in a weird place and the year is almost over and I somehow haven’t been to History class all year and I can’t find my class schedule or remember my locker combination and I’m going to be in so much trouble even though I have two degrees in History and am 32 years old.
I also have this dream about being late for school because the bus didn’t come or my friends didn’t pick me up even though I am 32 years old and own a car.
And somehow that mall doesn’t have ANY BATHROOMS and I would really like to find the bathroom now, or I’ve found it and it’s filthy and/or unisex and has no doors or they are weirdly cut so everyone can see everything anyway
also exits, they should install one of those sometime
This piece made me cry. In a good way. It was all lighthearted fun until the stomach-punch of “their hospital room”.
I just woke up, so instead of spending another ten minutes trying (and failing) to think of gud werdz fer complimentin’ that don’t sound trite or insincere, I’ll just say, I really, really, really, really enjoyed this piece of writing.
Thank you.