houses, homes, dreams

I'll find a new place to be from.

“Dickens’ Dream,” Robert W. Buss (1875)

Whenever I dream I’m “back home,” I dream that I’m in Tennessee, a state where I was not born and have no family—but did live in as a child. It’s always the house in Tennessee, though often in that dream way where you know where you are but the house in your dream doesn’t really resemble the actual place so much. The downstairs layout is mazelike in a way the real house’s layout is not, but when we first moved there, I got turned around once and so it’s always that way, in the dreams.

Am I from Tennessee? The dreams think so. I am not from the Midwest, where I’m currently living, and I don’t think I could be, even if I stayed here the rest of my life. I was born in New Orleans, but I don’t dream about New Orleans. I think of myself as temporarily displaced from New York, because New York is where my friends are. New York is where it doesn’t matter that I can’t drive and there’s a Catholic church every third block. But I’m not from there.