Empty House Dream

You were in my dream last night.

But you were dead.

...Or maybe we both were?

And I stayed in bed longer than I needed to so I could see your face again, so we could embrace one last time.

I walked through each empty room in a house I did not recognize. It was a new house or an old house--one I was moving into or moving out of. There were no boxes, just blank rooms. And each room was bare and dark. There was a sense of either an end or a beginning but I couldn't tell which one.

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My family was there too, and as I weaved in and out of each room I could feel their presence, see their faces. Perhaps they were there physically in one room and they just remained on my mind as I journeyed through all of the rooms in the house. All of the rooms were connected to each other by one long hallway and separated only by the doors that connected each room.

And as I found myself in the last room, I realized you were there beside me. You had either been following me or you were in the room by yourself the whole time. And all of a sudden I knew you were not in this world with me any longer. I knelt beside you and we embraced. It seemed you had been wandering. Unable to move forward, you were trapped between life and the after-life, had not walked into the light, had never seen the light to walk into. I did not know what happened to you or why you were no longer alive, and I did not ask. I was only sad. After some time, I said, "We could have made it." You closed your eyes and hung your head and after some time said, "I know." And we both looked at each other in sadness but we both knew we did not exist in the same realm anymore... So we just embraced again.

But now I'm moving through the rooms again even though I want to stay there with you, and there's a feeling of newness or oldness, of death or is it life? is it a beginning or and ending, I can't tell, all of these things seem so close to each other now, so interconnected that one can't quite tell what has just started and what has just finished, a brief understanding that life and death are so thinly connected, so finely interwoven that an ending is a beginning...that a death is a life....that a beginning is also an ending...

The rooms remain dark and I am on my own now and after some time I find someone, I don't know who it is, but this someone let's me know you are no longer in between worlds.

You are no longer stranded.

You have found light and moved into the next world.

And I am at peace for you but ravaged for us and empty and full and each room is still dark and I continue walking, knowing that you are not wandering anymore, knowing I will not see your face in your purgatory any longer. You have found your way out of the empty house and I continue walking through the bare rooms...

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The dream ends, though I want to see you for longer than this short visitation we have strangely been granted, and I wonder now if I am in between realms, as well, searching for the light in the empty house like you were.


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