Empty House

Recurrent dreams

For many years I had a recurring nightmarish dream. I would find myself alone in a grey and dusty hallway, or a playroom, backyard, kitchen-various rooms in houses that had been left, as though the people were long gone. The rooms had items strewn about, meaning they had been in use. In my house, if company is coming for a visit, we put everything in its rightful place, we clean, and we welcome our guests in to mostly, a spick-and-span living space. In my recurrent dreams, the homes were what is referred to as lived in, in other words, it looked like they weren't expecting company. 

Disturbed and displaced

As a semi-self-absorbed person, and we all are, dear reader, I thought the dreams were about me. They were my dreams, and I sought to find meaning in them. Over the span of perhaps a decade, these dreams haunted me. I would awake feeling disturbed and displaced. In the grey and colourless houses, I would wonder where all the people had gone? Periodically, I would encounter my husband (now my former husband), in the phantom rooms, in the ghost like homes that used to be occupied by children, fathers, mothers. I would try to hold him to a conversation, asking him "What are we doing here? Do we live here now?", but he would slip away and I would again, find myself all alone.

This morning I have an acute awareness, a keen knowing, that empty houses, empty shops, empty streets that used to be well occupied, will be our living nightmare. We will see evidence of former life, things strewn about that were once in use, never to be picked up again by previous owners. If you are an opportunist, a capitalist, you can look at this as your way to wealth, scooping up the for sale businesses and properties, left behind by those that are no more.

Fire Sale

The market is now for buyers with cash in hand. The missing persons have forfeited their holdings, and said holdings are being vomited up from the grave. The living, those that have familial ties to the deceased, are already, as I type, offloading the meagre and sometimes massive estates, of their dead relatives. Forgive me for what may seem like a callous play on words, but these are fire sales, depending of course, on where the deceased went after death. 

Empty houses

My repeat of a repeat themed dream is coming to pass. It wasn't about me, per se, it was about our now, our current state of affairs, and what we can anticipate going into in our near future. While grave holes fill and fresh dirt is shovelled onto coffins, empty houses, empty businesses, empty playgrounds and schools will be our haunting. We will carry on, not as though nothing has happened, dear one, but with weeping and mourning for the dead. 

Tragically, the dreamers could not stop the carnage: like the phantoms in our nightmares, when we try to take hold of them, they escape our grasp and slip away, as though they never were.