The thought initiating this essay starts with a missing document, miss-placed, lost to time. Shuffling around in my head, I search an internal catalogue, traveling through rooms, apartments, desktops of the past, trying to unearth; and somewhere, either real or imagined, sits this document: a record of the re-occurring dream. I’ve been dreaming of this house since childhood. A few nights ago it happened again.

This isn’t the only re-occurring dream that has followed me through life—others involve war games set in a local, childhood park, a subterranean portals cloaked by an old mattress lying in an apple orchard, or the drowning dream thrust into and then immersed by a large body of salt water. These have dissipated in frequency during adult life, but the house dream has never ceased. It accumulates new dimensions, new wings of the past. The house keeps growing. But It always begins somewhere: the house on Vine Avenue: a 1920s bungalow in Sebastopol, CA, north of San Francisco and just east of Bodega Bay, where Alfred Hitchcock filmed his iconic thriller The Birds. Venture through the house and there are flashes of birds flying, sometimes violently hitting the large floor-to-ceiling windows framing redwood trees. Built on a hill, the front of the house scoops up the street and flows back and outwards, quickly spreading down the hill into a deep yard full of trees. A jungle, that’s what I used to call it, and full of animals. Sometimes these animals – possums, skunks, raccoons—would seem to guard this back space, keeping me from sneaking out into the night during teenage years of parties and drugs, they were the caretakers that kept a lid on the pandoras box of young desire. The dream always builds into this space a series of additions, populated with ghosts and ancestral presences both familiar and threatening, whose breeze-like bodies shift and accelerate to fill rooms. From the belly of the house, which remains crystallized, these phantasmagoric chambers and wings extend further, like outer banks of memory. Sometimes clad in heavy Victorian, sometimes in Frank Gehry-esque modern, their extensions dematerialize, become porous and pneumatic. Like decrepit ruins or not-yet-materialized structures, they are filled with dancing absences whose marks it is my duty to search for, which land momentarily in objects or furniture that periodically jump into view. I sense a violence in these distant chambers. Sometimes I look out of a window and the landscape is reminiscent of British Isles. Is this house tracking ancestral, colonial histories? The violence is palpable, mixing eras and landscapes and scents and movements. I shudder, awed and paralyzed. This house is my house, is it? How can it be entered? It continues to dematerialize, revealing the unhomely through disavowal and forgetting. I have no memory; and yet, I always remember the dream. I remember hauntings, trauma, wonder, communion, and intimate joy.

I’m convinced within this lost document are logged accumulated iconographies and architectural details culled from these dreams. A record of shattered past, they might be put to use, designing a future project. Dancing through dissolved space as a way to remember a potential future? A lost object, animated with urgent fury. This house is a memory palace, and each recurrence of the dream an opportunity to further refine and do a deeply personal and difficult memory work.