The House That Dreamed me

Before I ever took my first breath, the house had already imagined me.

I don’t say that lightly. People talk about childhood homes with nostalgia—peeling wallpaper, creaky floorboards, the smell of wood smoke in winter—but this was different. The house didn’t just shelter me. It shaped me. And as I grew, I came to believe that it had always been waiting for me. Maybe even creating me.

It sat on the edge of a town nobody marked on tourist maps, its roof sloped like a shrug and its windows always half-open, as if it were listening. My parents bought it before I was born, after fleeing a cramped city apartment and the choking fear that their lives had already been written by someone else.

“This one just feels right,” my mother had said. The real estate agent had looked surprised—no one had lived there in decades. The wallpaper had curled like old tongues, the basement carried a smell like forgotten dreams, and yet she smiled as if the place had whispered welcome.

I was born on a Tuesday morning, in the master bedroom upstairs. My first cradle stood near the window, where sunlight painted golden patterns on the hardwood floor. The house was quiet then, like it was watching.


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By the time I turned six, I began to notice things.

Like how the attic only creaked when I was sad. Or how, on sleepless nights, the wind outside seemed to hum lullabies through the heating vents. Once, I drew a picture of a hallway I had never seen—arched ceiling, checkered tiles, ivy climbing up brick—and my mother turned pale. It was the original layout of the basement, she told me. She had found the blueprint in the closet the week before.

The house knew things. And sometimes, it dreamed.

On summer nights, I’d sleepwalk down the stairs and wake up on the porch swing, watching fireflies blink across the lawn. One morning, I found my childhood diary open on the kitchen table, though I hadn’t touched it in months. My last entry had changed. It now read:

> “I am still here. I remember you.”



I asked my parents, but they said they hadn’t seen it. My father dismissed it as sleep deprivation. But my mother just looked out the window and whispered, “It’s only dreaming.”


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I left the house when I turned eighteen. I said goodbye to my parents on the porch, pretending not to notice how the floorboards sighed beneath my feet. College, then a job in the city. Noise. Glass. Light. Life unfolded in spreadsheets and subway tickets.

But something about me stayed unfinished.

I never quite felt like I belonged anywhere else. Every apartment was too square, too quiet. My dreams were always of the house. In them, I’d find myself walking its hallways—except they were different now. The walls had grown taller, the rooms rearranged. The house was changing in my absence, as if it was trying to imagine who I was becoming.

And then, one rainy Thursday, I got the call. My parents had passed. A car accident on the way back from a grocery store.

I went home.


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The house was still there, slouched a little lower, its paint flaking like tired skin. Inside, dust had settled on every surface, but the air still smelled like warm wood and old books.

I walked room by room, touching the walls like I was checking for a pulse. In the hallway, I found a fresh footprint in the dust—my shoe size, but I hadn’t been in that room yet.

In my old bedroom, everything was as I’d left it: the small desk by the window, my worn-out copy of A Wrinkle in Time, the blanket with stars. But above the bed, something new—a mural had been painted on the wall. It showed a forest lit by moonlight, and standing in the center was a house just like this one. Except its windows were glowing.

I stepped closer. In the mural, in the second-floor window, a shadow was drawn—vague but unmistakable. It was me. Not as I was, but as I had become. The adult I had grown into.

The house had kept dreaming me, even after I left.


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I stayed for weeks. The house didn't feel empty, not exactly. It felt like it had been waiting patiently. Every night, it dreamed again. Drawers opened by themselves to reveal old letters. Dust gathered in words on the table: Remember. One night, I heard humming upstairs and followed it to find my mother's old music box—long broken—playing by itself.

The house was remembering, and dreaming, and grieving.

And so was I.

I began repainting the rooms, not to erase the past, but to honor it. Each color felt guided by some invisible hand. Light blue in the bedroom. Deep green in the hallway. I even reopened the attic and found boxes of my childhood toys—each one exactly where I had left it.


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On my last night before returning to the city, I stood on the porch, like I had at eighteen. The wind stirred the trees. I turned to lock the front door, but paused.

Inside, the house felt different. Lighter. Almost as if it had exhaled.

I realized then: the house didn’t just dream me into being.

It became through me. Just as I became through it.

It had held my fears, my joys, my first heartbreak. It had grown and grieved and wondered alongside me. And though my parents were gone, and the years had taken their toll, the house still stood—not just because of bricks and nails.

But because it had loved me into being.


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And maybe… just maybe… I had dreamed it, too.