I Dream Again of Houses: A Diary on Dreams, and Leaving New York City

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In the ten years I lived in New York, I had two recurring dreams:

Dream No. 1 / Nightmare

The premise left vague… as though I were seeing it through a clouded glass. But I have been living in New York... only, I am in a small town, the town I grew up in? I recognize these houses. This dream recalls them with such detail, I remember suffocating.

 How am I living back home again? 

Getting back to New York is all that matters. This I know, but what I do not know is how I might find a means of getting there. I have no money and no way of making any. Nor can I regain my composure. I barely am able to hold a thought, let alone come up with a plan. 

Dream No. 2 / Don’t wake me

I am walking through a house I’ve never seen before, yet it’s rendered to such miniscule details I should have known it my whole life. 

The houses are never the same: I am surprised by each layout: hexagonal sunken rooms open to more hexagonal, sunken rooms, A tall house, which isn’t actually tall, the living area swallowing the whole of the split top floor and a staircase leading to a corridor of successive underground rooms.  

___STEADY_PAYWALL___

 This dream was soothing to me, the houses were not in New York City, but in some unknown rural area, conveyed by forests, or an ocean, some unspecified place where my dream-self has reasoned I could just about  afford a house. 

The two recurring dreams divided–almost perfectly–the ten years that I lived in New York. 

The first, the nightmare, was the dream I had throughout my first five years in the city, a time in which I was briefly married, and lived in a different apartment each year.

No. 1 / Diary

I recall being hungover, I recall all the reliable symptoms of both exhaustion and wakefulness that aggravate a hangover, which make it easy to turn on all your life’s decisions: 

You are out of control! You have to quit staying up too late, quit drinking. What are you doing. It’s too late anyway, your life is ruined!

 I throw the covers back over my head only to violently throw them off again and stumble into the bathroom. Here, an all out war is being waged: a yellowed menstrual cup and a bar of soap embedded with beard trimmings threaten their permanent residence, an oozing tube of toothpaste marks territory on the brown-beige flecked laminate counter, collaborating with various capless oily tubes as if to send a message: this trash, this detritus, were the real inhabitants of the apartment. You may as well be looking in a mirror.

 As I pee, staring at a piece of dental floss plastered to the tiles, I investigate this realization: it isn’t just the uncleanly state, it’s something insidious, something inherent to the apartment itself… something emanating from the tiles that look dirty even after they’ve been cleaned, that evil area of pipes behind the toilet, cursing you with its unfathomable articulation of filth–a sort of muck, human hair?

That second dream, the dream of houses, was an almost tranquilizer for the next five years, in the second half of my time in the city, marked by big drastic upgrades in living, I relied on having that dream to sleep.

No. 2 / Diary

Waking up hungover in a luxury apartment brings about a different, less pressing dread. The same dull doom is there, the bathroom presents the same messiness you’ve never quite been able to cure yourself of: underwear–dirty side up–on the floor, a million products splayed along a two sink marble counter. 

There was even that same refrain: it’s too late, my life is over–yet the quiet of the apartment was tranquilizing, It’s too late, my life is over–Calmly, you believed these thoughts. It was fine, more and more every day. You stumble back to bed, reassured by the view of the East River and the boats that glimmer in the passing sunlight. 

In New York social settings you may ask how much someone pays for an apartment but never ask how they pay for it. That is a question saved only for the harmless sort of gossip meant to bond guests who’ve arrived too early to a party, someone says of a ‘mutual’ you share online: “How does she pay her rent?” It’s like commenting on the weather. There were only two answers: parents or sex work–and everyone already knew which.

6-hour dinner dates, 16-hour party dates, 48-hour dates that find you stuck in a hotel for 48 hours, a whole day of the dreaded 2-hour dates, a 4-hour dinner, a late-night 3-hour to cap off the day, tours in SF, DC, LA, Chicago, a new city rotated each month so as to always have a waitlist on appointments back in NYC. “Fly me to you” appointments with a 48-hour minimum, “vacation” dates in the tropics with that industry standard formula: Use your 24-hour rate the first day then come down by a thousand the second day and another thousand the third day before hitting a flat rate for each day the rest of the trip. Bring xanax.

This sort of hooking was more than a full-time job and my boyfriend accompanied me everywhere, “Bambina come run this errand so we can do my emails in the car?”

I realized Bambina is the feminine but his eyes were feminine and inspired a nickname fit for a long hair apple-head chihuahua toted around in a Gucci bag like a prize. This is Bambina, my emotional-support boyfriend.

Acting as an assistant, he managed my tours, screened my clients, dealt with their text meltdowns and novel-length emails which he returned in flowery prose. He made my schedule and became an expert at applying strip lashes and wielding a spray tan machine. He could pack a work purse or find your missing Gianvito Rossi nude stilettos in under 2-minutes.

We’d been together a year, hustling from the beginning, when I realized my bill with the IRS was racking up. On the bright side, I could finally afford the rent on an apartment that we didn’t hate. “You deserve a space to feel really comfortable in, when you get off work,” he said. We had gotten used to comfort, and perhaps went a bit overboard.

I furnished endlessly: a long sectional sofa, several end tables of marble and glass, a fluffy mauve carpet with sunken cushioned seating, a low wooden japanese tea table, Hollywood regency floor lamps, a stripper pole, mongolian fur pillows and poufs, rose gold barstools, custom neon wall lights, vintage mirrors, a bed and dresser set in the second bedroom for guests, sprawling bookshelves, all manner of porcelain and brass tschotskes. 

I installed endless flutes and goblets, ordered weekly cases of wine, kept various powders in mysterious trinket boxes, displayed prominently for guests to indulge in whenever they so desired. 

The nightmares about being stuck in the small town I grew up in had stopped long ago, it seemed. Now my nightmares were about work.

At night, I’d fight off sleep–one more drink, one more song, one more movie. When finally we passed out I’d wake a few hours later, my body jolted upright in panic. As I came to in my surroundings–the spaciousness of the dark room, windows gleaming with the lights of the Williamsburg bridge, mirrored in the water–I began to sense something eerie and undeniable.

A voice inside me said: This isn’t really yours. You don’t really belong here.

I rolled to the other side and tried to give Bambina a little shake but he went on snoring. I had wanted him to soothe me with the logistics of how I paid rent like everyone else, or really I wanted to borrow his confidence, something that lent his nature an aristocratic air, a refinement almost cartoonishly sharpened by his european accent. Why shouldn’t we want and enjoy beautiful things? 

Still, the internal voice haunted me: This isn’t really yours. You aren’t one of the people who really live in this building, and sooner or later it’s going to come back to bite you.

To shut it out, I set about making the apartment ours. The more overworked I felt, the more money I spent. 

“Never apart,” he and I would say, to soothe any anxiety when we woke up, from the benders the apartment supported. Hosting party after party felt easy, glorious but passive.

“Never apart” was our slogan, our mantra.

It was in this era, those last couple years in the apartment, that I began to dream we had saved the money, we hadn’t spent it all and I’d found a home for us to slow down in, my mind inventing house after house.

I tried to hold onto the details as I woke, as the cash in the safe dwindled and my sense of self slipped. My sanity hung dangerously on not wanting to be alone, not in my own mind. Never apart. 

When he left and I was, for the first time, alone in the place we had shared for years, I felt like a stranger to the apartment, embarrassed by its ostentatiousness and calm hum of appliances. Without him the space

wasn’t mine, the money wasn’t interesting. What was I doing? Living in this huge luxurious apartment that I had to work so much to afford?

In order to stave off anxiety attacks, I let my mind drift into a fantasy I was only dimly conscious of: I’d do the dishes or clean the countertop and pretend I was house sitting in someone else’s beautiful apartment.

I would make sure to do a good job. I was grateful someone would let me stay at their nice place at a time when I was really not doing so well.

No. 3 / 

Lately, I don’t remember my dreams, they are neither soothing or nightmarish, and feature half-listened to dialogue, people in the midst of their own miniature dramas, people my dream self has invented to, I suppose, occupy me. There are offers of advice and occasional accusations of side-taking, a little tedious, like being stuck in an eternal dinner-party.  Like parties, the dreams are easy to forget. 

There was one vivid dream. When I first arrived in Mississippi, I dreamt I was no longer in this world but in a halfway dimension between lives. I had to choose: which universe would I devote an entire life to next.

I was shown a video brochure for living on Earth, I carried with me no memory of having lived on Earth, or anywhere for that matter, still the commercial put little emphasis on the discomforts of human life, redirecting the viewer to wales jumping from the depths of the ocean in a graceful spray, the many varieties of love and falling in love, Earth had live birth, whatever that meant, it had intoxication, diamonds, lesbianism, swaying flowers, dry-humping, thunderstorms. Watching the presentation, some part of me acknowledged it was total propaganda for humankind… yet I had to admit it was persuasive.

Words: Rachel Rabbit White | Photography: Jen Senn | HMUA: Angel Gabriel