There are places and institutions that exist persistently in my dreams, in significantly different form from how I actually experienced them. One of them is our house in Idaho. In my dreams, but only in my dreams, we remodeled the house, switching the master bedroom from one end of the house to the other and then extending the house out the back.

I am thinking of this because I dreamed of that house last night. In my dream, I was in the area, so Emily messaged me that she had realized he had left a quilt at the Idaho house, so I should go ask to get it back from the new owners. I met one of the new owners (the husband of the couple), and he was willing to give me back the quilt–for a price. I negotiated hard and got him down from $50 to $9.

But because he insisted I pay him for what was mine, I decided not to tell him the secrets about the house that I had planned to share… like the secret rooms over the master bedroom, which they still had not discovered.

I’ve dreamed of the Idaho house before. The dreams are different, but in the dreams, we always expanded that house, which in real life, we never did.

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