From EPOCH
Dream House by Elisa Gabbert “When I was a little girl, I used to hide things in my room, a few coins or a piece of candy or a strip of Skee-Ball tickets, in the hopes I would forget I had done so and find them later, like buried treasure. I had my doubts, even then, that I’d manage to wait long enough to forget. But doubt, I now know, is faith; wished belief is belief. I had a nun-like streak: my mother often mentions that she’d find me sitting quietly alone in my room, doing nothing, and I’d tell her I was punishing myself. She finds this very funny, but I always think, My god, what had I done? I believed in the present as a time for forbearance and suffering. Pleasure, if it was to be deserved, and thus enjoyed, must be put off into a future, even if that future was only the end of dinner. My mother sometimes served as a side dish, probably for pork or what have you, a Stouffer’s-brand item, sold with the frozen vegetables, called “scalloped apples,” which was basically pie filling, and when she did I always studiously saved this full portion for last, a special and precious dessert. To sacrifice immediate joy for my future self felt like a form of selflessness. Later, in middle school, when I was old enough to notice how Daylight Saving Time worked, and that one change was better than the other, because it was better to gain time than to lose it, I grew to prefer the worse one (“spring forward”) because the better one, the one that gifted an extra hour, if only for one day, was still to come. In this sense the worse one was the better one. Looking forward to something was better than it happening, which was almost the same as it already being over.
“I know it’s common to dream that you’ve found an extra room in your house. I have a version of this dream, in which I’ve found a secret stash of rare vintage perfumes I’d forgotten I had. I am thrilled with these sumptuous, valuable discoveries, though I can’t smell or taste in my dreams. Dream sites will tell you the dream means you’re learning something new about yourself, entering parts of the inner landscape heretofore “unexplored.” I think it’s baser than this, just regular wish fulfillment—the mind wants stuff, it wants pleasure now, it wants a bigger house. My brain is very good at this, at giving me what I wish for while I sleep, creating forms of magic largely missing from my waking life. I sometimes dream up grand new structures to live in, architectural wonders with sunken floors and vaulted ceilings, curvilinear walls. I still remember one of these houses clearly, many years gone after the dream. I remember a deep, cube-shaped pool with lapis-colored tile on every surface, so at night it felt like swimming in the sea. I used to want to be an architect, but I don’t draw houses during the day. I don’t think I care for swimming, but often I dream I can breathe underwater. Why don’t I do what I want?”
