“Who looks outside dreams; who looks inside awakes.”

—Carl Jung

The house in my dream loomed large, split down the middle: half was haunted, and the other half held everything I needed to face the haunted half. In the hallowed half, there was a greenhouse for growing herbs and plants to protect me. When I invited my loved ones into this house I inherited, they could see the haunted half was in disrepair but couldn’t see the demons that dwelled there. Sitting in a circle of stones in the garden, I was asked my name. Then I woke up.

Weeks after waking on the eclipse, I learned Carl Jung believed houses symbolize the psyche in dreams. I wasn’t surprised by this; I have always felt half haunted. I started telling everyone what I saw, and in doing so, new insights dawned. My mother and I discussed the fact that the house was handed down. As we talked about the wounds we inherit and heal through living, I began to wonder how my life might have looked without them. Would I still be me?

The haunted half is where I found my name many moons ago, where I glimpsed my form in hidden mirrors before it was made flesh. Plants and growing things helped me do this, slip in and out of those rooms unscathed. Courage cultivated in a greenhouse, in soil I barely knew how to tend. Would the hallowed half even mean anything if the other half weren’t haunted? Maybe duality is how we make meaning: moon and sun meeting in the skies of our understanding. 

My friend Negar illuminated a detail of my dream I had overlooked: I had invited my loved ones into the house. I had shown them the haunted half. What is friendship if not that? A willingness to be witnessed, peeling walls and all? We may never truly see one another’s demons, but we can see the scars they leave. We hold candles to their clawmarks and absolve one another of the loneliness of carrying them. Perhaps love is how we paint over them.

What is the architecture of a self that has not known suffering? Does such a house exist? I no longer fear the shadows in this place—I might even be grateful for them—but I am not yet at ease in their presence. As summer descended into autumn, I began to think about what it would take to live in the haunted half: not as a space I must venture into from time to time, warded and wary, but to feel truly at home there. Could I learn to love every room of my life?

I thought that was the end of what I might glean from this dream. Then, in a meditation weeks later, another realization dawned on me: Even in trying to make a home of this house I inherited, even in trying to love every room, I was still choosing to live in it. But in the end, I had walked out into the garden, traded this binary of the haunted and hallowed for a circle of stones: the whole realm of nature, where life and loss grow tangled together, roots forever intertwined.

Finally, my friend Maria pointed out that being asked my name woke me up. How fitting, she said, given all your name represents: that you chose how to inhabit the house that is your self. It was then the last piece clicked into place. Nature is where we leave behind the stories we have outgrown, all our ideas of separateness. We may forget and lose our way again, finding ourselves back in the house, but we can always leave. The world is waiting, and we hold the key.