Dream House

     I had an unusual dream last night. Well, I should say the dream itself wasn't terribly strange by most standards (it involved a friend of our trying to spend the night in a tent in our backyard while it was raining, and then people were mysteriously disappearing...). But what really struck me as odd is that it was the first dream I've had that I can remember taking place in my current house.
     I'm sure I'm not the only one who is like this, but the vast majority of my dreams take place (if they are in a recognizable setting) in the house I grew up in, back in Ohio (or the high school that was right across the street). I suppose it only makes sense; I spent the most time there of any house I've lived in, and those were my formative years. I've only owned my home for the last three years, so I guess I'm happy to have it finally sink in deep enough to show up in my dreams.
     I would also note that, for two years after college, I was living back with my parents in the new house they had built (on the same property my old house was on). But that house has never made an appearance in my subconscious wanderings. There was nothing wrong with that house, of course, but in many ways it never really fit as being "home."
     Which seems like sentimental tripe, I know. But there is something indefinable about a house that makes it feel like home, and I'm artiste enough to admit to such a metaphysical concept. What I always go back to is something that happened to my wife and I when we were buying our home.
     Now, as usual, we looked at a lot of different places. We even got outbid for a few of them that we liked, and there were dozens that we didn't even want to go visit, just by looking at the pictures. We had something of a list made of things we wanted in a house, but by and large we were just gauging what was available in our price range, and I figured we'd just end up settling for something that wasn't too bad to either of us.
     Yes, we ended up falling in love with our house. And this was after visiting another house with the exact same downstairs floorplan, but a completely different and stupid layout for the upstairs (I don't remember the exact details, but they somehow managed to fit three poorly-shaped bedrooms into a space where we currently have four). My wife, after leaving this first house, commented "I love the downstairs, but I wish we could do something about the upstairs." The very next house we went to had the exact same downstairs floorplan, but with the superior upstairs I mentioned before.
     But this is not the tale I always think of to prove my point. Before we came across either of the aforementioned houses, we ran into one that looked on paper like it would be fantastic.  It was larger than the house we settled for, it cost less, and it was much newer (and thus in far better repair).
     However, as we were taking the tour, something about the place just seemed off. I'm not going to pretend to know what it was. Now, part of it was that the yard had not a single bush or tree in it. Sure, it was your stereotypical white-picket-fence surburban lot, so there wasn't much yard anyway. But it was devoid of anything but grass. I found that more than a bit off-putting. It also might have been that it was all so new and shiny that I couldn't help but wonder why it was so cheap. To this day, I can't say what it was that turned me off the place, but it was nothing logical. On the drive away from that house, my wife and I had one of those conversations where we were both hedging around an idea we didn't know the other had also had. We were both trying to convince the other (and ourselves) that this was a great deal, and that we should go for it. Finally, we admitted that the place creeped us out in some vague, nagging way, and we skipped it. My wife has later postulated that she thought "something bad" had happened there.
     Now, I'm not going to go into a conversation here about psychics or hunches or any kind of paranormal phenomena, no matter how much that story points in that direction. Mostly because I'm still on the fence about how I feel about the existence of psychic phenomena. And if it does exist, I am probably the least psychically-sensitive person on the planet. Yet I still walked away from a house that all rational thought would have had me buy. Ostensibly, because it didn't feel like "home" to me.
     I'm glad my house does fit so comfortably into my mental niche of what a home should be. Not just because of all the damn work we've done (and are still doing) into making the place nice, but also because I'll soon be raising my son here. My hope is that this place will be featuring into his dreams until he's thirty and has he own place, too.