Deadened House
I went out to breakfast with a friend.
I came back home, and slept the entire day away with some strange dream.
This dream was half-lucid; I couldn’t change the environment, but I could move around and engage with it as I pleased, and I knew it was a dream. A was trodding through a golden field of wheat, never ending, somehow a rural and unknown part of Tennessee, somehow home, somehow a real place in a spiritual world.
I walked for what felt like forever. The fields of wheat were endless, tall, ready for harvest. Sprinkled about were rickety houses, flooded at some point, destroyed, old, abandoned. At first, I ignored these dark places, choosing to take on skipping happily, running my hands over the top of the grain. Eventually, I became exhausted, covered in sweat. I stood up to look at the houses, considering seeking shelter in their shade, but I was immediately relieved of sweat and heat. Dry, cool.
Instead of skipping and walking as I had been, I picked one of the abandoned houses just a few hundred feet in front of me and made my way towards it. Before entering, I felt a sting along my ankles. I was being cut by some smaller weeds, my legs slashed and bleeding. I looked up, the sun beating in my eyes, and walked inside.
The place was moldy, decaying, darkened with the energy of death and sin. Repulsion. Bugs crawled, and my feet sloshed through the wet feeling of dirt and shit of the floor.
Still, my desire led me further in.
The living room was empty, the most deadened of them all. Still, I knew beauty was here, inside, so I crept forward, somehow knowing exactly where to go. I hung a right to the nearest room, almost hugging the walls to get there.
I found a woman’s bedroom. Awe. It was somehow me, somehow my things, yet those of a stranger. I looked and thought to myself “I can take these, I can own them in the real world, I can just clean them up and take them with me!”
I opened a box, curious, and found jewelry. I opened the closet and found fur coats, fur blankets, and raw fur. Everything I touched would glitch, then disappear when I would look away from them. For example: I would turn around from the closet of luxurious furs, then would turn back to find in it’s place a series of shelves, discarded taxidermy-style animal heads, rotting. One of the heads on the bottom row was entirely crushed under the weight of the falling shelves above it.
Still, I searched. I found a drawer of beautiful night dresses, and they would disappear, and become plain mourning clothes. I would look at the stained glass panels laid loosely on top of a table, and the night clothes, now mourning clothes, would disappear entirely. Dust and rat remnants remained. Everything was in a state of disappearing, turning, disgusting.
I finally accepted that this was going nowhere, and this was all meant to show me something.
I tried to wake myself up, and I wouldn’t wake. I began to panic, quietly pleaded to God to just end the dream. Instead, I felt a calm come over me. I felt an internal push to really look at what was before me.
In my time remote viewing, I became known for being willing to harm my “spiritual body”, and my willingness to do disgusting things in order to acquire information. Because these senses would be limited, you had to use all of them, otherwise you dramatically decrease your accuracy. I was able to get more accurate “reads” than my peers because I was willing to, in a remote viewing session, spiritually lick the ground to determine whether it was asphalt or carpet. I was willing to run my hands over glass and cut this spiritual body.
Those experiences made me unfazed to the mounds of dust and disgust in this dream, regardless of how repulsive. I knew I was in a dream. Also, being half-lucid, if I really found the dream that disgusting, I would simply walk back outside to the fields of wheat. Instead, I walked into a rotting pit for the prospect of taking these excesses into the real world.
I began to see what I was really doing— trying to avoid death itself.
I closed my eyes. I accepted the impermanence of my childhood home, of the earth and its birds and landscapes. I accepted the impermanence of the skyline of Nashville, the inevitable death of my beloved dog, my dear friends. I accepted that this place, in this dream, was not real, or was otherwise inaccessable. I accepted death for myself, my ideas, my body. I accepted the impermanence and death for the mattress I was currently sleeping on. I accepted death, and I accepted that I could take nothing with me.
I woke up happy.
Ends up, I spent seven real-world hours wandering about the wheat fields and attempting to plunder this house of disappearing, transforming things.
MY ANALYSIS
The Abandoned House
The abandoned house served as an architectural representation of stored memory and identity. Its rot corresponded to psychological and moral residuals that had not yet been processed, to eventually be relinquished altogether. Its decay, water damage, and infestation reflected the persistence of trauma, attachment, and moral compromise. Entering the house was a conscious choice to confront the parts of myself that had been sustained through necessity, fear, and habit. The slashing of my ankles when approaching it signaled that entry into personal history and self-confrontation involves a cost. The living room presented as the most lifeless space, the core of this identity I was given was vacant; the emptiness and rot indicated that these things could not be reclaimed as they had been. Yet, I continued deeper, driven by the presumption that something valuable was retained within abuse; I wanted something to be salvageable, with the haunting idea that without some form of gain, the abuse would lack meaning or purpose; I feared “I went through all of that for nothing”.
The Woman’s Bedroom
The bedroom represented a constructed identity organized around a history of survival through beauty, display, performance, and lifeless ornamentation. The jewelry, furs, and nightwear symbolized strategies of self-construction through luxury, desirability, and curation. The repeated glitching and disappearance of objects when my attention shifted demonstrated their dependency on desire. The transformation of luxury items into rotting animal remnants and mourning garments revealed the intrinsic instability and decay inherent in identities based on possession, performance, and image. The exercise of touching, examining, and witnessing the decay allowed recognition of attachment patterns and their intrinsic limitations. The room showed identity, once used for psychological survival, does not last and cannot be integrated into who I am becoming.
The Moment of Panic
The panic arose when I attempted to exit the experience prematurely, reflecting back the ego’s reflex to escape when confronted with the dissolution of identity. Change is not so easy. The intervention of calm suggested the presence of a guiding awareness that enforced observation rather than avoidance. Acceptance of transience, mortality, and impermanence was cognitive and somatic, confirming engagement with the deeper principles of surrender. The moment demonstrated the functional mechanism by which insight is enforced: continued exposure until understanding is internalized. I recognized that the search for salvageable identity had been a refusal to accept impermanence. The realization occurred in stages: giving up attachment to childhood environments, relationships, physical self, constructed identity, and the idea of continuity itself.
Takeaway
The house and the bedroom did not instruct through symbol alone, but through the experiential failure of possession. The moment of calm marked the beginning of actual consent to mortality, contingency, and the non-transferability of identities and attachments. The dream concluded when I understood that nothing can be carried. This understanding ended the dream-state and allowed waking without distress.
You can take nothing of the old self into Heaven.
Only the heart that has surrendered everything can be filled with God.