A House of Dreams

Today it is time for a serious matter to be handled. It is written to you from a serious place; La Biblioteca Profética.




If you know me you might have heard this story before. For those of you who haven´t this is a story about a house. But it is not just any house. It is a house filled with dreams and hopes, like most other houses I guess, but at least to me, this one has a very special meaning. I have been walking around with this story in my head for a long time. Now it is time to write it all down.



I came to think of the house once again when sitting by the kitchen table in my new home in Puebla, Mexico. It is a similar kind of house even if they were built on different sides of the Atlantic and during different centuries too. The house in Puebla is much bigger and better preserved than the house I am about to tell you about. But they have the same masonry walls covered with cracks and flaking paint. They might appear rough and old to some but I think these cracks give the house a personality. They tell a story of a house that keeps a secret within its walls. A house where people have come and gone as the colours of the walls have changed. The secrets of my new house I might never know, but I am sure they are hidden somewhere in those cracked walls.






The house of dreams that carries the secrets of my family, stands on an island in Greece called Salamina. It is a small white house looking almost like a little sugar cube. It has two windows facing the road. They look like two big and brown eyes turned towards the street as if they were waiting for someone. This house carries many stories and memories, but most of all, it is a house of dreams that were no yet fulfilled. Or atleast that is how I often think of it.

One of my earliest memories of this house is from a summer when I was about five or six years old. We had just arrived to the island with our blue Volvo and I was sitting in the back seat with my brother, both very eager to arrive to our destination. When we drove up on the dusty road I had the little sugar cube on my left side. I remember asking my parents if the big house to the right of the street was ours. You see, from the summer before I had completely forgotten what the house looked like. They laughed and pointed towards the small house to the left instead.


I knew this house was special. But exactly why I didn´t quite understand at that time looking at the old house and the wild garden. There are some moments in life that you can never erase. This is one of them. The dream was not exactly what I had imagined it to be, yet many years later, this house came to be my own house of dreams. And that feeling has come to follow me all my life. That the dream itself is often a disappointment in the moment when you are standing right infront of it. Its greatness takes years to understand.




My parents bought this house when they were newly married. Or rather, they never bought the house itself but the land it was on. The house was a bonus. It did not have water nor electricity but still we used to stay there for a month almost every summer when I was a child. We had to carry water in buckets to use for cooking and brushing our teeth at night. I remember one summer it was so hot we even took our beds out and slept right under the stars. Can you really do that I remember thinking. But my mum said it was cooler outside and so there we were with our beds under the sky.

I remember playing with my toys, a big brown teddy bear and a red dog, while my parents were sitting around the table with their friends and my brother was reading comic books. I remember the cups and the porcelain as they were museum objects carrying their own stories and memories. Right between the two brown windows there was a purple bouganvilla growing on the wall. I got it from my grandmother when I was baptized. And it is still there actually, like a little piece of me still attached to the house even after 31 years.


I was back in Greece last summer 2008 and during the fall of 2003. During those five years, and during the 20 years that have passed since the last summer we spent there, many things have happened in my life. But the house looks all the same. The garden might be a little wilder, the trees are bigger, the walls look weaker, but still it is as if time stood still in there. New and modern houses have been built around the house. And the house of dreams stands there in the middle, surrounded by modernity like a reminder of another time.


When you step inside the house it first looks as if someone just walked out. The washing liquid is there, the cups that were just washed, are standing on the sink left to dry. A pile of magazines on a little table, as if someone just placed them there after finishing reading. The pillows on the beds. The white curtains with roses on that sway as you open the door. And there is the teddy bear and the red dog. After a while you notice a thin layer of dust covering everything and you notice time for the first time. I guess you could call this archaeology too. A modern Pompeji.








To me this house is a symbol of all the dreams of my family. The dream of another parallel life that could have existed. But things don´t always turn out the way you plan. And some dreams are never fulfilled. But sometimes the dream is a truth in itself and has its own purpose, being fulfilled or not. While dreaming of the future, we might have had our share of dream as it was, while living there, without water or electricity, brushing our teeth with water from a bucket under the stars at night. It might not be a sad story about dreams that were never fulfilled but about beautiful memories that once existed there. You can call them dreams or memories, but maybe they are the same thing. As the future and the past. And maybe time did in fact stand still in the house of dreams.