I had a… homey(?) Dream. I dreamt I belonged to two world, one of normality and the other of wonder. In both worlds, I had family and friends. But the way to cross between them was rather odd. In the Old world, there was an old, run down house. The house had five rooms. On the first floor, there was a large rectangular side room with 2 windows on the back wall, facing an overgrown, unused asphalt parking lot, and on the front side, one window and a door facing an unused street. The side farthest right had one window, facing a gloomy look of all the structures and terrain beside the street. The walls of this addon room were white, inside and out. The ceiling was white with a few moldy spots where rain would leak through. The floor had a few holes in it, and, in certain areas, the floorboards looked broken through sheer force. The ground was wooden with a carpet where you couldn't see the threads or texture, almost like shoddily cured plastic.

On the left, where it joined the rest of the building, was a square, brick first layer that housed a garage and a staircase to the rest of the house. The staircase bottom landing had a door to the addon room and the garage, which I had never set foot inside. Somehow, though I don’t know car names, it had one similar to the one from back the the future. There were shelves close to the staircase and on the far side. There was another door leading out on the opposite side of the garage. This room is sinister and ominous in an unsettling way. I avoid it every time I have this dream.

Traveling up the staircase, space seemed to warp. Despite the staircase in the Old world, there was a window facing straight out to the street, even though there should’ve been the rest of a room. Going up the stairs, you turned right into a plastic floored kitchen, filled full with trinkets and boxes. The floor itself is brown and green, mocking the cool finish of tile floors. It peels up around the edges and there’s bumps and ripples in it, even a hole where I spilled some apple juice once. The cabinets span the bottom and the top of the wall closest to the road and they are dark stained. The granite countertops seem orange and tired from use. It has the same smell a large family living in an old home has, the kind of smell it’s occupants are used to. Though not used to it, I know the smell well, if only from a dream. It has a pillar marking the end of the room’s space, and it is completely open to the old carpet hallway.

There’s a woman with straight, long and dark brown hair who almost always spends her time at the cluttered antique wooden table, reading a newspaper or writing or… something. She is always kind and reminds me to say hi to Frankie, the grumpy, but oddly lonely, deaf cat. Frankie is white, and he’s in the New world. The woman is old, but not to the point of greying hair. Space is very warped here, as the brick room below was the same size as the kitchen above yet there’s still more rooms on this floor.

Beyond that is a living room with a black leather couch and an orange coffee table. The carpet there is less used, but is also piled high with boxes. The couch is not free to sit on, and the room feels stale and unused. Only Frankie comes here, though Doug the rottweiler sometimes curls up next to the door at the very end of the carpet hallway. Looking out the window across the coffee table, on the same wall as the cupboards, a mountain valley with a fast flowing river cascading down. Doug almost never stirs, he’s old and I always pat him on the head. He’ll always sigh heavily.

Right at the end of the kitchen and the beginning of the living room is a hallway towards where the old parking lot should’ve been. Instead, there was a lush mountain side through the window at the end of the hallway. There was a fan there, on but never plugged in.

The door to the left, going down the hallway, had a blue bed going diagonal from the corner of the room. The bed didn't have pillows, and the room was piled top to bottom with boxes. This is where Frankie’s official bed was, on the top of a stack of three boxes. There was six fans in here, only two of them plugged in. Only five running. One metallic short fan, one plastic white short fan, two tall plastic fans, one box shaped fan, and one bladeless fan. The bladeless fan was my addition. There was a closet, but the closet was empty aside from a singular, lone shirt. The shirt seemed very lonely, though I felt like it deserved it. The room had the same, empty unused feeling as the living room did, as if dust had built up in the air to the point where you could feel it through your fingers. The fans did nothing to disturb this dust.

The room that would be behind you if you were looking in on the guest bedroom was the owner of this house’s room. I went in once. If the other rooms were packed, this one was stuffed. There was no way she could ever spend a night in there. Upon opening the door, there was two towers of boxes that blocked almost all view, but the little you could see was jam packed with origami, silverware and glass cups. The bed was covered in dozens of little glass sculptures. This room had no dust in the air, and a lot of it on the room. The yellow sheets and white pillows, along with beautifully carved wooden frame. The origami would be such bright, wonderous colors. The silverware would sheen. The glass cups would look the finest available. The little glass sculptures would be dazzling. But none of that was true. The dust took some of the color from this room, but the stillness was caused by something else. Every time I opened this door, I could almost feel the despair, frustration and overwhelming sadness that rushed to escape from this room.

So I never opened the door again after the first time. Somehow, I knew she hadn’t opened it, either. The house felt so stale in these two rooms. She never visited these rooms, aside from the guest room where she had let me nap one time after a particularly rough day. She never visited the living room, either, but it was still better than these two rooms. I always wondered if she ever moved from her kitchen, with its apple juice and toast.

At the end of the first hallway was a door with rhombus shaped glass panes. The door opened, and there was Frankie, lounging aloofly atop a shelf for plants on the rock wall carved into the mountainside. It made no sense that I could see the mountain side from the previous window if the house was set so deep and the mountain so steep. I reached up and patted Frankie, before moving on to gently stir a grey dog sitting beneath the porch swing just below Frankie. The grey dog let out a long, slow growl which eventually turned into a pleased whine as I patted his head. Next to Doug, whoever this dog was the oldest pet the woman had. He lolloped out gently from beneath the swing and tried to look for me with his blind eyes. I reached slowly and gently stroked his head, giving him scratches behind the ear. He let out another pleased whine before slowly waddling to the house until he tapped it with his nose, then followed along the house wall to his spot under the porch swing where he collapsed and snored himself back to sleep.

There was a glass table and metal porch chairs on the wooden porch that overhung the steep mountain and cut into the mountainside. The glass table had two mugs on it, and I somehow knew that one of them belonged to someone she used to know and the other herself.

Though I may have described the first world as the Old world, I meant that it was just like the first layer of the house. It’s run down, forgotten. Forsaken. Everywhere in the old world was like that in the dream. The buildings were lightless, often with broken glass. All colors were faded. Everything seemed like it was dying, or already dead. Parking lots and buildings were covered in sprouts of grass, every now and then a new tree would peek up through the most overrun places. The glass of the buildings was broken, and the darkness in each had the same sinister feeling as the garage, as if… there was something watching me. I had family here. Where? I couldn't tell you. The woman lived in this world, and I knew she did. She could not see Frankie. She could not see Doug. That poor blind dog she couldn't see either. She could not see the mountain out the window. When I talked to her about it, she said the closer I got to that door, the blurrier and more transparent I became. She said it made her sad, but she knew for sure she wasn’t going insane. I remember only meeting her once before, but she always talks as if we’ve known each other forever. And the strangest thing is, through two dreams, I seem to have known her for an equally long time.

The second world, the New world, is a more subtle kind of ominous. Except it isn’t. I know it doesn’t make sense, but that world just feels too good to be true. I don’t feel any of the emotions that were locked up in that woman's room here. It scares me, but I almost feel like I could do something horrible and not know it was wrong until I stepped back into the woman's house. That’s why, in my dreams, I try to stay in the house. I go out to say hi to Frankie, I pet the blind dog, and I say hi to Doug. I then wake up.