I had a dream last night about a house my husband and I bought that was still furnished with the previous owners’ things—I was sitting in an armchair in the living room and across from me was a little table with a fat white cat statue and a shallow bowl of water—suddenly the statue flew up, turning end over end, and hit me on the arm, bouncing to the floor! Just then the water in the dish started splashing like someone was slapping the water! Weird, I thought.
I started walking around the house looking at each one of the rooms and realizing that the previous owners had customized each and every room in some way—there was a child’s room that had two whole walls covered in pleather pleated pockets to hold books and toys—in the hallway, there was a closet that when opened revealed a whole hidden interior laundry system—with hanging sorting “baskets” that looked like mesh hammocks and two big laundry shoots that I assumed went into the basement where the laundry facilities were, but I couldn’t exactly figure out the system.
At some point, during this tour that I was taking, I spotted an older Asian woman out a window, down the street, looking directly at me. I knew at once that she was a ghost and was THE ghost who had made the statue fly across the room! A friend of mine was there and saw her too and so she grabbed a metallic ink pen and started writing on the doors and windows, “No Entro,” meaning “Do Not Enter,” in Spanish*, because she thought the lady was Latin—the woman could’nt come through the door we had written on, so she went to the window, and I couldn’t get there and write fast enough! She was in the house and I could see her as clear as day! I yelled, “get out!” but she just stood there.
Once I calmed down the woman spoke to me and I realized she was nothing to be feared. I asked her if she could explain to me how to use the laundry system with the hammocks and she replied with a half-smile, “they put hammocks in there?” It was understood in my dream that this lady was here to stay and so I was accepting that I was just gonna be living with an old Asian Grandma ghost in my house and I was cool with it.
* ‘Do Not Enter’ in Spanish is actually, ‘No Entrar.’ It’s always weird when I try to speak or write different languages in my dream. I mean no disrespect with my poor Spanglish dreaming.