“Dreams feel real while we're in them. It's only when we wake we realize things were strange.” — Cobb, Inception
I was sitting in my living room and suddenly realized I didn’t belong there. At least, not at first.
I’ve never lived in a home I’ve built, only homes that have been built by others before me.
In this brief moment, I began to wonder how I got here comfortably lounging in these rooms without a single thought to the souls that have embodied this space. I was perfectly at ease sitting in a room that had echoed with voices I had never heard before.
The journey into this dream state has always been the same.
It begins the same way.
The real estate agent has always taken a key out of a small lockbox, and turned the knob of a stranger's door to let my wife and I enter this space. I always remember those initial smells — that warm sweetness of a candle, the watery must of a bathroom, or that can’t-quite-place-it scent that’s not bad, but it’s not yours.
There’s an eerie loneliness in unfamiliar spaces. It’s disconcerting walking around. Those first few nights feel strange. Nothing is quite right. But you give it a few days, weeks, or months and suddenly it’s as if you’ve always belong there.
The creaks, groans, and chirps of the space are no longer alarms ringing in the night but a soothing orchestra to your soul.
What changed?
The same space just months before you entered as a stranger, uncertain of your surroundings and not belonging to that place suddenly changes into home. Your heart is no longer distant and suspicious but warm and knit to this space.
Is it the time that brings us here? Just presence in a place over time?
There’s a simple boring science answer.
It turns out that we just become less sensitive over time to a stimulus. It is time that heals all wounds, but perhaps it’s not actually healed — it’s just that it all becomes the new normal.
As I sat in my space, apparently dulled to the dream state I had placed myself in, I realized it’s not just our homes we get used to. These odd places often can represent ideas, thoughts, or feelings we at first identify as irregular or even wrong - but over time we become less sensitive to the noise and ignore the problems.
This should cause us to pause on a regular basis and begin to wonder — where in our lives have we moved into a new home and no longer recognize the stimulus that might be warning us of danger? Or to put it more clearly — where are we in dream-states that we think are reality and need to wake up to the truth?
What insanity are we holding on to right now that feels real — that feels true to you and I? How do we begin to realize we just became comfortable, it’s not real…it’s just been a dream all along.
Thank you Tim. Despite how much I complain about a lot of business travel, this is one of its advantages, that it refreshes my view of home and gives me fresh eyes to see what’s right or out of whack in my most familiar space. Internally, conversation and dialogue with others, like reading your blog, gives me much the same kind of renewed perspective. Communication is the warning track of the dangerously comfortable.