Friday, May 8, 2009

Back home -albeit in my dreams












































This time my dream was longer and for the first time in 40 years I was able to go inside my house in Havana!

Many, many times I have dreamt that I am back in Havana, and suddenly I am near the house where I grew up in Miramar, near the Comodoro Hotel and Jesus de Miramar's Church --but for some reason I was never able to get close to it. Sometimes I was just a block away, but suddenly the vision fizzled out and some difficulty always came up in the strange world of dreams, and I was not able to get any closer to my house.

But this time the dream was so vivid and free, and slow...And there I was, walking very happily from 5a. Avenida and 84 St. and enjoying every step and every twist and turn, towards my house. I even walked by the place where Leon went to Kindergarten --and vividly saw the little children's straight backed chairs in the patio --although the place was very run down, and there was grafitti on its walls.

I then continued and after a quick cut -because dreams are 'edited' with weird cuts and fade outs- I was in front, and soon -inside the house! I was looking at the tiled floors, the big glass doors, the light pouring in golden and crisp, the interior curved 'canteros', or wall planters, mami had designed to keep her beloved plants around the walls of the dining room filled with her beloved 'malangas'. And I walked through the halls, saw the kithcen...and the huge green and black tiled main bathroom....and then the dream evaporated!

But it was wonderful...absolutely liberating and beautiful!...And not only I was inside the house, but the same feeling I used to experiment when I lived there was suddenly alive in my spirit. The same feeling of 'childhood peace' and lack of torments...the same 'everything-is-in-order' sensation children usually feel, even if their homes are not so 'peaceful' all the time, like mine was...But I felt exactly like I did whenever I entered that house after a schoolday --or coming from the beach club on the weekends...The feeling that I was home.

And that same sensation must be what happens when we die and start a new life! It's a way of 'feeling' without the need for words or actions. It's feeling deeply and instantaneously. It's a purely spiritual and material feeling at the same time. It's knowing it all without explanations.

And that is why that visit to my childhood home -after 40 some years of futile trying and trying to reach it- felt just amazing!