I have a recurring dream about a house. Not the house I grew up in - a different house, one I don't think I've been to in waking life. Three stories, a back garden that opens onto something I can never identify, rooms in configurations that don't obey physics. I have been having this dream for at least fifteen years.

In the dream I always know the house. There is a fluency I have there that I don't have anywhere in waking life - I move through it like I built it. I know which doors stick. I know where the light comes from. I know the smell. When I wake up the smell is still there for a few seconds, which is the cruelest part, because it is not a smell I can locate or describe, only recognize.

I've stopped trying to interpret it in the usual ways. The house is not my childhood. It is not my unconscious. It is not a symbol. It is more literal than that: it is a place I go, repeatedly, that does not exist, and my relationship to it is the relationship of a person to their home. The grief is not about what the house represents. The grief is about the house specifically.

I looked this up once. There's a word in Welsh, hiraeth - a longing for something you've lost, or for something you never had. The house is hiraeth made architectural. A homesickness for a home that cannot be returned to because it cannot be reached.

Do you have a place you return to in dreams? Does it feel like memory, or like something else - an elsewhere that has always existed, waiting?