Unfinished Reality: Dreams, Longing, and Homelessness

Dreams tell us that the world is unstable, the self is homeless, and reality is unfinished — and that imagination keeps trying, stubbornly and imperfectly, to make something livable out of that fact.

In House of Day, House of Night, this instability often takes the form of interiors and houses that refuse to anchor us. “Marta’s house is like her,” Tokarczuk writes — it knows nothing of God, the world, or even itself. It contains only one moment, a vast present that stretches in all directions, overwhelming and not made for humankind. This is not a refuge but a condition: existence without guarantees, without narrative comfort.

Dreams move effortlessly through such spaces because reality itself is already porous. Light hides where it should not — “in the souls of people and animals, in hibernation” — while the moon ferries souls elsewhere like a transport ship. Seasons distort perception; September turns psychedelic under mist and shadow. The world feels alive, but strangely indifferent to our need for coherence, as though it might crumble if handled too directly.

Longing sharpens this fragility. “How does the world look when your life is filled with longing? It looks artificial, it crumbles and falls apart in your hands.” Longing here isn’t desire for something attainable; it is a structural demand: that you be somewhere else, possess what you do not have, touch someone who does not exist. Everything else becomes provisional. Only longing feels real, sinking into the body until existence itself becomes painful — not aching, but founded on pain.

Bruno Schulz names this condition directly. “Reality is as thin as paper,” he writes, and dreams are what reveal the cracks. Even sleep offers no shelter. “Even in the depths of sleep… he could not rid himself of the feeling of loneliness and homelessness.” Dreams do not console; they expose. In them, hands belong to someone else, familiar places are empty, and the terror lies not in being lost, but in realizing that “the way itself didn’t exist.”

And yet Schulz refuses to treat dreams as disposable illusions. “No dreams, however absurd or senseless, are wasted in the universe.” Dreams, for him, are unfinished realities pressing outward, making claims on the waking world like unpaid debts. This is why his imagination clings to matter — sawdust, papier-mâché, distemper paint — materials that resist polish and betray effort. “We like to see behind each gesture… its inertia, its heavy effort.” Life, in Schulz, is never pure form. It is always matter struggling toward shape.

Tokarczuk’s dreams are quieter, more patient, but no less unsettling. Her dreamers wander through twilight landscapes, comforted only by traces — footprints, a lost lighter, a hat. Proof not of direction, but of having once been there. Identity survives as residue, as evidence — a kind of mosaic of memory. People change, outgrow themselves, are altered by small wars and large ones alike. Even the idea of a stable center dissolves.

Place, then, becomes both essential and fragile. “Each of us has two homes,” Tokarczuk suggests: one fixed in time and space, and another infinite, unrecordable. We live in both at once. People, like words, need attachment to become real. “If you find your place you’ll be immortal.” But such permanence is rare. Darkness conceals light; only in total darkness does the earth’s faint glow appear.

Taken together, Schulz and Tokarczuk suggest something quietly devastating and strangely tender: we are already dreaming. Existence itself is provisional, a borrowed state. Dreams do not remove us from reality; they reveal the truth about it. That nothing is fully secure. That meaning is partial. That light exists, but is often hidden. And that imagination keeps working anyway, leaving traces, pressing against matter, trying — imperfectly — to make something livable out of being here.