I dream about houses. I always have. Sometimes I dream about the houses I’ve lived in, but sometimes they’re totally different. Sometimes there are new rooms, with doors I’ve never seen before.

A few weeks ago, I said goodbye to my parents’ house for the last time. They had lived there for over forty years; I’d grown up there, in a beautiful terraced late Victorian house in north London. Huge, though perhaps more warren-like than spacious; the kind of place that these days would have architects planning how many walls they could safely remove to ‘open it up’.

The decision to move was something they’d been speaking about for years, always the next thing on the to-do list, but it was never quite the right time. When it finally happened, it felt a little late. The energy that had motivated the idea was by now dissipated, and the task of downsizing nearly half a century of life felt oddly mismatched with the phase my parents, now eighty, were entering. But the move happened, abrupt and messy, and borne with an unsentimental attitude I’ve known my whole life but still struggle to decode. Stoicism? Repression? Bravery? Perhaps they’re not as different as I once thought.

By then it was nearly empty, stripped of almost everything except a few pieces of furniture the new owners had asked us to leave behind. One was a round wooden table. As I ran my hand over it, I saw the spot where I’d carved my name into the wood when I was seven. I wondered if they would notice it, or have it sanded down.

It isn’t as though I much liked being in that house. For the last twenty years, every visit triggered a strange pain, usually sparked by some intangible combination of details: a particular smell, the texture of a doorframe, the quality of silence in the hallway.

It was a sharp, confusing ache, like an affectionate touch that had slowly tightened its grip into punishment. I’ve since learned that nostalgia once meant homesickness, an ache of separation from home, a long way from the ‘fond recollection’ we associate with the word today. This is after all a word that sits alongside myalgia and neuralgia, except here the -algia belongs to nóstos, to homecoming. Before the 20th century, this was considered a legitimate medical entity, one that was potentially fatal. That earlier definition feels truer to me. Not a metaphorical ache. I’ve often felt that one of the worst tricks we ever pulled on ourselves was convincing ourselves that most of our emotional language was metaphorical rather than literal. This was straight-up bodily, physiological, as if memory itself were housed in the tissue, at the same time that the memory of my child-body was somehow still stuck between the walls that once enclosed it.

Now, standing in the freshly emptied rooms, the pain was different again. Strangely, it felt lighter, as though the pain wasn’t just about the house. I realised then that the items we choose to fill our houses with become an intermediate layer between place and person. Without them, I felt I was saying goodbye to a benign, old intelligence, the majesty of which had been obscured by all the stuff within it. I surprised myself, heathen scientist that I am, by kissing each of the walls in my old bedroom, and then kneeling to bow my head in respect and kiss the floor.

I wondered whether the same pain would exist if my childhood had been different. Happier, perhaps, or sadder. Sometimes the walls of that house seemed to swell with the traces of the joys and the terrors that happened there. Sometimes I would be left with a kind of fullness in the ears, the kind I remember descending as a child when my parents’ shouting stopped, and something more awful lingered. I thought about the relationship between memory and place: the rooms I can still picture clearly, and the ones I can no longer recall.

I wonder if we are all ghosts, haunted by houses.

A few months earlier, we’d moved house ourselves. We left Amhurst Road, where my daughter had grown up, where we’d lived as a family. There are flats I lived in for a year or two when I was in my twenties where I couldn’t now tell you where the bathroom was. Yet I can still map every detail of the place I grew up and of the Amhurst Road flat: the creak of particular floorboards, the hum of a socket under the stairs, the way afternoon shadows lengthened across the living-room wall.

It already feels strange to think that this home no longer exists as I remember it (it too belongs to another couple now). And here I am in the new house, beginning to inhabit it, though I don’t yet know its every contour.

It takes time to learn the grammar of a place. Each house has its own syntax, its pauses and emphases, its rhythm of movement and rest. I knock on the walls as I pass. So does my daughter. I have no idea how far my voice carries; just this morning I heard somebody come down the stairs but nobody was there. We are echolocating, clumsily and more fearfully than we care to admit.

My parents, meanwhile, are still half unpacked. They seem unmoored, uncomfortable. They aren’t sentimental about such things as I am, and I find that both baffling and faintly infuriating, even as I appreciate the lack of generosity in that response. What kind of effacement must that be, to be cut off from the fabric of one’s own life at that age? I get angry with them for not foreseeing or anticipating the enormity of this transition on their spirits. For not realising that wellbeing depends, at least in part, on intimacy with one’s surroundings.

Stephanie, my wife, understands that intimacy instinctively, though in a very different way. She has moved countless times since childhood, each time deliberately - and with great love - taking care to make the new place feel like home. When we were speaking recently with my cousin in Michigan, where Stephanie grew up, she talked about visiting her old neighbourhood next year and sounded genuinely excited. There was no trace of trepidation, nothing of the foreboding I would feel. For her, return is invigorating; for me, it feels perilous, as though revisiting the terrain of childhood might detonate something. I envy that lightness, even as I distrust it.

A few weekends ago, walking through London after attending the baptism of a friend’s daughter, I thought about this again. The ceremony was in a Catholic church in North London where my friend himself grew up, just round the corner from the majestic block of flats his father still manages. That kind of continuity is rare. London is a city of arrivals, filled with people whose childhood homes lie elsewhere. In other countries, other climates, other languages.

I often wonder how those interior geographies persist within us. Again, I don’t mean the metaphorical interiors of the mind, I mean the literal ones: the layout of rooms, the angle of a certain window, the smell of a hallway in late afternoon. How deeply do those early architectures imprint themselves on a person?

Is it different to grow up knowing you can return to your childhood neighbourhood, rather than knowing you can’t? I could, in theory, visit my old schools, though I never have. When we went to tour a secondary school for my daughter, I was overwhelmed by the endlessly bifurcating, echoing corridors and the smell of varnished floors. It hit me with such force I felt physically shaken, as though memory itself had a weight.

I’ve always known that I could revisit my old places, but I avoid them. I can’t bring myself to walk past my old house, only one street away. I take a different route every time. Part of me suspects that seeing it again would be cleansing, but another part fears it would undo me.

Jung thought we dream about houses because they represent the self. Different rooms for different aspects of the psyche: the attic for higher consciousness, the basement for the unconscious. It’s an elegant metaphor, but I think he had it wrong, or at least incomplete. Neuroscience tells us we navigate the world through two overlapping maps: an egocentric one that anchors everything to the body’s position, and an allocentric one that fixes things in relation to each other. Both develop in childhood, shaped by the specific geometries we move through. For me, it’s the egocentric frame that carries the emotional charge. Not the abstract knowledge that my childhood bedroom was next to the bathroom, but the felt sense of turning left out of bed, three steps to the door.

I think of the shape of the room I slept in when I was two or three. My bed was tucked into a corner, but the wall didn’t quite meet it; there was a narrow recess, maybe from an old chimney flue, leaving a strip of space where you could put a glass of water. When I encounter similar arrangements now, say in a hotel, a bed pressed against a wall with a small gap behind, it reaches out to me. It’s as though the room remembers me as much as I remember it. Perhaps each of us carries a private lexicon of corners and recesses, but the logic is shared. We call them nooks, alcoves, thresholds. Places where our constructed selves and shelter coincide. These small configurations of space form a vocabulary of safety, of privacy, even of belonging.

It’s not just the micro-details, though. Sometimes, walking down an unfamiliar street, I’m overcome by a feeling that is not quite déjà vu as much as something stranger. A sense that I have been in a place like this before. It isn’t that the street is familiar; it’s that the arrangement of its elements, the slope of the pavement, the spacing of windows, a glimpse of brick through trees, aligns with some stored template. The mind recognises the pattern before the intellect catches up. For a moment, time and place fold, they concertina; we are both here and elsewhere, and elsewhen.

If that can happen at the scale of a street, can it also happen at the scale of a shelf or a doorway? I think it can. A certain curve of banister or the depth of a window sill can trigger the same small shock of recognition. Perhaps it’s not so different from the way a gesture or turn of phrase in another person reminds us of someone we once knew. These echoes exist not only in faces and voices but in the built world itself.

So how should we tend to these place memories? Often, we simply don’t, mistaking detachment for resilience. I don’t feel comfortable with that detachment; I can’t. To erase the coordinates of one’s life is a kind of bombardment. I think of the images of cities reduced to dust in war. Beyond the shattering physical loss, they imply a punitive psychological attack: the obliteration of an entire set of embodied memories. To level a neighborhood is to destroy the external scaffolding of the self. I wonder what it does to the inner landscape of those who survive. Does the loss of the external form force the mind to hold onto it more fiercely, or does the destruction of the place break the memory itself, leaving it unanchored?

My thoughts circle back to the logic of dreams. I think of the internet phenomenon of ‘The Backrooms’, those endless, yellow-wallpapered corridors that seem to loop into some Lovecraftian infinity. They aren’t moving; they are terrifying. And I think the terror comes from that same neurological divide. These spaces are nightmares of pure allocentric geography. They are maps without a center. There are corners, thresholds, and hallways, the geometry of a house, but they are stripped of the egocentric anchor. There is no ‘I’ in that space, no body to turn left or right, no history to soften the walls. It is a house composed entirely of space, with nowhere to rest the self. It is the limbo architecture of restless, liminal spirits, unable to find purchase, bereft of any life-shaped clutter to haunt, or through which to ingress.

And then my parents again. Why does it move me so much to think that they’ve cut themselves off from what I understood to be the nourishing expressions of the place they lived? Perhaps for some people being somewhere entirely new is energising, a kind of renewal. But I wonder if even that excitement depends on finding the familiar within the new. Recognising, in a doorway or a patch of light, something that echoes what has gone before.

When people talk about moving house, they often describe it as mourning a chapter of life. But you’re not only mourning a period of time; you’re mourning a place, and we rarely grant places that kind of dignity. Mourning a place is simply the ache, the pain, of nost-algia in its purest form. The body remembering a language the world no longer speaks.

What is it that my daughter misses when she grows tearful about leaving Amhurst Road? What status does a home have in a child’s mind? What inner architecture does it give rise to? I think of how she has the same bunk bed in the new house that she had in the old one, and I wonder what that continuity means. Does it ease the sense of dislocation, or does it confuse things further? When familiar objects traverse unfamiliar rooms, do they serve as anchors, or do they remind us of the rupture they were meant to bridge?

Sometimes I feel a flash of guilt, as though I’ve irrevocably damaged something for her by moving us. I know I haven’t, not really. I know she will form new attachments here, that her memories will grow into these walls. But there’s still that sense of having broken a spell. It sounds precious, even indulgent, to talk like this, especially when we’re so fortunate, moving from one beautiful home to another. Yet the guilt remains. I wonder if it’s not only guilt for her, but for the part of myself that needs stability and is still learning how to find it. I fear that rupture for all of us, that our carved names in the table might already be fading.

What happens when you move into a new place? Is it purely passive, a matter of waiting for certain corners and patterns to acquire emotional charge? Or can we help the process along? As a child I would weave supernatural significance into particular corners of the house. The gap behind the wardrobe, the landing by the stairs. They became charged with meaning, small private altars of imagination.

I wonder whether we should be doing something like that now. Should we be consciously investing the new house with significance, giving it personality, cultivating its spirit? Or will that happen on its own, through repetition and care? Should we do it for her, or would that be an imposition?

It is easy to attribute this to the preoccupation of getting older, to the sense that the world has become less accommodating to enchantment, that permanence itself is slipping away. But I know really that our attachment to place isn’t mere sentimentality; it’s something more real. To inhabit a place deeply is to stitch oneself into the world, to create an extension of mind that holds what memory alone cannot.

That’s why we dream of houses. Because they remember us when we find it hard to remember ourselves.