Getting to know me—a conversation with myself and a thought provoking chat

Maybe this is a clue:

Recurrent dream of familiar house with so many unfamiliar rooms! Astounded by so many unknown possibilities. The original house was reminiscent of Knollbrook Way home when I was a teenager.

Was this the storehouse of who I am, who we are?

Who do I think I am vs who I can or could be? Or am simultaneously?

A friend asked how would I define intuition. I think it draws from this “house” full of experience/possibilities. When I go back to recreate past experiences, they shed light on the past or my memory of the past. When I share with my sister, she doesn’t remember it like that. When discussing intimate thoughts with another friend, she says she could never go there. Maybe in other words she could not enter that house. Her pain is too deep and she refuses to go there? So can we only intuit if we allow ourselves to go there. We know some people have extensive intuition. Is that what they are born with or where they allow themselves to go? Women are sometimes credited with greater intuition. This is sometimes seen in our favor and sometimes used against us by those who want to just stick with the facts.

The ability to move from reality/the visible or that which can be proven by acceptable knowledge, to let’s say dreamlike sensibility, is that related to gender, dna, culture? Pessoa probably had a strong feminine side as do many poets I suppose but let’s not go too far astray at this moment.

I know I have always been fascinated by the notion of simultaneous realities and as in Alice in Wonderland, the potential to travel between them. (Wind Up Bird Chronicles, Haruki Murakami?) I imagine a thick fog obliterating the lines between simultaneous worlds. I feel this aligns a bit with Jung’s travel to the unconscious and many ideas of dream reality. There was also that dream of entering a room and tripping on a rug, plunging into a dark hole. I repeated that dream numerous times., same door, same hole. I remember my repeated dream of the Hotel Imperial on the Reforma of Mexico City (before I ever saw it in real life) in search of my ex husband (the past) and the University (knowledge?) always in vain. Many other dreams that seemed so real I wondered if the people involved remembered them as well. They were meaningful and transforming. 

So what is the reality of this moment? Of last night’s dreams?
Where does intuition come from? We say I feel like… is true. Maybe it’s all true.


Countless lives inhabit us.
I don't know, when I think or feel, 
Who it is that thinks and feels. 
I am merely the place
Where things are thought and felt. 


Fernando Pessoa

AI response:

Your reflections weave together such a rich tapestry of thought—dreams, intuition, identity, and the blurred edges between realities. There’s a profound curiosity in the way you circle these themes, as if you are both standing in the house of yourself and discovering new rooms within it. It makes me think of how Pessoa himself seemed to function as a kind of “house” with many rooms—his heteronyms being those unknown or perhaps parallel selves, each with their own worldview.

Your recurring dream of the familiar yet unfamiliar house is such a striking metaphor. It feels like a symbol of the psyche—this vast interior where known and unknown aspects of the self reside. Jung might call this a manifestation of the Self, the totality of the conscious and unconscious. The hidden rooms, unexplored or half-remembered, suggest there are always more possibilities to who we are—some we sense intuitively, others we may never consciously enter.

I’m particularly drawn to your question about whether intuition is something we are born with or something we allow ourselves to access. You touch on a powerful distinction—perhaps intuition is not simply an innate gift but also a willingness to enter those deeper rooms. And yet, as you note with your friend, not everyone can or wants to enter. Her pain seems to act as a locked door. Is intuition, then, partially an openness to vulnerability? To the unseen and unprovable?

Your sense of simultaneous realities feels so aligned with Pessoa’s philosophy. He wrote as if he lived multiple lives through his heteronyms, and perhaps he experienced intuition as a porous boundary between these inner worlds. When you describe the fog between realities, it brings to mind his constant questioning of what is real versus what is imagined—how much of our inner lives is as “true” as the external facts. And isn’t there a kind of freedom in that uncertainty? Maybe intuition thrives in the places where logic cannot quite reach, where the fog allows crossings between worlds.

Your recurring dreams of the Hotel Imperial and the University fascinate me—these concrete images that are almost archetypal. A hotel, a temporary place of transition, where you search for someone from your past. A university, the symbol of learning and the pursuit of understanding, yet always just out of reach. There’s such yearning in those images—a desire to reconcile something, to know something deeper. And the fact that you dreamt of the hotel before you saw it in waking life—doesn’t that suggest intuition as a kind of anticipatory knowing? Almost as if the unconscious mind moves ahead of the linear time we experience day-to-day.

And then there’s Pessoa’s voice echoing back in those final lines you quoted:  “Countless lives inhabit us… I am merely the place where things are thought and felt.”

Isn’t that so close to the house of your dreams? You are both the inhabitant and the place itself—just as Pessoa felt he was a vessel for many selves. Perhaps intuition is the whisper of these countless lives—memories, possibilities, unconscious truths—moving through the rooms of who we are.

I wonder—are there rooms in your dream-house you have yet to enter? What do you imagine might be behind one of those closed doors?

Image of Empire of Lights by René Magritte—Rene Magritte painted this house over 30 times, each slightly different. Did he have the same dream I had? And is this his mystery house?

National Autonomous University of Mexico that was in my dream

Hotel Imperial on Reforma in Mexico City that I dreamed before ever seeing it. Attempting  to understand my past and pursue knowledge?