Former Priestess Explains Dreams of Childhood Homes

My name is Ioato. I am from Benin City, Edeto State. I was initiated in a shrine in Yoya under a priestess, and for 19 years I served in that circle. I sat in meetings along Sappel Road in houses of Yuing compounds. I was one of the ones sent to look at people. So I am not guessing. I am reading a map I used to draw.

I want to start with a question and I want you to be honest. Do you keep dreaming about the house you grew up in?

Not the house you live in now, the old one, your father's house, your mother's compound, the place you were a child. Maybe it is in the village. Maybe it is in a face me I face you building in Ringro. Maybe you have not set foot there in 20 years. And yet three, four, five times a month, you are back there in your sleep. You know the corridor. You know the kitchen. You know the smell of the place.

Even though a smell cannot exist in a dream, and yet you wake up remembering it, you know which dog cries, you know where the well is, you know where your mother used to sit. And then you wake up and you feel heavy or tired, or you feel like you have been somewhere, like you attended something and came back. Most people dismiss it. They say it is because I am thinking about my childhood. But you are not thinking about your childhood. You have not thought about that house in months.

So let me tell you what is actually happening. And I am going to be very direct with you because you did not come here for stories. Your childhood home is not a place in your dream. It is a picture. It is the image your spirit uses for the foundation of your life. Let me repeat that because it is the whole confession in one sentence. The house you grew up in is how your spirit draws your foundation.

That is why you keep returning there. Not because you miss the house, but because something is happening at your roots and your spirit keeps showing you the roots in the only picture it has. Please understand this: in that world, we knew this when we wanted to study a person. We did not start with a person. We started with their roots, their family line, their father's house, their mother's lineage. We went back to the beginning because that is where the door was built.