Flash forward. The house is paid off. We’ve graduated two kids from high school and college. The boomerang child has finally moved out. Our biggest financial asset now sits mostly empty, while the property tax bill has soared to $19,000 a year — and that’s on the low side for my neighborhood. According to Zillow, my county has the second-highest property taxes in the country.

The math alone suggests a change. It feels like leaving the front door open on a snowy day with the heat blasting. Like I’m watching my money seep away.

We have friends, faced with similar math, whose calculations — financial and otherwise — led them to Maine. Their old house was charming but the Maine house surpassed it. They’d left an artsy town with indie bookstores for another artsy town with indie bookstores — plus Celtic festivals, ukulele play-alongs and lobster shacks. They’d pulled off a brilliant piece of real estate arbitrage: selling high, buying low, slashing their taxes. And somehow they’d managed to retain their souls in the bargain.

Thus, after a quarter of a century in one house — a record of stability and inertia — I began to consider the idea of moving.

I started thinking of Maine, of course, where we’d had a pleasant week in July visiting our friends. Then came winter and the certainty that I lacked the capacity for any more than cold weather than I was already enduring in New Jersey. So I started thinking of other places. Miami, Asheville, Charlottesville, Austin. I tested them all out with my husband, often late at night when he was sleeping. He’d grunt indifferently.

Even I knew this wasn’t likely to happen, that we were unlikely to undertake a relocation so radical we’d have to forsake our jobs and our health insurance. Not to mention our friends.

So then, naturally, closer options presented themselves. We went one day with our friend Frank, a realtor, to see a small side-door Colonial a few towns away. It had its charms, and its quirks, and taxes just over half of what we pay. I could picture us living there. It didn’t need much work. It backed into a woods, which meant no back yard to mow. My husband even liked it. After 25 years in the same house, we agreed, moving to a new town would be an adventure. A minor adventure, maybe, but an adventure nonetheless.

Then I ran it by my brother, our family’s resident MBA. Doing a quick mental calculation, he pointed out that, with transaction costs, we wouldn’t save any real money unless we planned to live there at least six years.

“If you love the house, by all means,” he said.

And that’s when I remembered the dreams.

In late April, a remarkable story by Oliver Sacks appeared in the New Yorker. I’ve been a fan of Sacks since the mid-1980s, when my husband had come home with a copy of “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” and I’d snatched it out of his hands. When Sacks revealed in February that he had terminal cancer, he came front and center in my consciousness again, making any new piece of writing by him irresistible. Doubly so when it turned out the subject of the New Yorker article was the gifted monologist Spalding Gray, whose body had washed up in the East River in 2004, an apparent suicide.

The movie “Swimming to Cambodia,” based on Gray’s one-man show, came out in 1987, just two years after “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.” For a baby boomer with a certain level of erudition, living in New York City in the mid-1980s, both Sacks and Gray were cultural icons. Most of my friends get the New Yorker. Everybody saw the story, and almost everybody had read it.

It turned out that Sacks had been Gray’s neurologist.

The story began with Gray’s car accident in Ireland in the summer of 2001. I don’t remember hearing about it at the time, but my husband did. He reminded me of it when we traveled to Ireland, and I found myself terrified by the narrow twisty roads. The accident, and whatever it did to Gray’s brain, had set off Gray’s downward spiral of depression.

One detail in Sacks’s story leaped out. While Gray was recuperating in an Irish hospital, he decided to sell his house in Sag Harbor— a decision he almost immediately regretted. So much so that on Sept. 11, 2001, the day his family was scheduled to move out of the Sag Harbor homestead, he “barely registered” the attack on the World Trade Center 100 miles west.

“Spalding had been sunk in depressive, obsessive, angry, guilty rumination about selling the house,” Sacks wrote. “Nothing could distract him from it. Scenes and conversations about the house replayed incessantly in his mind. All other matters seemed to him peripheral and insignificant.”

But that wasn’t all. It turned out that Gray’s mother had sold the family home, regretted it deeply, and also committed suicide.

The story felt like a knife to the heart. I had never met anyone else who’d had my dream about real estate regret, let alone heard it manifest into real-life depression and suicide.

I began to fear that I’d never be able to move. Or that if I did, I would never get over it.

Dreams speak symbolically. I know that. I believe my dreams of real estate regret — which have subsided the last few years, by the way — are not meant as actual warnings about real estate. They’re my unconscious telling me to diminish my expectations.

When we’re so young that people ask what we want to be when we grow up, the world literally seems wide open. Teacher? Ballerina? Major league baseball player? Astronaut? Why not?

The options narrow as we enter our 20s, but worldly success still seems possible. And there are still major choices. We have yet to pick a mate. We could live anywhere.

With each decade, the options narrow. We have picked our profession, our mate, our home. By our sixth decade, our children — whose noise and endless school projects distract us from our own mortality — have left the nest.

The branches on our decision trees get narrower and narrower. Eventually, they seem like twigs. Movie or dinner with friends on Saturday night? Or, narrower still, which Netflix movie tonight, Honey?

This, I believe, is the subtext of my recurrent dream.

Yet here I am also, suddenly, confronting the text of the dream as well. Symbolism and real estate are converging. Time is coming to sell the big house. Life, taxes, math are beginning to beg the question. My unconscious just got here a decade before me.