Sovereignty Erosion

Last night I dreamed I had houseguests when a group of strangers, apparently Russian, simply entered my home. They didn’t knock, sneak in, or offer an explanation. They arrived with the serene entitlement of people checking into an Airbnb for which I had somehow misplaced the reservation.

Within minutes they had colonized the place. They used the kitchen. They occupied the bathroom. They took showers. One man wandered around completely naked, his body covered with tattoos, apparently having concluded that sufficient quantities of ink constituted clothing.

I ordered them to leave.

They regarded this request as mildly inconvenient.

I had to tell them several times before they finally gathered themselves and departed. Even then, there was no embarrassment, apology, or acknowledgment that commandeering a stranger’s house might represent a minor breach of etiquette. They walked out with the composure of airline passengers who had accidentally taken the wrong seats and moved only after I produced the boarding passes.

A few hours later, they came back.

Apparently my eviction had been interpreted not as a permanent revocation of access but as a temporary scheduling conflict. Once again, I had to order them out. Once again, they eventually complied with the weary patience of people humoring an unreasonable homeowner.

Then another stranger appeared: a woman in her fifties making watch videos in my atrium. She had apparently identified my home as an excellent location for horological content creation. I told her to leave. She ignored me. I told her again. Nothing. By the fifth command, I was yelling. She finally departed reluctantly, as though I were the lunatic disrupting her production schedule.

At this point, my houseguests told me to call the police.

I retreated into a dark room and tried to dial the number. But my fingers wouldn’t cooperate. I pressed the wrong numbers. I tried again. Wrong again. The simple act of operating a telephone had become an advanced neurological procedure. I knew exactly what I needed to do, yet the message from my brain seemed to lose voltage somewhere on its journey to my hands.

My body felt like an electric car limping along with one percent battery: the machinery intact, the destination known, the accelerator pressed, but almost no current left to move the thing.

Then my hands stopped working altogether.

That was when irritation gave way to helplessness and finally despair. The strangers were almost beside the point. The true nightmare was discovering that ownership itself had become meaningless. The house was mine. The doors were mine. The rooms were mine. I possessed every legitimate claim to decide who entered and who left, yet my authority seemed to exist only insofar as other people voluntarily recognized it.

I had entered a state of Sovereignty Erosion: the nightmare sensation of watching authority over one’s own territory gradually dissolve. You own the house. You issue the commands. You possess every legal and moral claim to the space. Yet strangers stroll through your kitchen, shower in your bathroom, film watch videos in your atrium, and behave as though your sovereignty were merely a suggestion awaiting their approval.

The most frightening intruders, apparently, don’t break down the door.

They walk through it and wonder why you’re making such a fuss.