Dreamscapes

I’ve been thinking a lot about my dreams lately. Ever since I was a child, I’ve always had incredibly vivid and imaginative dreams. I remember when I was quite young dreaming of giants who knew nothing about our existence, but who every night dreamed an entire lifetime of a single human. Our entire lives were one night of a giant’s dream. There was a kind of comfort in that—to know that we didn’t control our fates, they were already decided upon based on the whims of giants who didn’t even know we exist. Or to imagine that this life, which we take with such seriousness, with some solemnity, is not real, simply the figment of a giants’ sleeping imaginings. (I’ve always felt comforted by the grandness of the universe, and thinking about how we’re just a speck within a speck within a speck in relation—it’s always managed to put so much in perspective.)

My dreams often defy the confines of reality in ways that don’t need questioning.

I’ve had a dream with creatures that were part lion and part something entirely made up and then shapeshifted into something else.

I’ve dreamt about watching a play on an island that the audience needed to take a boat to, and on the way back, the government divided people into different groups to separate society, shipping each group back to a different land. That’s when I woke up and then forced myself back into sleep to continue the story, landing into a different part of the dream: I had suddenly stumbled upon one of the other factions of society—a faction I had never known about previously. They were slaves, brainwashed into thinking their lives were perfect.

I’ve had a dream about the government giving everyone a pill and telling them it was for their health, but really it turned us all into robots who were controlled by the state. And we were used as an army, forced to kill the enemy. In the dream, myself and a few friends didn’t take the pill and were trying to save humanity. But to avoid detection, we had to pretend we had swallowed the pill, we had to act robotic. Until the government ordered us to kill and we couldn’t defy it lest we be caught out. We became the monster that we were trying to take down—but we were the only ones aware that that’s what we were.

I recently found a note in my phone labelled “dream”. In it, I recorded my dream of a mother (who is the body I’m possessing in the dream) and daughter with their adopted teen son. They’re all at the cinema when suddenly the son leaves and tells his family to come with him, but no one does until people start flooding the cinema and escorting others out. The mother gets into her car, drives with headlines not working and uses her phone flashlight instead to illuminate the road. In the next town, the car gets strip searched and taken apart, and the family is sent upstairs in a house where another mother and daughter are cooking and this second mother shaves off this second daughter’s mouth to get her to eat. I look aghast and this second mother says “you don’t know what we needed to do to survive”. I refuse food even though I’m starving and instead enter a plush sitting room where everyone is seated, but no one looks at me, as though they are all settled into this life, as though this is all they have ever sought.

It was only a few years ago, as I began describing some of these dreams to others and watching their astounded faces, that I realized that most people don’t dream in the same way. That for many people, their dreams operate within the confines of our current world. (If you’re reading this and have similarly vivid and imaginative dreams, please do reach out—I’d love to know more.)

So no wonder most don’t crave the world of their dreams. For me, upon waking, there’s this brief tinge of disappointment. When I am faced with the reality of the world—in which I cannot fly or float or morph into a new creature; where we exist within four immovable walls; where there are social norms and limits to my physical capabilities; where I am bound to rules, be that decrees or impossibilities within our existence—there’s a sense of wanting more. Of having touched a new world, but being denied my place in it. Of the boundless, of the lack of impossibility coming to life. And then having that snatched away only to wake into the “real world” with all its limitations.

That feeling of disappointment upon waking persists even when the dream is not a good one. Recently, there was a random and pointless stabbing in a part of Atlanta. That night, I dreamed I was sleepwalking and had grabbed a knife and was slitting my palm with it, over and over, in a kind of robotic trance. When my partner and friend saw me, they didn’t know how to stop me even though they knew I was sleepwalking, but eventually woke me up.

There’s a lot I can say about what it means that I was the one enacting this act, or that I was enacting it on myself. What does it mean that I can wield a knife, but I can only do it on myself?

I’ll unpack that with a therapist, but what I want to talk about here is something else: while I was dreaming this dream, it wasn’t scary. It wasn’t what I would classify as a nightmare. I think that’s partially because it was happening to myself and I was watching myself from a bird’s eye view. I think that’s partially because I couldn’t actually feel the pain. But I think that’s mostly because in the dream, this was the reality, this was the situation I was thrust into and forced to reckon with. There was no explaining the rules of what was happening; there was no questioning the rules of this world. I was simply existing in it, going along with it. And when I woke, I wanted to return to that world where everything operated differently, to be able to continue the storyline.

This is what I find so hard about the transition from the dreamworld into reality. When I wake up astounded by my dream, wanting to remember it, I often have to first start with explaining it. I have to describe the creature—the part lion, part made-up animal that morphs into something else—instead of just going along with the fact that this creature exists. I have to explain society’s three factions, or why the government wants to control it’s people or how a car gets strip searched. That translates to writing too: when I create a new world, I have to explain it, at least partially, to even begin to be able to describe what happened in it. I have to ground the reader into that version of reality.

And yet, I think the best books that operate in a different reality thrust the reader in and then trust the reader to figure it out. There is no explaining. (I’m thinking of one of my favorite books, Our Share Of Night, by one of my favorite authors, Mariana Enriquez, that does just that.) That’s the writing I aspire to: to know the world so intimately in my own imaginings that it doesn’t feel made-up, it doesn’t require explanation. To write it as though it exists. To close the gap between that made-up world and this.

There’s one last thing I’ll say about the dream world: in all these dreams, there are no neatly wrapped up endings. I wake, and the dream ends. I don’t know if the giants ever discover us or why the made-up creatures were shapeshifting or what happened after I stumbled upon a new faction I was previously unaware of or if I ever manage to take down the state and return people to consciousness or if the family was really ever happy or what happened when I awoke from sleepwalking and realized I was cutting my own palm. In my waking state, I am left to imagine the ending, to allow the story and the characters to exist long after I’ve stopped dreaming them. To be comfortable with untied strings and loose endings. After all, isn’t this in some ways the biggest reflection of reality: that nothing is figured out, that we are always searching to put things at rest, to close them out?

All this has made me want to try on a new habit: before I open my eyes, to pause. To allow myself to linger in the dissipating dream for a moment, try to imprint it’s reality into my memory. And then, to write it down in a dream diary without explaining, without constructing the new world but as though that world already exists. Maybe when I read back on it, it’ll be nonsensical. And maybe somewhere in that, exists endless possibility.