i dreamed a dream

a more bloggy post than usual

“Kriemhild sieht im Traum den toten Siegfried,” Henry Fuseli

I have a lot of nightmares—really, the majority of my dreams are probably nightmares. I’ve been told that unusually vivid dreams are a side effect of one of the medications I take, but why they’re mostly nightmares I could not tell you. Most of my nightmares are just unpleasant but shaken off when I wake up, but some leave an unpleasant smear over the subsequent day. What distinguishes the viscous dreams from the vaporous ones is—usually—the level of violence, but also the sense of a message. The dreams that linger unpleasantly touch on real fears or bring to surface emotions I did not know I had. To have dreams where I fail, over and over again, to understand non-Euclidean geometry while a murder cult runs amok—well, I already failed to understand non-Euclidean geometry in real life, and the murder cult is just weird. That’s a dream that just feels like unpleasant noise. When it’s over it’s over.

But a dream where somebody I am actually friends with says to me I hate you, I’ve always hated you, and I’ll always hate you… that can ruin my day.

Recently I had a very involved nightmare that involved a lot of very obvious imagery that I’m not really going to get into because, frankly, I don’t want to put my psyche on display at that level. One part of it though was that I’d moved into this house and I was going to have the whole third floor. The third floor was like a kind of mishmash of everything I’d ever wanted my bedroom to have—sloping ceiling on one side, walls and walls of bookshelves, a windowseat, a four poster bed. It just had two problems.

The first was that everything—and I mean everything—in the room was a uniform white. Glossy white paint on the walls and shelves. White carpet. White bedding. The second was that the room was the whole third floor—there were no internal walls, no door one would knock on upon coming up the stairs. It was totally open and any conversation I would have, anything I would do, would be heard throughout the house. Even the four poster bed was encased not by curtains but put inside a glass box. There were no curtains on the windows. And right outside the windows was a place where people were shooting clay pigeons and it was clear they’d basically always be there, always shooting clay pigeons.

There was, however, no more private room available in the house. Furthermore, this was a room with space for all my books and everything I’d ever wanted. Even if there had been a more private room it would have been crazy to take it.

I struggled to articulate (in the dream) why this, the lack of privacy, was a problem. Was I planning to do something bad in my room? No, but.… Did I think the other people in the house were just going to spend all their time eavesdropping on me? No, but.… I just wanted a door, I wanted to be able to shut a door, but I couldn’t explain why in ways the other people didn’t find insulting or impossible to understand.

None of this was what made it a nightmare, incidentally—this dream had another, very violent aspect and the end involved me crying and crying over a bloody, dying animal, and honestly even that wasn’t the worst part—but over the rest of the day I kept thinking about the room, and particularly the glass-doored four poster bed, which surely would have been an awful place to sleep. It was the easiest part of the dream to interpret and even while I was dreaming I was like, ah, I know what this means, you feel comfortable but stuck because you live in the basement. And it’s funny to wake up from a dream about feeling exposed and go—you know, I’ll put it on Substack.… Still.

Lately I keep having days where I wake up feeling angry. Whatever is happening is the opposite of knitting the raveled sleeve of care. The anger seems to gather like static electricity and I always worry that the person I’ll discharge it on will be an essentially innocent party. I wake up feeling fed up, but with what I couldn’t tell you.

Dreams are supposed to be boring to talk about but I don’t really think they are. Still, sometimes I wish I could sleep without dreams. But if I lost all capacity to dream, I’d probably miss the nightmares. And if we’re being completely honest—which I suppose I’m not, given that I’m presenting an edited version of my dreams, but still—the times I wake up from good dreams and feel them slip away are even worse.