You Are a Character in the Dream of a Stranger

A dream is a snake that can alter the course of your life.

A dream is as incoherent as a fistful of Scrabble tiles or a jagged thread of edgelord ramblings on a Discord channel.

The dream itself has no agenda; it will flicker and drift. More often, it will vanish before you can catch it. Even so, its residue colors your morning, like acetate film. We call this “mood.” A dream can sour a friendship; lick flame to the paper of dangerous love.

Your own dreams are more interesting than your friends’. Jot them down so you’ll remember.

But what is the purpose of telling a dream? We bully our dreams into narrative, but they were never that. When you remember a dream, you destroy it and re-form it. The told version of your dream is a lie. It was never a story: it was the brain’s theater, the Momix of the mind. Pain, and color, and elapsing gradations of sound and light.

Nothing is as boring as another person’s dream.

Sipping coffee across the table, you are put on notice. You are the villain. Last night as you were sleeping, innocent in your bed, you guest-starred in your friend’s hallucination.

You were chasing me with a bread knife because you wanted to saw off my hair.

Accusations pile up: You were angry. You were cruel; you turned everyone against me.

A hasty retraction: Well, I don’t know why I dreamed such a thing—so funny because of course, you wouldn’t ever, you’re my best—

But a dream, once spoken, has life and legs.

Neither of you could stuff it back in the box, even if you wanted to. The air between you is different.

Now you appear in the dream of a stranger.

The dreamer lies halfway around the world, hallucinating while you slowly stir soup with a long-handled wooden spoon. The soup is the color of rain. With each turn, you scrape the bottom of the pot. You are just a background actor, a single face in a mostly smudged-out crowd. The scene shifts, and you now speak in a language you don’t recognize. The dreamer stirs beneath the sheets and groans. His heart is pounding. There are explosions overhead. Your face is a face the dreamer will never forget.

The soup thickens. You raise the dripping spoon and sip. It tastes of preserved lemon, deep, and sharp as knives.

In the age of black-and-white tv, they told us nobody dreams in color.

We wore black-and-white saddle shoes to school. The nun, in her long black habit, slapped her ruler on our desks. The copulative verb does not take an object! It takes a predicate nominative!

We didn’t dream.

We did; our dreams were secret.

At night, we read books with flashlights while our parents slept. The books had an acid smell, which meant they were manufactured to decay.

In your dream, your beloved books are waiting for you in a bedroom in your long-gone house, crumbling in their jackets.

In the Age of Instagram, we dream in squares, endlessly elapsing miniatures that repopulate across the Metaverse.

I consume each one faster than the one before, swallowing a chunk before it’s chewed so I can quickly bite another.

The first time I saw a video on a tiny screen, it was like watching a movie inside a postage stamp. I felt in my own body the charm of its precision, so cute, so keen, like the dollhouse miniatures in that Chicago art museum. Now my mind’s eye thumbs the greasy glass plate, and the whole world is as small as my fist.

Do you have dreams inside your dreams? During a dream, I recall past dreams, petit dioramas unfolding picture-in-picture inside the vast tableaux vivants of my unconscious mind. Upon waking, I cannot work out whether these nested dreams are real memories of other nights’ dreams or merely the current dream’s confabulation. Maybe my past does not exist. My lived life has been overwritten in the night.

If you are lucky enough to snag one at the instant of waking, your dream can hang like a banner across the entire day, suffusing it with an overlay of color— sepia, or neon pop. Who hasn’t woken flushed from their heart-pounding escape up and down and upside down the M.C. Escher stairwells of some government building?

Or maybe your dream was a delicious tug towards some unexpected object of desire, a blissful erotic misdirection. The brain in the night: it slips past the gate and wanders where you refuse to take it.

But I never did that, that was never me.

On waking, you linger awhile in this forbidden landscape. Pluck a pawpaw from the Tree of Life and suck. Until the neighbor’s dog barks and you must scurry back to safety.

But the gate is locked. Or, is this even the correct address? Your street seems different in this light. The houses look familiar, but home is somehow missing; the garden is gone— the wound’s healed over. Was there ever even a garden, or was the garden just a memory in a dream inside a dream?

Who are you, even, but a pulpy sack of metadata? It doesn’t matter what you did or didn’t, or what you will become: the tennacles will reach inside your pith. They will take whatever they need.

Leave a comment