Gadabout Town: What’s in a Dream?
For this issue’s Gadabout, we offered some dreamers a choice of three prompts:
What’s the best, worst, or most memorable dream you’ve ever had?
What’s the closest you’ve ever come to experiencing the sublime?
What’s your most addictive daydream?
Sofia Wolfson, writer and musician:
One of my closest encounters with the sublime consequently turned into an episode of cartoonish horror. Last year on an East Coast-to-Midwest tour playing bass in a friend’s band, we spent a day off passing through the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. I had avoided weed for several years after a bizarre (what we think was a) lacing incident left me briefly catatonic (I was 19 then and probably exaggerating the memory). But when the pen was passed around the sprinter, I couldn’t resist. I wanted to do Niagara Falls the right way.
Parking proved impossible, so our heroically selfless tour manager dropped us off, a van-load of exhausted, stoned children (musicians) unprepared to embark upon the sublime. The beginning of the walk was overcrowded with tourists, bodies upon bodies upon strollers upon plasticky ponchos, a claustrophobic herd moving in slow motion towards the sound of thrashing water.
And then suddenly we were at a railing. Peering over the ledge, on the precipice of the stereotypical sublime, I had never felt so small. At the time, I had been nursing an elongated heartbreak that seemed to instantly vanish against the landscape. The line between myself and the natural wonder thinned, then vibrated, then collapsed in on itself. I only returned to linear time once a friend placed a hand on my back to suggest we keep walking.
But the sublime soon turned sacrilegious. Did you know that the main street adjacent to Niagara Falls is a terrifying cross between Universal Studios, the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and an eroding state fair? We did not when we decided to walk the mile from the water to our hotel.
My world turned from blissful to paranoid in front of a Frankenstein-themed haunted house. The thing about getting too high when you’re as short as I am is that you start to shrink against your surroundings, so that everything gets thrown out of scale. Unlike the spiritual smallness I felt hanging over the water, now my surroundings were threatening to crush me. I watched the shoes of my friend in front of me as the promenade attractions threw light on the sidewalk until we made it to a small business hotel, the sterile walls of which were an unexpected relief. Suffice to say, I haven’t smoked weed since.
Ezra Kupor, Associate Editor at HarperCollins and author of Galleybrag
I have a recurring nightmare where I'm going about my day and suddenly I remember that I killed someone many years ago. Whether or not it was an accident, I never know. And it doesn't matter--even if I was just at the wrong place at the wrong time, I never reported it, so it's as good as crime.
The true nightmare starts when someone says, "I know, and soon everyone is going to know, too." Could be a passerby, friend, my mom, etc. And then the deep-sinking, gut-wrenching knowing that no matter what I do, no matter what I say, the deed is done. Everyone is going to hate me, my career is done, my life is over. The end is nigh but it's not yet.
I never get to the part of the dream where things come crashing down and the truth comes out. I'm just going through the motions of my day with a fist in my stomach, smiling and emailing and waiting for my life to be over.
There's always the moment in the middle of the night when I wake up and think, did I do it? And then, for the rest of the day, the thought lingers at the back of my mind like the cursed entry on a never-ending to-do list.
I also have a recurring nightmare that I've gone too long without a haircut and I look in the mirror and somehow I've detransitioned back to my high school self. Unclear which is scarier, tbh...
Ely Watson, SLAB, a chapbook publisher:
Panther(s) Dream(s)
From 1999 to 2007 I lived with my immediate family in Pella, IA, downtown, on 1st St, in a house built in the late 1800s that was always in disrepair, we were constantly half completing construction projects. That house has appeared in more dreams of mine, recurring or not, than any other space. Last year while visiting my brother in Albuquerque we were talking about strange dreams, recurring dreams, leading us to talk about Pella dreams, and more specifically house dreams. Primarily my conscious associations with that house are very positive: happy childhood memories of hanging out and playing with my brother, loving parents, and a protective space from the claustrophobia of living in a very conservative heterosexual American Christian town in the early 2000s. I don’t know why, for both of us, the emotions associated with that house take such an unsettling turn subconsciously, that house is just haunted.
Anyway, my brother and I are in Albuquerque talking about dreams and I say oh I used to have this recurring dream that I would be in the house and turn to the sunroom door, and through the window see a huge black panther stalking the house. I would get very freaked out and go through the house trying to warn people who were either not there or asleep. It would be a long dream of this sustained suspense, but it never really escalated. Sometimes the dream would start with me in a difficult building, turning a corner or entering a room and it would suddenly become the sun room, and the whole dream would play out from there. I would have this dream so frequently I would be aware of this turning point as it happened, but other than a sort of added suspense, I never had lucid autonomy.
My brother had a strange look on his face as I told him all this, then he told me about his recurring dream of being in the garage (separate buildings, but adjacent to the sun room) either by walking into the garage, or suddenly being there from another dream. He would be in the garage, see a large white panther, which would then chase him in circles as he tried to leave the garage and get inside the house, which was always locked. We both still occasionally dream about that house.
Heather Akumiah, author of Bad Witches and co-host of Limousine
I’ve had dreams that make me scared of myself. Scientists don’t know what dreams are, but tradition and the internet have come to provide a rough legend of the symbols we see most often. Being chased might mean you’re avoiding a problem. Pregnancy signifies a project coming to fruition. Teeth falling out indicates loss of control or confidence. When I was younger, I had dreams that fell exclusively into this category of inexplicable but entertaining. Limbs fell off, animals were indoors, I was going to space with a classmate I had never once considered during my waking hours.
In recent years, though, my dreams have started to disturb me. You don’t need a key to know dreams that prominently feature spectacular scenes of violence, sexual deviance, or bodily excretions are bad news. Dreams like this make me scared of myself not because I act badly in them, but because bad things happen in them. I understand these dreams to come from my unconscious, so I’m acting badly by dreaming them.
Here is another kind of dream I have: I am sitting before a massive slab of wood in a white temperature-controlled room. Then, apropos of nothing, I tap the mousepad on a computer – an old scuffed MacBook Pro – and check my calendar. I’m irredeemably late for a work meeting. I log on and apologize. Everyone says it’s fine but I know it’s not fine. That’s the end of the dream.. The big slab of wood is a mid-century modern desk from Pottery Barn; I agonized over it before finally committing to the purchase last year. The white room is my studio apartment, where I’ve never put art on the walls because I’m indecisive. Everything is real, everything is true to life – there is not a gadget or person or piece of paper for which I cannot account.
I have lots of dreams like this, in which, without annotation or intervention, I act out my daily panics. A friend does something that drives me insane, but I don’t know whether I should bring it up to them. I live in moral limbo, convinced my criticism of them is a reflection of something malformed and antisocial that lives inside me. Then, in a dream, they do the very thing I hate that they do. And in the dream, I think about whether I should say something. In the dream, I know I can call one of three people whose opinions I respect and they will confirm that my friend’s behavior is wrong. Then what? I move the goalpost: I should be able to care less, to react more graciously to my friend’s bad behavior. I wake up.
Last year I had a dream that I was inside a prison in the 1950s or ‘60s. Inside the prison, there was an issue with inmates defecating and smearing it on the walls. The dream happened in first person – I never saw myself. But from what I remember, I was in a position of authority, and when I conferenced with the wardens, there was a strong sense that something (unconscionably violent, I assume) had to be done about the prisoners’ behavior. I think that’s where the dream ends.
There is nothing on earth that scares me more than prison – to the extent I have to actively remind myself that the death penalty, when weighed against jail time, is not in fact a mercy (or at least isn’t conventionally considered one). When I was in middle school, there was a rumor that someone had smeared poop on a hand dryer in the boys’ bathroom. At the time I had recently learned that scatolia was, alongside animal abuse and pyromania, an early indicator of sociopathy. I believed this until ten seconds ago when I Googled it and found this is just a widely believed myth, but it always rattled me. I remember being amazed by the idea that our later or truer selves could be indicated so early, and through such apparently unrelated behavior. Behavior could carry meaning beyond the obvious and immediate.
I, of course, woke up from the prison dream very scared of what my mind was trying to tell me about myself.
Still, as a person who is pathologically averse to suffering, discomfort, and inconvenience of any kind, I can say confidently that the dream about being late to a work meeting, or the dream about my friendship trouble (a dream that is essentially a dream about thinking! a dream that is simply a continuation of the day’s torturous internal dialogue!), disturbs me infinitely more than the prison dream. When I wake up from those real-life dreams I am frozen solid, spooked, afraid that I am becoming a woman without symbols.