[The #FF0000 Book]: Dream WRLD
Some of you may know that I’m a devoted Jungian analysand, a disciple of dream analysis as interpreted through the symbology of the collective unconscious. This means that every other Wednesday, I discuss with my analyst the events that transpired in my dreams in addition to those of my waking life. Of course, far more happens in the dream world right now, a world free of COVID-19 and politics (just kidding…obv!!).
I know this stuff can be off-putting to some, particularly men who code or live in an otherwise highly codified world where they only acknowledge as true that which is visible before them, ordered and measurable in Euclidean relation e.g. A–B–C, 5–3–8, G–M–E… Sorry but In This House, time is not linear and the passive voice encouraged, the vehicle of a metaphor as real or realer than the tenor, the echo of a call true or truer than its source, etc.
If this is you, here is where I say goodbye to you and your /r/malelivingspace.
A few months ago, I had a dream where I was driving up Highway 17. Now I’m going to sound very Californian for a second as I explain the significance of this highway but it’s a short 26-miler that connects the 280 to the famously scenic Highway 1. It’s notoriously dangerous, known for its sharp turns, narrow shoulders abutting steep cliffs, and a conspicuous lack of lighting which makes evening travel scary as shit. I had my nihilistic fun on it in my teens and early twenties, but I avoid it now and trust only a handful of people to drive it. There are always wrecks and while those big eight-lane commuter highways all see several crashes daily—during the years I commuted down the 280 to Palo Alto, I saw at least two almost every morning—there’s something singularly hellish about the careening crash of a blind curve on a dark and twisting road, smoke billowing up against craggy rock.
In the dream I’m on an imaginary stretch of the 17 that’s straight as far as the eye can see, with wide, easy lanes under a bright sky. Trees with yellowing leaves rush past on both sides. Possibly it’s fall, season of decay. I’m in the backseat of a driverless Tesla which might explain why the ride is unusually smooth, emitting that silken metallic whirr of trains in sci-fi movies. It feels like floating. When the car exits the highway, I notice people in other vehicles staring at me, aghast at the empty space where there should be a driver. Suddenly my mother appears there, just as I realize the battery is almost dead. I frantically direct her to pull over. She nearly crashes doing so, wedging us tightly between a street tree and a parked car. At this point I notice that her battery is almost dead, too. She’s tired now, settling into her seat, eyes closed as if for a nap. I reach for her from behind, holding her until she dies.
The parallels to waking life are clear: life is a highway and we’re all just travelers1. But beyond that, I don’t really know what this dream means. I’m not sure exactly why at the forefront of my mind was the knowledge that I was on the 17 or that I can recall, without a doubt, the make of my car. It seems important that I wasn’t driving my own car on this road called life, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing, symbolically—it could mean that I feel a lack of agency in life but it could also mean that I’ve figured out how to turn on the cruise control while I tend to other, more urgent things. Dreams aren’t like equations where you solve for an X; they’re more like poems where the possibilities for X are endless, each value evolving in tandem with you as you move through time, accumulating and shedding skins and pains and joys and all the other things which we’ll never name, never find a way to fit into the geometry of the terrestrial.
In another dream, I’m in SFO with a friend whose face I don’t recognize. All I remember is that he had dark hair and eyes and that our relationship was never complicated by sex. We’re sitting on one of those black leather benches in Terminal 3, just talking and laughing, but like, really laughing, like we’re doing accents and impressions of people we both know. It’s so fun that eventually it dawns on me that this couldn’t be real, that this person had died and was visiting me one last time before leaving this world for good. That was when I realized I was dreaming. Then I woke up.
It isn’t unusual that in my dreams, a loved one dies. Often I wake up still crying. Half the time, I don’t even know whom I’m grieving. The crazy thing is that nothing feels different from one world to the next: I’m in the same body, feeling the same grief, filled with the same memories of the same past. I’m the same person, fated to live this life no matter which world I’m in. There’s an episode of Star Trek: TNG called “The Inner Light” (S05E25, looks streamable on both Netflix and Hulu) where Picard wakes up one day to find himself on an unfamiliar planet, called by another name, living another life… I won’t spoil it, but it’s widely acknowledged as one of the best episodes in the history of one of the best shows of all time. It’s about the nature of memory and the dreams which become them, what constitutes reality, whether what we see is actually what’s before us. In my dreams, I see things and touch people, remember them, am changed by them. What more is there in accounting for what’s real and what’s not? In waking life, I can’t remember the last time I hugged my mother. I haven’t felt that impulse in decades, but in my dream I held her with the sort of desperate love for a mother that I’ve only dreamed about and still do. That dream has now ossified into a memory as real as any other from another world. That my desire for what is fated to elude me in this one is made manifest in another is enough. What’s more haunting, lasting, and real—a loved one, embodied, or the shadow they cast over you?
Recently a student wrote a sonnet that incorporates a lot of references to the rapper Juice WRLD (they even spelled “bed” as “bedd” as an allusion to the rapper Trippie Redd, who collabed with him), which I took as a sign that I should finally give it a listen. It turned out to be exactly the sort of sadcore melodic rap that I’d expected, but one song, “Lucid Dreams,” samples a distractingly recognizable guitar melody, so evocative in its somber minor key that I didn’t want to just google it. So I listened to it over and over, stopping and starting at the first line I can still see your shadows in my room, after which the auto-tuned vocals drown out the rest. Finally I remember. The song is “Shape of My Heart” by Sting and it plays during the closing credits to one of my earliest favorite movies, The Professional, starring an 11-year-old Natalie Portman who falls in love with a middle-aged hitman after her family is murdered by drug dealers. I watched that movie countless times after school with a Chef Boyardee in the microwaveable cup and a can of Kern’s nectar, wondering when childhood would finally end.
Still can’t believe it did, honestly. Feels like a dream now 🪄
See you in the Dream WRLD2,
Adri
I swear it was Brian who introduced me to this platitude, which is now one of my favorites along with “beggars can’t be choosers” and “ya win some, ya lose some.” In my memory, he picked it up from someone at a meditation retreat fifteen years ago. But he swears it wasn’t him.
A special thanks to Emery for letting me know that Juice WRLD died in 2019 and that “see you at the Juice WRLD concert” is a suicide joke among Gen-Z. Not funny.