Dreaming About Waking

Issue 254

Milan, 2019

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Although nearly everyone assumes that the dreamworld is fantastical, that its brilliance and vibrancy contrast with reality, there’s nothing to prevent you from believing in the opposite. When you’re asleep, perhaps that’s where you’ll find truth, logic, an actual representation of the universe as it exists, and what you find when you’re awake is just the humdrum order that your mind creates so that you can rest. The laws of physics, the consistency of mathematics, the fact that your childhood friends don’t typically materialize in the air, these supposed truths might be the illusions, with reality visible only after you shut your eyes.

Certainly there’s a heaviness to dreams that isn’t felt in life. The intensity is staggering, even suffocating, because there’s nothing beyond the present moment in the dreamworld, neither past nor a future to grasp. That sensation of immediacy doesn’t happen too often while you’re awake. Typically you’ll need an extreme—danger, exhilaration, shock—to experience anything that resembles a dream. If you take a step and your foot lands on ice, you’ll get close, for just a fleeting, inhaling surge, as you’re thrust into the present. Most times, however, there’s an edge to your awareness, and it hums just below your attention: you’re alert to what’s beyond your vision, to what’s coming in a few minutes, to what’s likely to occur. This is the background chatter of expectations that persists in your mind while you go about your day.

But the dreamworld doesn’t contain distractions. There’s no perspective, no center, to the world inside your mind, just an omnipresent, expanding I, so that you exist in all places at once—much like how an infant can’t recognize where their hands begin and end. And if dreams resemble anything, they do seem to resemble childhood, a time of life when your assumptions are regularly confounded, when you’re befuddled by both what’s possible and impossible, when your most heartfelt predictions turn out to be futile, when you’re simply unable to comprehend the proportions of the world.

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These thoughts came to my mind because I’ve been thinking about the importance of the stories that we tell ourselves. It seems to me that telling our stories—about our childhoods, about our desires, about our fears—requires great care, as each retelling shifts, almost imperceptibly, how we understand ourselves. Our memories are more fragile than we realize, akin to ancient manuscripts or cave paintings that fade with each exposure to light. Because I’ve spent so much time writing about my memories, crafting my sensations into sentences, I’ve learned that my past remains malleable. It changes with each telling—partly because my present affects how I explain my past, partly because my memory is disjointed and elusive and fragmented and dreamlike: perfectly clear in my mind, surprisingly blurry once I speak.

To put my past into paragraphs forces me to shape a narrative, to locate a story, for events that don’t contain a shape—which ends up shifting how I remember those very events. Nothing feels fixed: a slight tweak here, a slight pause there, gives a new geometry to the experiences that created the person that writes this sentence today. The inchoate thoughts that I once had about my past before I birthed them into sentences—shardlike, wordless—are, now, somehow, clear and coherent stories. Still, I know that the act of telling those stories about myself has altered how I understand my life. It seems important, vital really, for me to take great care when I craft words to explain myself, as those words will, soon enough, shape my reality.

There’s a desire for honesty, yes, although that’s tricky when I’m uncertain about my own impression of events. Such as when I walk alongside a row of shops and feel startled by a stranger because someone, it appears, lurks to my right. When I turn to look, however, I find a mannequin in the shop window, so the illusion collapses. Or when I eat lunch in a large restaurant, where there’s not a single empty seat, the room bustling and cramped and lively, until I spot the mirrored walls—shrinking the large restaurant that’s inside my mind into the small restaurant where I actually sit. How about in the evenings, with the sun low, when I hesitate as I approach a building entrance, calmly waiting for the person behind the door to step outside, until, abruptly, the mirage vanishes, and I realize that the person in the window is me.

Persisting with the illusion after I have comprehended the reality isn’t possible, because I slip into new perceptions, new interpretations—the mannequin negates the person, the restaurant shrivels, the reflection is mine. My new perception doesn’t have any causality, there’s no before and after for me to examine, as nothing, really, has changed about the world other than what’s in my mind. And I’m left just a little disturbed by how many illusions, in this moment, I’m failing to see.

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Sometimes I imagine the universe as a vast, intricate tapestry, every thread already woven and complete, with my consciousness merely tracing different paths across its surface. What feels like truth might be nothing more than the particular angle from which I view this fabric at one moment. Rather than before and after, cause and effect, there’s only boundless whole, timeless and complete, so that what feels like progression is merely the order that I impose on something that’s far vaster and stranger.

Besides, it is certainly possible—perhaps even likely—that my perceptions are grossly, hilariously distorted: that every sight is merely a shadow on the cave wall. Doesn’t it seem likely that life is much stranger than my mind can conceive? Isn’t the only truth, the only truth for which you can’t doubt, the sensations that you feel while you read this sentence?

Perhaps the task, then, is to avoid shackling your perceptions, to avoid the rigid or conclusive or insular when it comes to reality—especially because life might contain paradoxes such as the taste of the number seven, such as the weight of love, such as the color of sound—so that you can, instead, faithfully inhabit those moments when one truth dissolves into another, when an I finally recognizes itself in a reflection.