And Now, An Uncensored Glimpse At My Dream Journal
*insert Danielle Haim wailing on the guitar solo from Up From a Dream*
I have not yet made any goals/resolutions/intentions for (or threats against) myself in 2021. If this disaster of a year has taught us anything, it’s that the only predictable thing about life is its unpredictability. That quote is lifted directly from Pixar’s hit (and hands down their best) movie, Ratatouille, but don’t let that make you take it for granted. Life is unpredictable. Since we really have no real idea as to when things will start feeling “normal” again, I think I might forgo making any big plans for myself next year. Nearly everything I decide for myself will be a strategic move that will not be meant to inspire, but instead to motivate me to just keep going. That’s the best I can do right now.
One thing I’ve been doing to combat the blahs associated with living through a once-in-a-century (hopefully) pandemic is journaling. I don’t take it too seriously. Because the only thing I do these days is go to work and park myself on the couch to stare at the TV now and then, the pages are pretty boring. Life isn’t thrilling enough right now to document failed dates or buzzing birthday parties, because they’re not happening. For a while, I thought it would be fun to document what I ate that day as a way to be able to look back years from now and reflect on what I thought was good at the time. God willing, my diary won’t turn into some artifact I show to my kids 20 years from now as we sit around a trash fire and split our final rationed can of Soylent for that week as they pore over and imagine how nice it must have been to eat chicken! Vegetables!
I stopped keeping track of what I was eating after a week or so when I noticed that I eat a lot of the same things. It was kind of humiliating. A self-own. More than my fair share of pasta dishes. Lots of bananas and clementines. I guess two things will always be true: I’ll always have a soft belly and won’t ever have to worry about getting scurvy.
More fun than journaling my daily life, however, has been dream journaling. Real life is overrated. Especially these days, but let’s be real—all of the time. My dreams, however, are a fantasy theatre where whatever I say goes. My subconscious runs wild and gives me a glimpse into what I’m actually thinking about all day long during a time when my brain feels like it’s been plucked from the stem, squeezed into a blender, and poured back into my skull.
My dream journal is different from my “real” journal. Instead of being kept in a Moleskine notebook on my nightstand, it lives in my phone’s Notes app. I didn’t do this on purpose, but I think keeping it locked away in my phone gives it a more feral quality than an overpriced notebook that I can romanticize by keeping close to my bed, scrawling all of my thoughts down in loopy chicken scratch. There’s nothing ritualistic about it, either. It only gets updated if when I wake up I can remember what it was I dreamt about the night before, and actually care about documenting it. I roll over in bed and my greasy thumbs begin typing.
Some of the dreams I chose to remember are pragmatic and, perhaps, foreboding:
10/2/2020
Watching CNN and Anderson Cooper said biden was polling 27 points ahead of trump
Others, however, are a bit more bizarre:
9/15/2020
Went to gas station with marley to pick up snacks and after buying a lot realized that there was an ice cream machine. Got soft serve and then found a guy behind a counter who was making cool ice cream designs so waited in line to get one. He seemed cool but cold. Waited forever and gave him a complicated order but he was chill. After realizing he liked me because i was so “no worries” about everything he proposed and we ran off together. Also the entire time iris by the goo goo dolls was playing as a soundtrack but specifically the “AND I DONT WANT THE WORLD TO SEE ME” part
I wish I knew more about how to dissect a dream and decipher its meaning. You would think that I read enough copies of Girl’s Life magazine growing up to have some idea, but I don’t. The only thing I know even a modicum of information about are the anxiety dreams—which, if you know me, that tracks. I know what it’s supposed to mean if you dream that you’re falling or your teeth are falling out. My anxiety has evolved past normal anxiety dreams. My shit is so fucked that one time I dreamt not that my teeth were falling out, but that I was able to pull them out in little shards, like plucking a popcorn kernel from between two molars. I don’t need to write that dream down. It’ll stick with me for the rest of my life.
Dreaming about politics again:
9/28/2020
Dreamt that I was in an Uber and while driving around I saw Kamala Harris jogging in an AKA shirt. Asked to get out of my Uber and approached her and she gave me her shirt and invited me to pledge AKA but i had to go to her house first to meet Doug and her parents (not sure if they’re still alive irl). We bonded over having family being jamaican immigrants and laughed about how we could understand patois but couldn’t speak it. She eventually let me join AKA and then we became friends. She paid for my Uber that ran/charged me for the entire time I was at her house
Thinking about the way other people dream fascinates me. Is it in black and white? First-person or third? If you’re really interested in random information like me, do yourself a favor and Google how blind people dream. My dreams are always very cinematic. They rarely feature me and instead feature characters—sometimes they’re played by celebrities, sometimes they’re played by random people. Did you know that everyone and everything you see in a dream is something you’ve seen in real life? Mind-blowing, if you ask me.
Here’s a more recent installment, where I dream about celebrities:
12/5/2020
Met tracee ellis ross at a picnic and we became friends, she invited me to her house to borrow some gucci for an upcoming birthday party I was invited to. Her house was huge but then we walked inside and her mom (Diana Ross) was there? I called her “ms. Ross” and everyone laughed. Then we went into this giant warehouse connected to her house which was all designer couture and memorabilia and I got to pick out whatever I wanted for this part. I chose a colorful fringy top and black rubber skirt, then I asked if my mom could stop by to pick me up and they said yes. Mom was shocked by how many clothes there were in the warehouse but even more shocked by how nice Diana and tracee were to us
Can’t believe I haven’t brought this up already, but I can lucid dream. I don’t know why or really how to do it, but more often than not, I’m able to influence what’s playing on the projector of my brain on any given night. Usually it’s when I’m in the middle of a nightmare and I want it to stop. I’m able to recognize that I’m in the middle of a dream and can toggle away from whatever it is that freaking me out. Sometimes it’s being able to influence what someone does or says in a dream. It’s kind of like a Choose Your Own Adventure Book.
Again, I don’t know how my brain does this. Please don’t ask me to teach you how to lucid dream in the comments.
Earlier this year, I read a bunch of articles about how living through a pandemic is altering our dreams. I can’t come here to lie and say that like nearly everything else I do these days, this decision wasn’t in some way impacted by the advent of COVID-19. I never want to look at this time through a rosy haze, but I do like the idea of documenting it in some way. I have a cardboard box sitting in my bedroom that I’ve already started filling with relics of these strange days we’re living through. Some are classic editions to a time capsule, like the paper the day after Joe Biden was declared President-Elect, or the cork from the bottle of champagne my roommate and I used for mimosas for our at-home Thanksgiving brunch this year. Others are more reminders for myself of how the pandemic impacted me; tickets to a Vampire Weekend show I’ll never go to (and have yet to be refunded for), Donald Trump’s letter that quickly followed the “stimulus” checks deposited to (some of) us back in the spring.
My dream journal is like that time capsule, but instead of something tangible that I can show to my grandkids when I’m inevitably the subject of one of their history papers someday, it’s just for me. It can be deleted with the swipe of my thumb. I love how chaotic and unwieldy it’s become.
Are the dreams I shared with you today the only dreams that live there? Absolutely not! Will I share more with you in the future? Perhaps. Probably not. But maybe! We’ve got an entire 2021 ahead of us.
I go back to December all the time…
Can you believe it’s December already? I saw someone on Twitter earlier this week say something about how March is only three months away. That really made me want to pour bleach in my eyes. I’ll be back with one more installment of this newsletter to wrap up the year, and then it’s over! Bye-bye, 2020! While I think it’s nice to anthropomorphize an entire year and kick it to the proverbial curb, I also believe that our troubles won’t magically end on January 1st, so let’s maintain this raging spitfire energy into 2021! Really, now that we’ve got this monster of a year under our belt, what’s the worst that could happen?
As always, here’s what I’ve been consuming as of late…
Watch this: For absolutely no reason at all, I went on a mumblecore bender this week and devoured a bunch of “indie” dramedies about, well—
And most of them were fine. I like mumblecore and can appreciate it, I just think most of it is self-indulgent to the point of unwatchable. I did, however, finally get around to watching one I’ve been meaning to for a while—Alex Ross Perry’s The Color Wheel, which was wonderfully droll and whose ending still managed to eek me out despite knowing what was about to go down. Felt like a great intro to the genre despite being a later installment in the mumble canon. Highly recommend—just maybe not if you’re squeamish.
Listen to this: Spotify did the thing it does every year and wrapped up my top listens in a beautiful slide show to please/embarrass me, and I am very pleased and embarrassed! I’ll include it down below and you can skip through to see how far back into my comfort zone (read: late aughts indie) I slipped this year.
Read this: This great Q&A with Fiona Apple about how Fetch the Bolt Cutters came to be, how she approaches life, and her dogs—! I love her. Robbed of Album of the Year. Good thing she doesn't care!
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