A short essay to preface another artifact from your correspondent’s dreamy world:
When something significant changes in someone's life––a death, an upcoming move, a new job, a pandemic––people often say, "it doesn't feel real." Conversely, powerful dreams or hallucinations can feel just as real as daily life, and sometimes even more so. "It is as if," writes William James in the second chapter of The Varieties of Religious Experience, "there were in the human consciousness a sense of reality, a feeling of objective presence, a perception of what we may call 'something there,' more deep and more general than of the special and particular 'senses' by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed."
This sense of realness is strange. Like seeing or hearing, we don't control it completely. I can't will myself to see what I don't see or hear what I don't hear, and, likewise, I can't will myself into feeling that dreams are life or that life is only a dream. But just as we can hallucinate sights or sounds by no choice of our own, this sense of realness can attach itself to fictions.
Unlike our other senses, though, realness is caught up in our sense of life being worthwhile. Being fooled by any individual sense doesn't threaten the worthwhileness of life. But as the soul unlaces itself from the body and strays into that sense that life is mere illusion, fewer and fewer things seem to matter. In the drift of depression and anxiety, it is possible for this sense of reality to erode entirely. Everything that anchors us to existence––the need to eat, to sleep, to connect with others––can suddenly seem no more than dancing shadows, vain illusions.
James quotes a woman describing this experience:
"When I reflect on the fact that I have made my appearance by accident upon a globe itself whirled through space as the sport of the catastrophes of heavens...when I see myself surrounded by beings as ephemeral and incomprehensible as I am myself, and all excitedly pursuing pure chimeras, I experience a strange feeling of being in a dream. It seems to me as if I have loved and suffered and that erelong I shall die, in a dream. My last word will be, 'I have been dreaming.'
Consider Don Quixote. As long as he feels the realness of his beloved Dulcinea, of his quest, of his station as a knight errant, he moves forward with purpose and meaning: he is Don Quixote. He endures hunger, cold, and violence, driven by a palpable, sustaining sense that everything he believes to be real is real. But at the end of the novel, doubt creeps in, and his sense of realness finally flips completely. He admits in the end that he was mad, and he dies, despairing.
In other words, Don Quixote could only be real in a dream.
***
Many years after his adventures, your correspondent would ponder on the nature of dreams. While digitizing his notebooks, I have attempted to elucidate his more obscure sentences with links, though I can’t be certain I’ve got them all correct.
I hesitated to wake from my dreams this morning, though I can’t now fathom what obscure desire possessed me so fiercely in the night that I believed, for a time, half awake, that night held more for me than day.
This kraken pull of dreams upsets me. I give way too easily to its tentacled grasp. When I finally push myself up out of bed, I rise unsettled and go sluggish to my day. Soon enough, I escape the sandman’s charm and lose myself in manila and mucilage. But if I pause a moment too long at my desk, or if I look the wrong way, hear the wrong crackle in the distance, or find strange shapes in the dusty air, that kraken stirs again inside me. I sense the sandman standing just behind me wearing a wicked grin, holding a dream cupped tender in his hands, hoping I’ll stay distracted just long enough for him to pour it through my ear. I wonder often whether I shouldn’t let him, whether kraken depths are not brighter than the day.
John Jo dreamed he was a butterfly once, remember? How hu-hu-ly it fluttered! he said. And then on that bridge above the coy pond he asked me how he could possibly tell if he was now here talking with me or if he was in fact that hu-hu butterfly itself dreaming of being a John Jo!
Ol’ Tom’s rejoinder saved me from John Jo’s madness for a time. Tom wrote to me that he can tell dreams from waking because when he’s awake, he can wonder if he’s dreaming, but during his dreams, he never wonders if he’s actually awake. But the more I dream, the more I grapple with Tom on this point and think he must never have had dreams as strange as this––
I spent the evening before last as a weathered, waist-bent king in a high tower. I had been caught in a plot by my advisors. I watched them kill my son and heir, but they convinced me he was away at school, and I had only dreamt it. I believed them at first, but then began to doubt, began to suspect myself lucid all along. I stood there and muttered to myself over and over, reassuring my heart—“I must be awake. I am the king. And it was here, at this window, that I saw them throw my son from the tower… I must be awake. It was here, at this window…” and on and on. Throughout it all, I distinctly recall feeling the strongest sense of reality, never suspecting for a moment to be an entirely different person lost to himself in a dream.
And this is just a single example! Most of the time, my dreams differ more between them than do my days. Daytime feels repetitive and dull, like the sleepy rock, rock, rocking of a granny’s chair. But each night, I awake in my sleep to find a whole new dream, never to be repeated. No wonder so often I fear that I wake into sleep and take my waking sluggish and slow.
Siggy, though,tells me the dreams all mean something. He thinks they bubble up from our depths and carry the color or shape of something from the deep. He told me I could interpret them the way an astronomer might split the light of distant stars to figure out what they’re made of, how far away they are from earth.
But my kraken bellows to me that there is no astronomy for dreams, that Siggy’s got it just as wrong as Tom. Sure, if I could trap the beast and investigate its innards, I might learn of its anatomy, but what does that tell me about what it wants from me? About why it’s chasing me so?
One time, when I felt the Sandman standing behind me, hands cupping another dream, I asked him that very question. He cackled and sang,
“THEY WANT TO LIVE.”
I suspect that John Jo has it right when it comes to dreams. He told me a story once about a giant fish that leaped into the air and twisted itself into a bird so it could fly off to some celestial lake. Maybe all our krakens just long to be birds, too––just use us as stepping stones from the sea to the skies.
***
Hope you enjoyed this week’s post! It was lots of fun to write. If you have thoughts or questions, leave a comment, or send me an email.
Until next week,
Josh
P.S. For anyone interested in the made-up adverb “hu-hu-ly.” Zhuangzi describes his butterfly as “xuxuran,” which means “vivid,” but the single-syllable repetitionhas such emotion to me that I wanted to import it phonetically. But I didn’t think “shu-shu-ly” sounded quite as xuxuran as “hu-hu-ly” in an English sentence, (and, moreover, saying “shu shu” in English sounds distinct from the Chinese sounds xuxu). Hu is the first character in the classical Chinese word for butterly, hudie, so I just went with hu-hu instead of shu-shu.