I had a weird dream the other night.
My partner and I were going to a pool party, held in a greying replica of the Trevi Fountain. When we arrived, I realised the party guests were mainly students from my high school, plus my partner’s friends. Having lost him to the latter, I reluctantly socialised with my former classmates. They were particularly keen to hear about my job, and unexpectedly lavished me with glowing praise. So much praise that it felt performative. As I zoned out of the conversation I realised that everyone around me was half naked, and not only that, everyone — regardless of sex, gender, whatever — had a cartoon-style penis protruding from their body.
‘Bye!’ I squeaked out. Nobody heard me, or at least, nobody listened. The pool was cast in glow, I was outside. I turned and ran.
As I pelted undressed through the streets — cobbled and winding, a bit like the recreation of Hogsmeade in Watford’s Harry Potter Studios, but grottier — it began to rain. I was soaked to the bone and searching not for the college door I recognised, but for a scene I recalled from another dream, a white washed church set low in the ground, with a bathroom directly opposite. I couldn’t find it, I knew what I was looking for but I couldn’t find it.
And then my alarm woke me up.
I don’t often remember my dreams, but when I do, they’re like this. Half-familiar, uncanny landscapes populated by characters from my memories, fiction, and my daily life. Urban labyrinths which join my beloved Oxford to the European cities of childhood vacations, suffused with a post-apocalyptic suggestiveness. During lockdown, I dreamt that Oxford was burning, and the sea encroaching all at once. I couldn’t find my friends and could only get around by a balancing act on the rooftops. It was a bit on the nose.
In On Dreams, Sigmund Freud contrasts the ‘manifest content’ of a dream (that which is recalled, the dream evoked by memory) with its ‘latent content’ (the dream meaning which is only revealed by the process of analysis). Peculiar images or scenes in recalled dreamscapes have ‘manifold’ origins, combining and condensing elements with an association in common. In my dream, the apparently disparate elements were united by a sense of inaccessibility, of being or feeling shut out, of a party, of Oxford as home, of my seriously lapsed Christianity, of an (albeit peculiar) idea of sex. I’d entered a landscape of inadequacy illustrating my endless preoccupation with what other people think of me. What sounded like praise could be veiled condescension: my job is FTC, and I don’t have another lined up for when I leave at the start of December. I’ve always felt less attractive than my peers and sticking my dream avatar in a bikini was a sure-fire reminder of that. The dream also reflected my longstanding fear that when I leave a party early, no one notices. And of course, there was a good old fashioned bit of penis envy. At least, that’s what I imagine Freud would say.
I’ve been thinking recently about the things that bind us to and divide us from the people of the past. As a medical historian, what springs to mind is health and sickness, life and death, the states between which our bodies inevitably fluctuate. As Susan Sontag puts it in Illness as Metaphor: ‘everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the Kingdom of the Well and the Kingdom of the Sick’. Dreams, in this context, are weird. They’re not a sickness or a disease, just an ordinary side effect of certain stages of sleep, but they don’t feel ordinary. They are strange, disturbing, provoking, nostalgic, painful or joyful or both at once. To extend Sontag’s image, dreams are not part of either kingdom, but a drifting, stateless state, rising out of a nebulous, ever-shifting architecture. If, as Sontag reminds us in Illness as Metaphor, the ‘Kingdom of the Sick’ is ‘landscaped’ with lurid metaphors, the dreamscape has no geography which is not made up of metaphor. Throughout my life I’ve had dreamscapes that recur — the whitewashed church, vaguely Grecian; a few streets of Lugano that led to an undoubtedly long gone Spaghetti House; warped Oxford; a terrifying warehouse maze. These locations are themselves metaphors to be unravelled; as Freud tells us, dream thoughts are ‘expressed symbolically by allegories and metaphors like the figurative language of the poet’. These allegories and metaphors are culturally conditioned, dependent on time and place, but dreaming itself is a universal, ahistorical force. Our ancestors dreamt, our descendants will dream. What they’ll dream of, we can’t know.
I wrote my undergraduate thesis on sleep paralysis narratives in early modern England, researching the stories that people told themselves in order to make sense of their strange, disturbing experiences. I began my thesis with a comparison between an American woman who in 2016 described her terrifying nocturnal abduction by aliens, and an English widow who in her 1658 trial for witchcraft revealed her distressing sexual encounters with the devil. These two encounters shared several features: the nocturnal setting, the appearance of a shadowy intruder by the victim’s bed, feelings of heavy pressure and coldness, and a pronounced sexual aspect. Both can be seen as episodes of sleep paralysis, interpreted through the prevailing cultural structures relevant to the victim’s social context. Like dreams, sleep paralysis takes place in half-waking, half-sleeping states, and therefore like dreams it is a suggestive medium for considering the intersection between human biology and cultural forces.
I was told by a marker that the connection was tenuous, but I don’t think it was. The past may be a foreign country, but people still lived there. They may have walked different roads and led different lives but they still traversed the path between the Kingdoms of the Well and of the Sick, they still travelled into the deep dreamscapes of the human imagination. That dreamscape may once have been populated with god and the devil, but it is aliens, zombies, and superheroes who populate it now. In both cases, our lovers, family, friends, and enemies play an integral role in our dreamscapes, albeit in the strange, composite form noted by Freud. One of the subjects of my research recalled sleep paralysis symptoms alongside a terrifying dream of his father at the time as his turbulent religious conversion in the 1610s. This distorted, composite figure expressed all sorts of repressed emotions, and the dreamer knew it. People in the past dreamt, and they cared about their dreams. In fact, they were as keen as Freudian psychoanalysts to interpret their dreams — if not keener, given that dreams were thought to conceal divine inspiration or demonic intervention. We can’t understand people in the past — or our peers — unless we understand the integral aspects of their humanity, its embodiment and its imaginative faculties. Maybe it makes me a poor historian, but I want to be able to recognise the people that I study, if not as my kin, at least as human beings grounded in particular contexts.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that the dream is as fertile a medium for interpretation as Freud instructed us a century ago, but it’s equally important to be aware that he wasn’t the first person to point that out. Dreams draw a landscape of human connection — whether between the individual and their own subconscious, between the individual and the collective narratives of a particular culture, or across different cultures separated by space and time. And more than that, dreams speak to an attribute which is fundamentally human: the search for meaning. We are biologically predisposed to interpret, to philosophise, to analyse. We search for the latent in the manifest, it’s an instinct hard wired into our biology.
To be aware of our dreams is to be aware of our status as human. To know our own humanity reminds us of our connections and our communities, across space and time. We are all dreamers, refugees from the kingdom of reality. It is up to us to confront that, whether we like it or not.
A note: If you follow me on Twitter, you’ve probably noticed that I’m a little quiet on there at the moment. I realised it wasn’t doing much for my mental health, and a break was overdue. I’m not leaving the platform but I’d appreciate subscriptions on here as an alternate for staying in touch if I do! I’ve also re-made a Tumblr, and while I haven’t decided whether to move there fully from Twitter, you can find me @21stcenturydemoniac.