why do i keep writing about dreams?

 

 

Their body chose to wake up. From billions of shattered and fleeting fragments, consciousness came back to her like liquid honey, sticking to her gums, spilling through their throat, sickening in her stomach. Their skin became aware of itself, the sweat and the quiet and the space they all filled. Breathing came next, a slow, needed exchange between the body and the bedroom. The air was heavy wet velvet on her tongue. She was awake, breathing, and real. 

This year was the first year I started working. Properly working. Full time, seven days a week, zero hour contract work. I’m living the student experience, tossed between three jobs. The hours are nonsensical and shifting. From January to June, I would have a 05:00 start, 06:00 walk, to make it for a 07:30 start. On the same day, my shift could end at 16:00, and I’d start another shift at another job at 17:00, until 20:00 before walking home.
    Too, fitting seminars, lectures and reading into this labour is, while doable, incredibly taxing. I’ve barely read this year. I made a list at the start of the year of the books I wanted to read by December. July is here, and I’m nowhere near completion. I’m only walking to work. I have no routine that loves me. 

Still, somehow, I have passed my second year of university. The last term felt like an afterthought. No ideas, no thoughts. I wrote a lot about dreams, consciousness and premonitions. In terms of university, I’m beyond halfway, and nearing the precipice, coming towards ‘post-graduation’. I have no idea what happens next. I hope I will still be me. Call me out on this if I lose sight on that one. Wherever I’ll be, I’ll still be working. I’ll still be paying rent, month after month. Perpetuity and inevitability are slowly stretching me apart.
    Reality felt like a moment. It came once or twice a day, but passed as quickly. Nothing sticks to her any more, everything is slowly plying away, making it’s distance, staining her window skin with cheap plastic glue. 

All words sound the same. All distance feels the same. Everything is so distinct, it does not relate to anything at all. Everything is also everything at once. There is no separation. Separation is everything she knows. She gets up to pee. 

It has felt like lockdown ended in August, 2020. Summer ended, and I was back in seminars. October ended, my great-grandmother died, and I was working evening shifts. By the end of December, I was away from my girlfriend, exhausted and empty. I was trying to write while away, trying to find the words to bring together for another blog post. Nothing was coming. I was stressed or tired. I wasn’t reading, I wasn’t myself. From January, I’ve been working. The pandemic never cared — it forgot me a year ago. Now I’m still tired, still exhausted and still without the words to show myself love. Cool and normal for 20 years old.

Writing typically stands to uncoil this derealization. It decompresses the internal strain into a vulnerable (but confident) lexicon. Now, I am stretched thin. There is not enough energy to go plunging into the recesses of consciousness and perform this ritual. 

In contrast to this, I’ve noticed in my writing this year an attention towards consciousness, sleep and dreams, and the meshing of lucidity between the three. Consciousness is failing. Sleep is infrequent. Dreams are left to fill the space. Everything and nothing remains to voice subconscious reality. I am the bare minimum required to function, as a person, as a being, as a consciousness. After this year, I am nothing. After everything I have overcome, there still stands the shadow of who I am left to be.
    Walking out of her door, she hasn’t learned how this place works. Walking down the unlit corridor, anxiety becomes the air. There is a low, anonymous hum. They stand in its eye, letting it surround her, stare at them with its selfless consciousness.

They keep the light off, knowing the noise the fan makes keeps their housemate awake. In the moments following that dream, she feels the realest they have felt in a long time. Their body feels like the bottom of a wet well, the anxiety a small remainder of herself. A small and hopeless character. She stands, and looks in the unlit mirror. They look like a Runescape character. A depressed, mindless Runescape character. 

The writing itself has become unusual. No more 1000 word sprints. These are short, quick-fire and messy pieces with little character distinction, but the introduction of ideas around this aforementioned triumvirate. These stories often explicitly ‘don’t make sense’. They maintain the same focal character, an ambiguous, genderfluid, anxious mess. I want to know where this came from. I watched Lain at the start of the year but like, come on. I’m more than that, right? 

I feel that these ideas of consciousness and lucidity are the minimum of my identity. I feel that in working, in moving into the ever busy, ever tiring working world, I am unable to maintain my full self, and that parts of me have been slowly fading away into subconscious obscurity. I feel like there is one way of verbalizing it, reducing myself to a husk. Again, I have become the minimum of myself. I am just the essential, just the bare minimum of who I could be. Was I at once a fulfilled person, living lucidly, living fully? 

    The dream was a long one. A real one, one that uses real people, but mixed it with new, artificial, but just as living ones. They think of those people as real, living somewhere in the world, that at some point they were to cross paths with.
    Equally, dreams are pointless metaphors, they think. They saw beings shaped like people in empty rooms, like a hotel block, with lights left on by accident. These were naked bodies, featureless and faceless. They stood in the air, spaced randomly. They hung, unmoved, eyeless but staring, swaying but still.
    In one of the rooms, only the bathroom was lit. In there, they could see one of these bodies vomit without mouths. They hung where they wanted, unmoving, still, the lingering of sentience keeping them twitching. Everything else that lay in the ‘otherwise’ was mundane.

    The heart of it, the heart of me, is sewn with fatigue. Tiredness flows into everything. Dysphoria feels higher, my anxiety is set of quicker. There’s no softness in the world, I can’t know affection. Tiredness is not solved by sleep. It is solved by a change in this schedule. Something beyond me, something beyond the toils of being 21 in the 21st century.

Bear with me. I’m working a senseless amount of hours. I must then become senseless. Or, otherwise, I am made senseless. This is industrial living. Surely the world doesn't work like this. I tell myself that I have the skills to say no, but here I am, working 8 days in a row. Good money doesn't mean anything, money isn't something I see. 

I suppose I write about dreams because it’s all I think I have. Maybe there is more happening that I can get my hands on. Maybe I’m in survival mode. I need to make it to tomorrow -- nothing more. An economic re-imagining of early life. Eat food, sleep enough, live until the next day. Hunt, gather, rest. I have unlearned intimacy, love, and self. Dreams are all the creativity left with me, an innate, undying subconscious, algorithmic and imaginative. I will not let this work get out my dreams, for the dreams are all I have to own, to show, to bear pride in. Bear with me while the transmissions falters, and I keep myself together. I will still be me, eventually. 

After a long night of dreamless, tired rest, she reaches the place where the shore ends, spreading around the corner to a very long, very far ocean. They took a road to get here that’s been closed for years. The air is cold, the wind is soft but the breeze sticks to their skin. They get back in the car, and make their start home. It’s morning, and they know they have a long journey home. The road never ends, so they start now, around 10am. That is when they wake up.