The Reproducible Dream
I don’t remember when it started, but lately it’s been a night train arriving more frequently. The concealed guilt of a murder. The carried weight of having done something truly awful, but living on. Moving forward with the self-inflicted anchor of taking another’s last breath. The dreams are remarkably consistent, despite their opaque detail. I’ve killed someone, probably a man. I am concealing it through the creative disposal of the body. I am consumed by the anxiety of being found out. Sometimes the body is placed in a remote part of the house where in time even I will forget about it. Sometimes it is atomized and burned over a roaring log fire in the winter. Sometimes it dissolves in acid and gets poured down the sink. The methods of disposal change, but the act remains potent and present.
The victim is never disclosed. It’s not that I am dreaming of those who’ve wronged me in the waking hours. They remain safely anonymous. Irrelevant to the anxious story of what happened next. A story of living with the terror of being found out. The ultimate imposter syndrome. And what would the ultimate consequence be? Solitary confinement with a large stack of books doesn’t seem so bad. I already spend my days like that by choice. And I wouldn’t have to worry about where the next meal was coming from, although the constant threat of violence holds the promise of frequent distraction from the words on the page.
There’s never any motive to the dream. There’s also never a location. No murder weapon or root cause buried in the grief of childhood. It’s just a man, dead. And I am the one who did for him. But why are these dreams accelerating? Why do they keep coming over and over, and more so of late? I’ve tried all manner of sense-making techniques, most of which are folksy insight made digital based on… who knows what. I feel little sense of anxiety in real life, and my days are relatively calm. It’s not the breaking of reality into dreams as the psychologists might seek to argue. It’s not that the dreams are pages of the book of one’s life, skimmed backwards and forth through the night. But it is the consistent waking experience of realizing that you didn’t do it after all. Perhaps our dreams aren’t where we live out our fantasies, but where we say goodbye to aspects of our lives. Amorphous characters become allegory and metaphor for the things we’ve thankfully moved on from. The relief which comes from waking providing closure on yet another previous chapter as we struggle to remember the vanishing traces of the dream’s final moments.
Is this just how it is now? The reproducible dream not something I do, but something I am? Waking forces me to be at peace with what happened, despite what feels like the hours before of anxious avoidance and the terror of discovery. A man lies dead just as much as I lie flat under the covers. We are echoes of each other, mirrored in life and death. I wish him back to life in order to end the anxiety. He wishes me awake to do the same. Neither of us get what we want.
