So, I wanna do something I don’t normally do. For some reason today, don’t ask me what that reason is cause I don’t know, I wanna talk about dreams. Now, not only do I not normally talk about dreams, I actively avoid doing it. Hearing someone tell me about their dreams just… I don’t know, I just don’t like it. I could probably sit here and try to analyze my feelings, (“search your feelings Luke”) but nah. I wanna talk about nightmares and, sort of, wonder aloud at mine.
Nightmares as a concept are obviously incredibly undefined, nuanced, and specifically personal. However, when I think of nightmares that other people tell me about they always feel like they would fit into a horror film. There are lots of different types of horror films so I guess I’m failing to combat that undefined aspect. The point is that they just consistently have that feeling. Here’s an example, a nightmare I heard someone tell recently, “I had a dream where I was looking at my dog and she turned to the side and suddenly she was a like a half centipede half dog thing. She started scuttling up the walls and I just started screaming. I woke up all tense.”
I guess I didn’t do anywhere near a good job describing what I think of when I think “Nightmares.” Let me instead try to approach it from the other side. I don’t think I really have nightmares like that. You see, I’m never falling from a great height, being hunted, attacked, tortured, or humiliated. I’m never being made fun of by my peers or flubbing some presentation at work. I’m never having these moments where something great is happening and then suddenly the people I with turn into monsters. My loved ones don’t die in my dreams, they never even appear to be honest. All the things that normally happen in other people’s nightmares don’t happen in my dreams.
But, am I saying I don’t have nightmares at all? No, I think I might have them but let me describe them to you and I guess you’ll have to decide for yourself how nightmarish these dreams are. Before I do I want make clear that while I think these are my own versions of nightmares they could never be described as emotionally painful or anything. I have dreams like this maybe a couple times a year and they don’t bother me when I have them but these dreams are the closest I come to “nightmares”, in my opinion.
So, in these dreams I’m always in a public place but I’m never the focus of attention or anything like that. For example I might be walking around a college campus, a normal, everyday college campus with normal people walking around doing normal things. I’m simply walking from one class to another. Now the weird stuff comes in when I’m put in a situation that everyone else around me thinks is normal but gives me a problem. So, for example, I’ll be walking up some stairs and for some reason the ceiling of the stairwell starts to get really low, like, I have to take off my backpack to squeeze through the ample but confusing gap. The gap never snaps shut on me. I never get stuck. I just approach it, don’t understand it, and look around to see everyone else being slightly inconvenienced by my hesitation. Then I go through and I just try to finish my walk to class without worrying too much about that one thing that was obviously really weird to me but normal to everyone else.
Another example might be that I have to use the restroom but the restroom is weird. There’s no blood flowing from the walls or serial killers anywhere. I don’t walk in and suddenly everyone else stares at me the whole time. It’s just that the bathroom is a little weird. Maybe the bathroom is really big with lots of stalls, or the little divider walls between urinals are in weird positions, or there’s some weird kind of fancy urinal I’ve never seen before and everyone else is using normally. I just kind of awkwardly try to suss my way through whatever quirky thing is going on, take care of my business and leave.
These are the closest things to nightmares I have. I mean, i think the meaning of them is pretty obvious. It’s a common experience for me to see the world around me in a way that everyone else doesn’t see. It’s also very common, and honestly troubling, for the thing alone notice to make next to no sense to me. There are many aspects of society and life that feel off putting and wrong to me that everyone else just seem completely accustomed to. These moments make me feel abnormal but they also give me a little bit of hopelessness or confusion because I feel like if I turned to the person next to me and said, “Hey, this stairwell is really weird right?” they would just look at me as if I was the only weird thing around.
So, there’s no real question about what these dreams mean or why I might have them. The question is, are these nightmares? I mean, no matter how weird the situation is nothing actually “bad” ever happens. Nobody dies, I don’t get yelled at, there’s a happy lack of centipede-dog hybrids scuttling on walls. Do these fit into the classification of nightmare? Or, maybe some other classification.
The theory I’m currently choosing is that the “bad” things happening in the dream are that I’m the only one that notices. I’m the kind of person that isn’t very scared of getting hit by a car, or sharks, or killer clowns or something like that. My fears in my life typically stem from what I fear for others and my biggest fear for others is that they’ve normalized in their lives something that, if looked at objectively, or even just anew, would be obvious as unhealthy or bad.
Maybe, what I’m most afraid of is that there are people who are so normalized to something obviously terrible or idiotic that if I was ever to turn to them and say, “Hey, why are you doing that? Why do you care about that? Why is no one doing something about this thing?” they would simply look back at me with a complete lack of understanding of what I was talking about. At best they would just walk on due to apathy. I mean at least if they’re apathetic it makes sense for them to just not look at what I see.
At worst they start to try to help me, as if I’m the one who needs to hear, “Why do you think this way?” I mean, that would mean they’re trying to do what makes sense, they’re trying to look at things objectively the way I think I am. Apathy towards the truth is easy to deal with and even easier to understand but full belief and rationalization of what’s false is only a half step away from conflict, especially in our day and age where being incorrect is seen as a weakness or a failure. That type of encounter takes some small amount of hope away from me as it reinforces the sheer scope of people’s distance from the truth.
Maybe the much more important possibility for why that conflict scares me is because it means that people being completely incorrect in their concept of the truth is just a normal thing and the more normal it is then the more possible it is for me to be one of those people. After all, I’m a human being just like everyone else and if I’m the only one seeing the world in a certain way then, from the all powerful Empirical Perspective, I’m the one that’s wrong. Now, I’m well aware that the empirical truth is significantly over praised in today’s world. I’m not as worried as I might make it sound that I’m the one that’s wrong but it still might be my biggest fear.
Or maybe the truth isn’t that it’s my biggest fear. Optimistically, there’s a chance it’s just my only fear.
The Mind of Joshypoo 