All I Think of Is What I Look Like in Your Dreams
We love to say that no one really wants to hear about your dreams. We tell jokes about this all the time: how our insufferable work acquaintance cornered us in the break room to tell us they dreamed about driving endlessly without being able to find their house or seeing their third-grade teacher turn into a purple seashell with wings and flying off into the sun. How little we want to hear our friend prattle on about themselves over the phone. Maybe our annoyance with these dream stories comes from the fact that sometimes we don’t even want to acknowledge our own. I’ve grown so tired of my dreams that I stopped making note of them in my journal, which previously held every nightmare I’d experienced since 2016. Instead, I wake up and let the night’s memories dissipate as I check my horoscope, hoping signs of the future will obliterate whatever I just saw. I turn up the brightness on my phone and read sideways, resting my head on my left arm: Your confidence and fire are rising, Aries. There are parts of you that will want to be in the spotlight, and you should deliver them all the applause you think they deserve. The universe needs you so desperately, Aries. Tell them what you want to say.
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Because it’s so ubiquitous in American culture, you can find people asserting the obnoxiousness of dream-recounting in every avenue from personal blogs and social media to science journalism.[1] A quick Google search will show you a range of responses: that complaining about others’ dreams shows a lack of empathy, or that actually the dream-tellers are the selfish ones. And maybe the most interesting response: that many of us want to confess our dreams to our loved ones but restrain ourselves, self-congratulating for our ability not to be a burden for a few minutes of conversation.
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I suppose I’m representative of my generation in my hodgepodge pursuit of healing and truth — variously sourced from legitimate therapy as well as books, tarot readings, and a half-formed understanding of my star chart. The internet clearly knows this about me: for years I’ve been fed Instagram posts from millennial pseudo-therapist influencers despite my constant attempts to adjust the algorithm away from them, like trying to train a ceaselessly independent dog. Perhaps my disdain for this genre of social media is outsized. Perhaps I just naturally meet the idea that I should care for myself with my teeth gnashed, like a friend once suggested by comparing me to a fox inching towards the food offered in a kind human’s hand.
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Some basic problems of the mental health media ecosystem are perhaps obvious, from the glut of misinformation[2] to the encouragement of (often faulty) self-diagnosis.[3] But lately, I’ve found myself more concerned by the number of posts that ask me to assume everyone who’s hurt or neglected me is a narcissist, that assure me I care too much for everyone and anyone I feel isn’t giving me enough attention is an abuser, an energy vampire, toxic. Each time one of these posts pops up as “suggested” to me, I feel my heart quicken for a minute, seduced by the message: Yes, I am a perfect, selfless person. Yes, everyone else must simply not care about me enough. Yes, that’s the reason for life’s unfair treatment of me. Each time I snap out of it, I feel flushed, ashamed. This language wants us to inject every interaction with a sign that we’re always focused on other people — no matter how much we do want to talk about ourselves and our own lives. It feels less like a guide for offering genuine care to others and more like a strategy for presenting the appearance of selflessness — whether we polish this self-image to convince our Instagram followers or the versions of ourselves we encounter in the mirror.
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Dreams, then, would have to be the most selfish communication possible in this worldview. Of course, other words to replace selfish might be intimate or personal, but sharing our deep inner selves — just for the sake of sharing them — holds no value in a social economy that aims to publicly prove how much we give to others, how little we take. (A word that’s often floating around those influencers’ posts but is never quite uttered is debt. Any moment we’re seen not giving is a moment we could be accused of owing someone.) There’s no room for sharing our dreams in this space, because, after all, dreams are the most literal example of our brains only thinking of ourselves.
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The less-discussed phrase that we tend to love hearing is: I had a dream about you last night. Listening to someone else’s dream can be like asking them to guess your astrological sign: letting them explain what they think of your deepest, most intrinsic self as they measure their impressions of you in celestial bodies. My friend Lena once texted everyone we know — scattered across thousands of miles — in dread over a nightmare I appeared in, needing to know I was okay. (To this day, I still don’t know what happened to me in her dream.) I don’t remember what I said in response, wasn’t sure if I should take this dream-world I’d unwittingly entered as a cipher for my past or an omen for the near future, or no sign at all. I’m fine, I must have told everyone and must have believed, before going about my day, going out to get coffee, meeting up with the person who always saw me as a bleeding bird, needing. Who said they’d never seen me doing well but thought they could make me feel okay finally. Sure I smiled, thinking how fortunate I must be to have people care for me so relentlessly.
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When Stevie Nicks sings in “Dreams” that players only love you when they’re playing, the words are so teeth-clenchingly true that we allow ourselves to forget thunder does in fact happen without rain, sometimes.[4] Nicks’s songwriting voice offers a quality not often conferred to pop music, a genre derided for its supposedly facile treatment of teenage-girl emotional realities: her words feel like a prophecy, a cryptic message that defies the physical realities of our world but nonetheless feels true. So when Nicks sings of love and thunder in two shared breaths, it’s like dream logic itself: the incredible makes itself everyday, the true statement makes the untrue statement possible, and the universe exists without impossibility for just a minute.
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I’ve only experienced sleep paralysis once in my life. A lot of people endure this haunting regularly, often with a demon or mysterious old femme menacing at the foot of their bed. David Hufford’s book on the subject, The Terror That Comes in the Night, begins with the phrase: No commonly accepted term exists in modern English for the experience.[5] The appearance of this ominous figure is distressingly consistent across cultures, times, and places. Yet, as Hufford points out, there is no socially acceptable way to speak it into reality despite so many people experiencing it. (Or it’s unacceptable to speak the possibility loudly enough to ask others to listen to you, to believe.) For me, though, there was never any Old Hag. Only myself, my body refusing to respond when I asked an arm to move, told a shoulder to roll over and start the day. I assumed this must be what a stroke feels like. I thought only of the days and days of COVID pandemic isolation it would take for someone to notice their unanswered messages, the further days taken to visit my apartment and find out for themselves. Three weeks I thought, at least, before anyone would notice I hadn’t responded, before enough people reached out to receive my silence. I thought this with no room for bitterness, at the time, or even self-pity — only the deep prickling animal terror of danger with no way to flee or fight, knowing my body had been ripped from me, on its way to becoming a red-brown stain on my mattress that wouldn’t wash out. I woke up, though. As always. The bedroom looked the same, sunrise at the same height. At my brain’s fresh command, I stretched out each miraculous finger on its own, cracked my knees and wrists, and wept.
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I don’t know if it was a good thing or a bad thing that the COVID pandemic lockdowns hit about a year into my gender transition, since the process requires a monumental feat of listening to your thoughts and feelings while trying to reject outside narratives the world has told you about yourself. Transition is one of those realities of your body and identity that no one can discover for you, although the entire outside world loves to tell you how impossible and unbelievable it is. Incredulity can be incredibly violent. But every impossibility is borne out of an unspeakable possibility. Convincing everyone you are not the person, not the gender they built up on your body, feels like a lifelong paralysis nightmare. You tell your hair to grow, your jaw or your trachea to shave down, and they look back and tell you No. You tell your hand to move to your lips, your eyelashes to flutter, and they tell you No. Not if we didn’t tell you to first. Not without permission. They don’t have to raise a hand against you if they find a body that can’t move on its own.
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Imagining how others would respond to your death sounds like care on the surface: concern for them, unconcern for yourself. Always thinking of how everyone else would feel. I don’t think this was ever the case for me. I think, like all our dreams, my fear was more concerned with the role I had to played in everyone else’s story. For a long, isolated time, I worried that not one person wakes up and thinks of me first, knowing even as I spoke this dark thought aloud, alone, that this is a terrible way to measure care. I knew in my chest what a hurtful (and honestly incorrect) accusation this would be against the people in my life, had I allowed this thought to follow me out of bed. I just stared at my ceiling, unable to imagine any future for myself that sounded likely or desirable at all, deciding that if my own dreams couldn’t stomach any good thoughts about me or my body, then the best version of myself must have been banished from everyone else’s dreams, too.
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Walking through a park once, they told me how glad they were to have me, how I would surely always be there even though everyone else would leave them sooner or later. My skin crawled. I smiled, nodded. At the time, I figured my fear just meant the responsibility of caring for someone else, tending to their needs and wounds around the clock, was too scary and I was too immature to take it on. I think of this conversation years later, lying on my bathroom floor, trying to find some rest in my un-air-conditioned apartment. Years later, they screamed past my head at the swan boats on the pond, claiming they’d never spent a moment of their life doing anything other than supporting me. That I didn’t even care about them, had never done enough for them. That I only thought of myself. Okay, I said. I’m sorry, I said. I never wanted you to feel that way, I do care about you, if that’s how you’re feeling it must mean I don’t show it enough. I’m sorry, really. I felt my tail tucking between my legs, my belly bared to show submission. And it worked: after a while we moved on, finally speaking of calmer everyday things. Books. Museums. Old relationships. It felt fine, comfortable even. When I got home I lay on my right side and retched bilelessly in the bathtub for an hour. My body blocked the drain long enough that the water rose, cold like a threat. Like all dreams, I knew how to wait for this one to pass. You always wake up sooner or later.
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Like everyone, I want to hear others’ dreams about me. I don’t just want their dreams to exist, I want them confessed to me. I want to feel our dreams flattened between our tongues.
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One of my favorite lyrics of all time is in the climactic section of Broken Social Scene’s “Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl.” The song relentlessly repeats its vocal lines throughout three sections — as if the listener would forget halfway through the verse what they mean, as if we wouldn’t trust the singer if she didn’t tell us again and again what she really wanted to say. Emily Haines sings much of the song in a sort of whisper-rasp but builds in such a way that her voice sits right at the edge of needing effort, needing real breath. The song’s speaker feels like they’re holding back, afraid of revealing how much they really care about what they have to say. The third section is phrased in imperatives: Drop that phone, Sleep on the floor. It’s the last command that sticks with me, though: Dream about me.[6] The longer I think about dreams, the surer I am that this is what most of us want to ask for. (And what is so impossible to ask, to want of somebody.) I always assumed the speaker of the song was gay and reaching out to another teenage girl, yearning for a different body or different desires, any Rubik’s reconfiguration of flesh and name that would make wanting not so excruciating. But searching online, I realized most people, probably rightly, interpret this whole song as an auto-anthem sung to a younger version of oneself.[7] What sounded to me like a one-who-got-away song was likely always a letter to oneself. It’s just that the lyrics sound so tender, so upsettingly affectionate — perhaps my own misreading is owed to the fact that I couldn’t possibly imagine someone talking to themself in this way.
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It's hard to describe how bad being misgendered feels. Hard, in part, because there are so many physical, material violences that get enacted against people in this community that the occasional linguistic violence feels almost like luck, like the price you have to pay and be happy with. Although I have been threatened with physical violence on the basis of my gender, I still know Black trans women and other trans people of color make up the vast majority of victims of violence, so it’s hard to complain about being called he in a situation when I am then allowed to walk out of the CVS with my life, when I can escape to another room for five minutes safe from my biological family’s misreading of my body. So many queer and trans kids are put out of housing, and I’ve been lucky (I tell myself) to socially transition in my twenties, with enough income to keep up with my own rent, so there was never a question of relenting to my family’s wishes or willingness to understand. A little he can’t matter that much amidst all of this. (I tell myself.) If I were more honest, I’d say that each little slip-up of misgendering carries with it all the weight of belief, an intoxicating, lifesaving promise that can be withheld anytime someone wants to withhold it. Every time someone calls me he, even on accident, what my body catches is the threat, the accusation, the decision: we don’t believe you. Our eyes have invaded your chest, our ears have snuck into your throat and found something there that we will use to overpower you. More often than I care to admit, I catch myself making excuses for others: telling myself that they and she are just too difficult of words for them to handle, that it’s understandable they’d get it wrong. I tell myself it doesn’t matter that much and you can’t expect better from cis people, because if I tell myself the truth, the screaming I hear coming from nowhere will turn out to be me, like the noisy pipe in your walls that has been crying for longer than you can remember by the time you finally notice it.
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Still, I see this person in dreams, now and again. Their hands are sticky. Their smile a blunt edge. No matter how many times I tell my body to turn and run from them, it won’t listen. The night will last for all time. I reach for a phone, a line back to reality, and my hand passes through it. I see in my mind’s eye all the people who told me I had to get out of there, and they stand sneering, turning their backs on my noiseless, undeserving cries. My molars explode and crumble out of my mouth, and the porcelain dawn sits forever on the verge of breaking.
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Really, doesn’t a huge part of the sentiment No one wants to hear your dreams also stem from the assumption that everyone who turns a dream into a story must be lying? At least exaggerating? A relevant question is why we care that we’re being fooled. Most people tell stories of their waking lives with embellishments, yet we don’t have the same ire for these tweaked retellings as we do for dreams. It’s interesting that we treat real life as contingent on our belief in it, right? But, after all, what else do we have to go on?
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What’s nice about dreams — even though people hate hearing them, even though people may often exaggerate them — is that no one can take their reality from you. When we’re talking about our dreams, accusations of dishonesty have no proof, no leg to stand on. Even correct accusations are, at their core, assumptions or guesses rather than fact supported by any evidence. It’s all in our heads, after all.
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Upon learning of my coming out, this person sent me headlines about trans people about once a month. They never sent me any info I hadn’t already read, and maybe I should have pointed this out, but I overlooked this fact. After all, the gesture was well-intentioned, it seemed, so it shouldn’t matter that these articles never helped me in reality. Each time, I texted back, Thanks so much! I thought they must surely care a lot about me, because no one else I knew made such a big show of their allyship. What I felt in these gestures at the time was the distance between this treatment and the incredulous misgendering that was so constant among strangers, coworkers, family. Even now, I feel almost indebted to anyone who speaks to me in the most basic gender-affirming way, because for most cis people — well-meaning or not — just believing in your identity or believing in your transition is too much to ask. When one person tells you no one else will see you for who you are, will learn your real name, will treat you so well as they do, will ever believe you, you begin to think that person is the beginning and end of all belief.
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Some people sense when someone needs support the same way a wolf notices a break in the gate, a point of entry the flock hasn’t even imagined yet. How grateful I was, for someone to care enough to scale some of those walls I built in the dead of night. How beautiful the moon may seem, sharply gleaming on smiling teeth.
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It’s worth considering that so much media encourages us to think our interpretation of others’ real-life trauma matters, that if we do a good enough job and pay attention we’ll be able to perceive who the real bad guy is. If we do a good enough job at noticing all the right evidence, it seems, our correct opinion will get the bad guy locked away forever and justice will be served. If we learn what the heroine of the story did wrong in placing her trust and vulnerability, then we’ll be perfectly safe because we’ll know not to make the same mistakes. George Larke-Walsh writes of armchair jurors, noting that audiences are trained to think of real-life investigations as a whodunnit narrative where the fun is assuming any of the characters could be guilty.[8] All that’s left is for us, the viewers, to collect enough evidence to decide our beliefs are correct and we know the whole story — despite, of course, never knowing the people involved, never seeing any evidence with our own eyes.
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Half the time I dream, it’s in movie-script beats. My least favorite form of these dreams mimics those horror movies where the audience sees that a slasher threatens to slice the heroine in half at every turn but none of the men believe her. The cops say she has nothing to worry about, her friends get annoyed that she won’t let it go. The authorities have her committed, call her crazy. And as we all know will happen, the blade-wielder appears in the asylum shadows. They find her in the final, safest place, just as we’ve known they would all along. I’ve hated this sort of narrative motion since I was a kid, even in non-horror movies: the victim being framed, the ulterior motives of the disbelievers. To be fair, Carol Clover suggests these movies actually encourage audiences to identify with the femme victim character, despite the troubling optics of watching all this violence enacted against women.[9] Even in my own nightmares I never know where to place myself in these stories, or if I deserve the sympathetic, identifying gaze. We’re told the transfemmes are always the serial killers, after all, not the heroine triumphantly fighting her way out.[10] And what’s more, every stalker and manipulator I’ve ever known in real life has been entirely convinced they were the victim. Half the time I dream, right before I wake up, I’m the one holding the bloody knife, the rope, with no memory of hurting anyone but knowing, The evidence in my own hands must mean I did it, right?
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As much as I’m an amateur, I often have a hard time convincing my friends that I don’t know much about astrology or tarot or witchcraft: I’m just aware enough to follow the planets’ plot for my own life. At the most recent queer birthday dinner, I was gifted someone’s palm across the table, and I pretended my sheepishness was humility and not ignorance. I said I could see clearly because they clearly wanted to be seen. Their life and love lines were both very strong. I told them this, and they believed me, and everyone was happy. I went home later and Googled palmistry maps in bed: I’d been almost right, but I mixed up the two threads of the future in my head.
//
I stopped sharing personal accomplishments with them many years ago, because I saw how viciously they spoke of our other friends when anything good happened in their careers, their relationships. (No, even that’s not totally true: I did try to keep sharing my own joys with them, for a while. And they always changed the subject, ignored me entirely. Or sneered, It would be nice if anyone ever offered me opportunities like that.) It just makes me feel like shit, they told me of everyone’s successes. I just don’t understand why no one appreciates me, they said frequently. I’m sorry, I said. That’s tough, you don’t deserve to feel that way. I appreciate you, I promise. I started to catalogue all the good things that happened for me and let them sit like stones at the back of my throat, called this act something like mercy. Some days, I think I buried more good down there than I can ever excavate. I sit at the mouth with a headlamp, and the cave goes so deep the light dwindles in mist before I can see the bottom. Later, when I bring these conversations to light, they refuse to believe any of their own words. They’ll insist that this doesn’t make sense, that surely they wouldn’t have said or done these things even once, nonetheless all the time. And I won’t know what to say to that — after all, we can’t see down far enough to find where those moments landed. The bulb flickers, goes out. Where no one can find a body, no one can make a case.
//
I do some background research with the aim of reminding myself how long the average dream lasts. I think I’ve heard that even when a dream feels like a full day, it lasts just a few seconds, or maybe it’s 90 minutes? In searching, I find the sentence, “Dream content research relies on self-reported information, which can be unreliable.”[11] I stare at this line for a long time, like it’s telling me something I’ve heard once before. I stare so long I forget what I’ve been looking for.
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In Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick says erasing the pasts of queer people is a way of denying their futures as well. Sedgwick calls the denial of our history a logic of Don’t ask; You shouldn’t know. Sedgwick’s vision of this bigotry is incredibly similar to other forms of manipulative logic, where the claim that It didn’t happen leads straight to the admission: Okay, maybe it did happen. But it didn’t mean anything . . . it makes no difference.[12] What Sedgwick points to here is the American cultural impulse to appeal to white, Western ideas of logical thought — assuming logic to be more real than impressions, feelings, affinities — even as a close examination of this logic reveals it to be inconsistent at best, targeted hate at worst. For me, proving bigots wrong by their own logic tends to be a hollow victory. (After all, Sedgwick’s point is that it’s a victory they don’t acknowledge even if you are right, even if you do play by their rules.) But I am fascinated by these moments that reveal our guiding evidence to be emotional, that reveal our certainties to lie elsewhere, far from where we’re told to look.
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Believing is often a choice, yet it’s a choice we say reflects evidence and reality so we don’t have to take responsibility for those beliefs. On one hand, belief can imply faith in the absence of logic or evidence: religious beliefs, feelings about ghosts and the supernatural. But trusting certain kinds of evidence over others is belief, too. Belief is a door slammed shut regardless of the evidence or logic underlying it. Teaching folklore and horror stories, I frequently tell my students to avoid research questions like Are ghosts real? or Do you believe in Bigfoot? Beyond being relatively unprovable, these questions create binary camps of believers and non-believers: in each camp, we suddenly have an emotional stake in the question, and we become more interested in defending our beliefs than remaining open. I’m far more interested in why we believe in ghosts. I’m far more interested in what goes through our brains in the moments we try to convince ourselves we don’t believe in them.
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I keep telling myself my dreams probably mean nothing. I keep stripping out memories and dreams and leaving them locked in the comments section of this file. (Too self-centered, I write, cringing later at my own lack of generosity. Not enough of a story to keep the reader’s interest.) My friend Su writes of her own words and mourning, Every start to this essay feels selfish, so I delete it, then force myself to put it back.[13] I don’t know if she realizes that her own kindness and her willingness to believe me saved my life, that I probably wouldn’t be here without her belief in me. I draft this sentiment in a text message every once in a while and usually erase it. I wait for a moment to show how much I care about her that doesn’t feel like it’s making everything about me. The flowers we used to gift each other when we were sad soaked up a desperate gratitude in the city water we used to stave off their dying. I still use the makeup Su gave me when she moved, dust glittery shades of her over my eyes to start most mornings. The feeling dissipates but never disappears.
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If you research pointedly enough — if you’re desperate enough — you can find a text that justifies your actions and feelings, no matter what you’re feeling or what you’ve done. This also means you can find an influencer justifying your actions as self-care, no matter how much you’ve hurt the people close to you. You can also search until you find the confirmation that the most hurtful people in your life were right about you all along. On every side, this research into truth becomes a decision we must choose to make. We often assume belief reflects a static, universal version of reality: the things we think are just natural, just the way the world is. But believing, so much of the time, is a desire. If someone says, I don’t believe you, they’re not asking for more evidence, or even asking to be convinced: they’re telling you that they don’t want to believe you and they’ve already decided you’re lying. Or you’re delusional, making up your own things to believe in. Do we feel like disbelieving others somehow protects us, like making such an accusation about others’ stories and dreams deflects suspicion from our own? Don’t we all just want to feel protected?
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In the song, “Chinese Satellite,” Phoebe Bridgers wryly quotes The X-Files’ famous catchphrase[14] about the existence of UFOs, a phrase the songwriter allows to refer to both spaceships and god: “I want to believe.” The speaker needs, desperately, to believe in both themself and a vision of the universe that unfolds the way they want it to. Yet Bridgers follows this with, “instead I look at the sky and I feel nothing.”[15] Sometimes wanting to believe is the entirety of belief.
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I give up. Finally, I relent. I can’t sleep, so I type the words toxic and narcissist into my phone’s search bar and try to find the people who will tell me the worst things possible about me. I find the Instagram posts pandering to empaths looking to heal their openness, their vulnerability, and I imagine a version of myself as their opposite — the reflection of me with the sharpest teeth, the most glowing malicious eyes. If I’m a terrible, harmful person, then there are things about myself I can fix, and this knowledge is oddly calming. If I was always wrong and I should have handled all my relationships differently, then I can identify those mistakes and never make them again. There is a certain safety in this worldview. If I am a victim of harm, though — if this harm wasn’t my fault in some way I can pinpoint — then nothing I do can ever keep me protected. Then, I can’t watch the true crime show to learn tips for avoiding murderers or possessive partners, I can’t learn to anticipate which people are unsafe to be alone with. There is no help, no safety or future to be found in the admission that someone has hurt me: so I refuse. They were right about me all along, I tell myself. I was making up everything they supposedly did and said to me. I just wanted attention. I was just ungrateful, choosing to ignore all the nice things they did for me. The problem wasn’t the way they treated me, but rather my inability to get over it. They never made me feel so undeserving of love that I spent all evening sitting in a hotel room shower, not noticing how untenably hot it was until my skin started peeling the next day. When they called me a child, said I was acting like a dog lashing out at them for no intelligent reason, I really didn’t have the energy to disagree. Yes, of course. I’m a dog, a dumb disobedient animal. I deserve sympathy and care like the pets on the Humane Society commercials, but not the same believability you’re supposed to confer to humans. No: humans are clever enough to know what’s good for them.
//
In one shining, brutal moment, I did indeed express myself perfectly. Once. For once — after several attempts rejected — I said everything I needed to say to them, with facts, with clear memories. Words verbatim. I said everything I needed them to hear and understand, if I was going to stay. I did everything right, just this one brave time. And all they chose to hear was barking, my canines bared in the silvery polish of a mirror. Too dumb to know I’m arguing with no one, they’d probably put it — I had let the snickering humans trick me into lunging at an image of myself. The truth is: I’ve rarely been hurt by someone who really needed to raise a fist against me. They don’t have to hit you if they set that mirror down and step just behind it. They’ll sneer at your face shattering against the plated glass sooner than they’ll admit to placing the barrier between you and them. In the days and months following, I inevitably blame myself more than the mirror, more than the knowing hand holding it. Because you’re a dog, I can hear in my brain. Don’t bite the hand that feeds, no matter how rancid the morsels. You were lucky just to be picked, to be saved from the shelter, to be cared for by anyone. Look at yourself: you’re just lucky to have a home, and someone who cares so much.
//
I wandered around the city for weeks — dissociated, paranoid, troubling gaps appearing in my daily memory — before I finally burst out crying on the bus and couldn’t stop, through all of downtown in rush hour, all the way home, falling to all fours on my marine-blue living room rug, snapping out of it later when the sun had almost gone down. My phone and my mailbox were the only things that reminded me, assured me, that there were people outside of my apartment who weren’t filled with venomous fangs. I think about this day a year later: Erin sends me a care package with wish-papers and a short ritual for speaking energy into them and lighting them on fire, plucking the gauzy ashes from the air before they hit the ground. Again, I’m no real witch, but the directions are clear and learning them makes me feel like I can control what’s about to happen. This is how I tell the future what I think it should be. I come close to wasting all my wishes on the past. Wishing for a different past has made me so tired, yet I can’t stop. The thought occurs to me that this act of recounting makes me less like a final girl walking into the safety of sunrise and more like a ghost reciting events, half-believing the story will have changed if I can haunt someone else with it. I run through the past anyway, trying to find a way out, thinking I’ll heal everyone if I can uncover the correct history of this house, the true name of the spirit infecting it. Lately, it seems this retelling is not the antidote, but the poisoned wound. I consider writing all my wishes down just to keep them straight, to make sure I make the right decision. But I resist unleashing the words because I know there’s no surer way to curtail your dreams for the future. I sit in my bathtub with a cigarette lighter and watch these hopes take flight, one by one.
//
I can’t tell if writing a personal essay is the most protected or the most vulnerable position I could put myself in. I have control of this story, right? No one else can tell me what to include, what to leave out, how to tell you about this dream. The first version of this essay was written entirely in second-person, filled with pleas for belief, and I deleted them all. I wrote with all the desperation of someone who knows, before they’ve even begun to speak, that the listener doesn’t believe the story being recounted. Now, I make myself a vanity mirror and stare, wondering what dreams I’d like to speak to myself. Some days, gender dysphoria wins out, but sometimes now, I ask myself to say I’m the most beautiful creature I’ve seen in my whole life — and there are days I believe it, my laughlines reflexively creasing in a gesture that looks something like love. Now, I just keep listening to all the pop songs I can think of that mention dreams, hoping that one of them will be able to say whatever I haven’t been brave enough to.
//
I type out the question, Will I be worth loving, believing, if I don’t ask anyone to believe me at all? I’ll always be waiting for the answer, I fear — no, I realize. If I allow myself, for every believer I believe in, I will see the others forming like an armada on the red horizon, a storm nearing with the wind. As long as there are horizons, there are men, storms, threats that could be beyond them.
//
Like music, part of the medium of storytelling is time itself. If we’re honest, there is no true pausing, and all going back requires repeating, retelling, relistening. I reboot my old mostly-dead phone to remind myself of the text chains full of my friends’ reassurances — that this relationship was unhealthy for me and I wasn’t wrong to feel that way. Restarting the device takes half an hour, and I hold my breath lest I jostle the charger and have to start over. I go back, though I can only trace the signs that are frozen, timestamped on a screen — I can’t place where my body was, how it got from here to there. I stare at my last phone calls, two or three hours long apiece. I would like to replay them, but I can’t. I go back to find the oldest horoscopes on Chani Nicholas’ website, and they happen to begin on that exact day I’m looking for. The site tells me that in my rising sign, co-conspirators offer an abundance of connection, a curriculum of wisdom, and a celebration of all you’re building together. My eyes unfocus on the real guidance and just devour the verbs: Follow, Discover, Trust, Trust, Trust.[16] I stopped writing down all my nightmares back then. This came after months of waking up crying and gasping from dreams I couldn’t recall in the slightest. (These were the most difficult dreams to reread — all feelings and out-of-focus shapes, never quite finding the real thing that happened.) Now, I return to them. In the last nightmare journal entry I can find, to my surprise, I’d finally remembered what had happened. No confusion, no self-questioning or doubt, just the events spelled out clear as day, all written down, labeled by date and circled in purple ink. It seemed so obvious, in hindsight, though I’d somehow forgotten the nightmare in the intervening year. And it was the simplest story you could imagine. On that morning, I had woken up and wept, and for the first time I fell back to sleep.
//
We’ve learned Saturn is losing its rings, darling — we tell you this at almost the moment the planet is done returning to you.[17] You always knew this adornment was an illusion, always saw yourself as the glowing morsels of rock and water circling in and out of the sun. Trust your intuition, my love, for you know abundance may flow in the planet’s shadow as well as the light. In both the night and the day, know your motion will continue, waking alongside all other beings and things. You never know who might need you, and what you have to say to the world.
[1] Jim Davies, “Why You Shouldn't Tell People about Your Dreams,” Scientific American, May 9, 2017, https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/why-you-shouldnt-tell-people-about-your-dreams/.
[2] Vicky Spratt, “The Danger of Instagram Therapists (& What Real Therapists Think of Them),” Refinery29, April 20, 2022, https://www.refinery29.com/en-gb/2021/01/10237732/mental-health-therapy-instagram-accounts.
[3] Tatum Hunter, “Online creators are de facto therapists for millions. It’s complicated,” The Washington Post, August 29, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/08/29/mental-health-tiktok-instagram/.
[4] Fleetwood Mac, “Dreams,” recorded 1976, track 2 on Rumours, Warner Bros. Records, 1977, vinyl.
[5] David J. Hufford, The Terror That Comes in the Night: An Experience-Centered Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1982), ix.
[6] Broken Social Scene, “Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl,” track 7 on You Forgot It in People, Arts & Crafts Productions and Paper Bag Records, 2003, CD.
[7] “Broken Social Scene — ‘Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl’ Lyrics,” Genius, accessed August 9, 2022, https://genius.com/Broken-social-scene-anthems-for-a-seventeen-year-old-girl-lyrics.; “The 200 Greatest Songs by 21st Century Women+,” NPR online, July 30, 2018, https://www.npr.org/2018/07/30/627398980/turning-the-tables-the-200-greatest-songs-by-21st-century-women-part-7.
[8] George S. Larke-Walsh, “The Armchair Juror: Audience Engagement in True Crime Documentaries,” in Reclaiming Popular Documentary, ed. Christie Milliken and Steve F. Anderson (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2021), 345-47.
[9] Carol J. Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992), 8.
[10] Mey Rude, “Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Trans Woman?: On Horror and Transfemininity,” Autostraddle, October 8, 2013, https://www.autostraddle.com/whos-afraid-of-the-big-bad-trans-woman-on-horror-and-transfemininity-198212/.
[11] Jay Summer, “How Long Do Dreams Last?,” Sleep Foundation, March 11, 2022, https://www.sleepfoundation.org/dreams/how-long-do-dreams-last.
[12] Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1990), 53.
[13] Su Cho, “Su Cho on Beginning Her Poetic Journey,” Literary Hub, November 14, 2022, https://lithub.com/su-cho-on-beginning-her-poetic-journey/.
[14] The X-Files, season 1, episode 1, “Pilot,” directed by Robert Mandel, written by Chris Carter, aired September 10, 1993, https://www.hulu.com/watch/c8758588-3d2a-4c24-b050-bcf0d6c72f81.
[15] Phoebe Bridgers, “Chinese Satellite,” track 6 on Punisher, Dead Oceans, 2020, streaming.
[16] “Aquarius Free Daily Horoscope — August 17, 2022,” Chani, August 17, 2022, https://chaninicholas.com/aquarius-free-daily-horoscope-august-17-2022/.
[17] Bill Steigerwald and Nancy Jones, “NASA Research Reveals Saturn is Losing Its Rings at ‘Worst-Case-Scenario’ Rate,” NASA Solar System Exploration, December 17, 2018, https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/news/794/nasa-research-reveals-saturn-is-losing-its-rings-at-worst-case-scenario-rate/.