My wife is far less analytical than I. She is more likely to look at an occurrence and say, “Some things just happen.” I am more likely to insist that there is a reason for everything and then grind my brain away on the question of what that reason might be. I analyze. I examine. I explore.
That exploration takes place even in my sleep. I have dreams about places that I’ve never been to—places that don’t exist in the real world, but are as vivid and real as any place I’ve been. Cities. Houses. Fields and forests. I even return to them in later dreams and they remain the same—the same buildings and streets, just as I left them.
When I wake, I wonder why I dream the dreams that I do. I think I have some answers. Allow me to take you on a journey through some of these, and to a few other places. Maybe it will prompt you to make similar examinations and find your own insights.
In dreams…
Apocalypse and dystopia
When one looks at Netflix show descriptions, one finds that they use “dystopian” when what they really mean is “post-apocalyptic.” The distinction matters. Brave New World, Gattaca, and 1984 are dystopian. Mad Max is post-apocalyptic.
I have both kinds of dreams.
My dystopian dreams all follow the same basic plot points. I am trying to get away from an oppressive state—some sort of controlled, stultifying dystopia. I must escape the city and get to the forest. The city is a prison. The forest is safe.
Along the way, I must evade, and occasionally fight, government enforcers. I must avoid the prying eyes of others. I crawl through culverts and hide under buses. I run, duck, and shoot. It’s like an action movie. But the goal is always the same: get to the forest. I wake exhausted and stressed.
I also have post-apocalyptic dreams in which I am roaming the wastes in the aftermath of some disaster. These vary more in plot, but they all have a common feature: they don’t stress me out. They actually make me kind of happy. I don’t wake up pining for a lost civilization—I wake up with a feeling of wide-open possibilities.
In short: My dystopian dreams seem like nightmares. My post-apocalyptic dreams don’t. Why might that be?
Giant houses
I have had many dreams in which I am exploring fantastically large houses.
They aren’t clean, opulent mansions with perfectly manicured rooms. They are usually older, and they are always very unique, with strange spaces not typically found in normal houses: An attached warehouse that goes on for hundreds of feet. A house with multiple kitchens or atypical configurations. A middle floor that can only be reached by going to the top floor and then taking a secret staircase down a flight. Often, the houses need work.
I am seeing these either as a prospective home-buyer or as a homesteader of an abandoned place. A few times, I have dreamt not about a house at all, but some factory or empty facility that I am going to turn into a home. The rubble on the floor that I am going to have to clean up isn’t off-putting—it’s exciting. Here is a place that I can make my own.
These dreams make me happy too. I can still see some of these houses in my waking mind, clear as a bell.
Awake…
Abandoned and crumbling places
Long before I started having such dreams, I developed a love of old factories, abandoned buildings, and crumbling industrial areas.
I have been to many such places. The old subway tunnels underneath Rochester, NY, were a fascinating and terrifying standout! The abandoned Victorian mansion in New Haven, CT, which haunted me and my high school friends so much that we had to go back a second time. Old factories. Wastelands.
Obviously I am not the only one—many people love exploring such places. But do they like them for the same reason? I am not sure.
I have always loved the far ends of parking lots—untended and crumbling, with grass and weeds growing through the cracks. I also like the area behind the shopping mall, where no one else is and things seem…uncontrolled and imperfect.
Travel
I love road trips. But even when flying is much more convenient than driving, I still prefer to drive.
When I fly, my destiny is in the hands of Delta Airlines, the TSA, the airport, the FAA, and all the others who run your life when you travel by air.
When I drive, I am in charge and my choices are my own.
Fiction…
Sci-fi
I like sci-fi for the reason I think most people like sci-fi: the possibilities are endless. But I have been gravitating, especially of late, to specific kinds of stories.
I love tales of people colonizing new worlds—a few hundred hardscrabble homesteaders on an otherwise empty planet, making a home. Even if they face terrible dangers, I still find myself wishing for such an open-ended adventure.
I also love sci-fi stories in which people are exploring abandoned and ruined places. Imagine that.
Tolkien and fantasy
For many, myself included, the appeal of fantasy is much the same as sci-fi: anything is possible. But in a recent conversation with a dear friend, I realized that there is something even more specific in it for me, and no one provides it better than J.R.R. Tolkien.
Tolkien didn’t just tell a story—he created a world. There are maps and a history. He tells stories of things that happened in various places and at various times, but not all the stories or places were completely explored. There is an open-endedness to it.
When I was a child, I would look at the map of Middle Earth and think about all the places that didn’t feature in the main stories. What sort of things might have happened there? I could imagine whatever I wanted. I could be there myself, at some obscure place, in some obscure moment in the thousands of years of its history. It wasn’t all known. It wasn’t all done.
Looking around online while in that conversation with my friend, I discovered a quote from Tolkien indicating that he appears to have written his stories (in part at least) for the exact same reason—to give himself an escape to a freer place:
But the special horror of the present world is that the whole damned thing is in one bag. There is nowhere to fly to. Even the unlucky little Samoyedes, I suspect, have tinned food and the village loudspeaker telling Stalin’s bed-time stories about Democracy and the wicked Fascists who eat babies and steal sledge-dogs. There is only one bright spot and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power-stations…
“The whole damned thing is in one bag. There is nowhere to fly to.”
That says it all. Tolkien is lamenting a world that is fully known—where the are no new places to find and everything is controlled. He makes that even clearer by choosing the Samoyeds—a people living in one of the most remote places in the world—and notes that even they live under someone’s thumb. He is so frustrated with the situation, in fact, that he cites rebellious destruction as a ‘bright spot.’ (We will discuss that in a future post.)
Apocalypse again
Unsurprisingly, I also gravitate to dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction.
Just as with my dreams, the dystopian unnerves me and stresses me out, but I like it…so long as the good guys win in the end. And, just as with my dreams, the post-apocalyptic, while disturbing, also contains an element of open-endedness that actually makes me weirdly happy.
Put it all together…
Parking lots being reclaimed by nature. Strange houses. The lonely and endless expanse of a post-apocalyptic land.
What is going on here? Why am I this way?
I don’t crave chaos. I don’t want an apocalypse, and if one happened, I would probably miss my nice warm house.
Yet I gravitate to sci-fi about people homesteading empty planets, even if they must fight horrible ravenous monsters, because at least they are in charge of their own destiny.
I watch zombie shows and think how horrible that life would be, but there is still something appealing about a world in which everything isn’t prescribed. And maybe there’s a quiet little corner in the forest somewhere…
Psychologically, I am clearly craving a world in which free choice abounds from here to the horizon, and where there is no map to whatever is beyond that horizon.
I also obviously have a problem with authority—something I have known about myself since I was very, very young.
But not all authority…
I did not mind being ordered around by the sensei in my dojo during the years I studied karate. In fact, I loved it. I craved it. I paid for it. If it benefits me, I am willing to follow a meritorious leader.
I also don’t mind being subject to the stern tutelage of reality…even though it means I might stumble in the face of that reality.
I would love to work with people I know and trust on a group project or in a collective struggle, and to follow the lead of someone with true expertise.
I do not mind leaders—it’s masters I hate. And in today’s monstrosity of a world, everyone is a master:
I am subject to the rule of people I didn’t vote for, bureaucrats no one votes for, and hidden ideologues no one sees.
I am subject to the overlordship of voting majorities—to the rule of people whose goals are not my own. Their fears, their whims, their defects all become my problem…imposed upon me by force.
And no matter what direction I turn, it is more of the same.
I am not a misanthrope; indeed, I am highly extroverted. I like people. But I would happily move to a planet where the whole population numbered 200…just so I could get away from what we have now.
I do not like ruined factories because I crave destruction. I do not like weeds growing through cracks in pavement because I like decay. I like them because they make me think of freedom—of a world that isn’t completely known and controlled.
I do not bring a takeout lunch to the grottiest spot behind a mall because I am a loner. Indeed, it took me many years to figure out that I do so because it allows me to feel, even if only subtly and subconsciously, that there has been some sort of catastrophe, leaving the future unclear…and unshackled.
No, I don’t want that catastrophe or wish harm upon others. Nor do I hope—unlike our diabolical, climate-change-obsessed overlords—for some sort of massive population reduction.
I just want to be free. Don’t you?
Yep. Beautiful writing. Technically apocalypse means revealing. So although I imagine it will be messy, it could be relatively graceful for those who are aligned to co-creating beautiful things for all and to see with truthful, yet loving eyes. Peace! #bedandelion
A fscinating post reminding me of my own dreams which I am remembering more and more of late. Last night, I 'escaped' from one distopian world that wasn't very nice to another which was weird with plants growing on people but they were friendly and I felt safe. It made me think I was being prepared to accept people who are very different from me, that there are worlds 'out there' that we are yet to discover and know, or that we once knew and were part of. They say all these dimensions and timelines are happening in real time, that all these various scenarios are happening right now. It's a stretch but past lives I believe are very real. Certain places make me think I have been there and that I lived there once before. Tintagel Castle in Cornwall and Pompeii in Italy in particular, I wrote stories about them in school. I ran away from the Acropolis in Greece once on holiday when I was younger feeling a sense of dread like I had been a slave and had to get away. We don't conjour dreams from nowhere, they are recollections, I am sure of it, to help us put things into context and face up to (and alchemise) experiences that need to be brought to the surface and processed for our greater good. They tell us that whatever the situation we can surmount it and we never actually die. Matter cannot be destroyed, it simply transmutes into a different form, this is us too, and our spirit lives on.