Scary Dreams

For the past few weeks I’ve been carrying this computer around with me, but have used it only once, to play Aphex Twin for a former bar DJ, now working at a hotel in Cappadocia.

My folks and my grandmother left Turkey this morning at 6am. Last night I dreamt that I was robbing a bank with several of my good friends. We were working for an evil organization run by Robert Englund, the guy who used to play Freddy Kreuger in the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, but he was not aware of this heist we were pulling. We hauled an enormous amount of cash out of this bank in two black garbage bags. I locked the bank door from the inside, we made everybody get into the vault, and I chose two of the fifteen or so hangers-on who had followed our gang into the bank to empty out the drawers and the safe.

I realized, in the middle of the robbery, that none of us was wearing a mask and that there were videocameras everywhere. I understood that, even if we were not caught in the act, I would have to go into permanent hiding, or flee to another country to avoid prison. We made off with the cash and stashed it somewhere. Later, we would divide it among us. I was wondering how much each share would amount to. I was wondering whether it would sustain me during my years in hiding, and whether I should flee to a country with a weak economy so that the money would last longer.

Sometimes I have these kinds of dreams—in which I do something irrevocable—punishable by many years or life in prison. The feeling is claustrophobic and terrible: an immense pressure on the solar plexus. This thing you have done, nothing can undo it. There is blood on your hands. You have fucked up forever. You deserve even worse than the punishment you will inevitably receive.

Heavy stuff. Some deep, subterranean accumulation of guilt?—hundreds of thousands of grains of little meaningless guilts for things like some girl you once broke up with badly or somebody you never called back who you promised you would? Flotsam and jetsam accrued and compacted and petrified into a big, ugly, menacing heap that casts shadows across the dreaming mind, pinning it like a butterfly just when it should be at its least constrained...

But this stealing dream was different from other nightmares I’ve had, ones in which I have brutally murdered somebody either in self-defense or just inadvertently, without realizing what I was doing. In the stealing dream, there was still a hope of escape: we were not caught immediately. It would be several days before the police got onto our trail. In the meantime I could change my appearance or leave the country. Something would be lost, but I would also, probably, have the money and my freedom. I would forever, in my own mind, be branded a criminal, but my only punishment would come from my conscience, and I could live with that, couldn’t I?

After all, though robbing a bank was an ignoble thing to do, wasn’t it essentially a victimless crime? The State would absorb the costs. On the other hand, I would have to cut myself off from everyone I had ever known—from friends and family—and that physical separation would be another kind of punishment. Exile.

That’s the thing about both the murder and the robbery dreams: the irrevocability. The feeling that a door has closed--that YOU have closed a door--that can never be opened again. That what you were before, you are no longer and can never be again. And that the change is immediately visible to everybody: that you are marked.

What is the fear that precipitates this kind of dream? Is it fear rather than guilt? Perhaps murder and robbery just represent boundaries you have set for yourself: ways of living and thinking that you won’t allow yourself to do because they would threaten the existence you have built and are afraid to lose. Perhaps the transgressing self in the dream is, in fact, free—-crossing naturally and carelessly over artificial boundaries: the horror in the dream is not the transgression itself—it’s the backlash of the consciousness, beginning to understand the meaning and the consequences of the transgression. Trying and failing to reconcile the new self with the old self, when in fact, they are the just same self in different locations, as demarcated on a map that has no meaning to the self it locates.

Like when you’re standing at the Four Corner states, in all four states at once, saying: “I’m in four states at once” and how that means something and nothing at the same time.

What I’m thinking is that the Big Scary Thing in the dream may not be trustworthy, and that it might not be altogether necessary or wise to submit to its intimidating power. What is interesting is that the Ego, in these dreams, if you look at them this way, is characteristically unconstrained, childlike, and unconcerned, and that the Superego kicks in with its big, parental “NO!” only after the damage has been done, failing to protect you, serving only to punish you. It’s the uselessness of this that strikes me as interesting and untrustworthy—whose authority I’m inclined to reject as unedifying and essentially antagonistic.

Maybe these dreams are my sleeping self doing battle with my own, self-imposed limitations—testing the waters. The backlash is tremendous—suffocating—terrifying, but after all, survivable because it’s only a dream. If, as they say, dreams reflect the preoccupations of the subconscious self—the tensions that arise from its constant process of becoming (and unbecoming), then I’m rooting for the Ego: go on—disappear to Iceland. Dye your hair. Cover your entire body and face with tattoos. Be Something Else. If this requires an amputation, so be it. Cut the hook loose and your arm along with it. Ignore the Big Scary Voice and it either vanishes or becomes a ridiculous irrelevancy. An anachronism. Nothing.