I used to keep a dream journal. It was a really productive time in my life. Around last Halloween, I planned to start one again. But something happened to my brain. Without even noticing, I had stopped dreaming in that visceral, remember-everything-in-the-morning way I always had before. All other brain functions are running at near 100% capacity, but the dream well has dried up. Nowadays, I wake up with immediate memories of a dream (because we probably always have them but don’t always remember) only every few months.
In the latest dream, I try to smuggle a dog out of Moldova. The dog is a big gray Weimaraner who has to be carried around half the time and weighs enough to make doing so more than slightly irritating. But I’m glad to carry this dog around as often as I can because he’s really helpless, meaning, even more helpless than I am.
We’re staying at a hotel in Chisinau, waiting to meet a group of people at dinner. These people, including Kristy, my current girlfriend in the dream, are celebrating their last night in town after working for a Chisinau company for three years. The dog has to eat, meaning I have to go navigate Chisinau streets and figure out what “Dog Food” looks like in Cyrillic. So I tie the Weimaraner up to a bedpost and head out down the hallway.
Hallways in Moldova hotels often smell of rusty water and are sometimes decorated in the kinds of neons and pastels that characterized 1980s Ray-Ban ads. In the hallway, I notice a guy who looks like Joseph Gordon-Levitt just as he disappears behind a door. I give chase. Behind door number one, we find the Gordon-Levitt look-alike in the throes of various forms of passion with, of course, none other than Kristy.
Worse, when I turn to leave, the door then opens onto a room where all my exes are in the process of orgiastically making out with all the men they left me for. It’s like the opposite of that scene in 8½ where Fellini’s dream-state exes gather around him to taunt him and fight over him until he’s filled with guilt.
In reality, an ex once told me that I’m the kind of guy who gets a dog from an animal shelter instead of going to a breeder. Looking back, I think she meant that as an insult.
The dog and I nonetheless go to the club, where the only black man in Moldova is playing guitar tonight, and the dog decides to sleep in his empty guitar case. The man falls in love with the dog and wants to keep it. Meanwhile, I’m navigating the scandalous social territory of my erstwhile girlfriend’s post-coital arrival with Gordon-Levitt, avoiding statements like, “There’s something on your lip… just there.” I don’t want to give up the dog, but Kristy convinces me it’s for the best, that I have to learn to let things go, to leave things behind.
I have a theory that, if you’re the kind of person who goes through or has gone through a lot of whatever you consider trauma, your brain will give you back as much as you can handle. A kind of working out of problems you don’t want to work out when you’re awake. I say “whatever you consider trauma” because what we consider trauma varies: according to some social psychologists, the trauma of finding a scratch in your favorite DVD can be the equivalent of seeing your brother shot in the head. All suffering is the same suffering, and so forth. Maybe my dreams have been shut off for the last many months or years because whatever is lodged in my brain is too much to take.
But who cares about that bit? Here’s why a dream journal might be important. Dreams have excellent craft. You can be eating ice cream out of a shoe while your sister sings “I’m Just Wild About Harry,” and most of the time you won’t even question whether this is really happening. The perfectly normal masks the perfectly surreal. There are millions of mundane realistic details that make the completely unreal possible. A perfect lesson in the craft of fiction.
Look at me, trying to wrap things up. Nothing ends. Nothing makes sense. We don’t write because we have something to say but because we don’t even know where to begin.
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