I’m writing this on a cruise to Canada with my in-laws because life is a bizarre adventure. So much humanity here. Dozens of languages chatter on the decks. Hundreds of forks scrape through the remains of the buffet. Five thousand heads snore and dream.
Last night I dreamt I was on a ship of crumbling skyscrapers. We could not leave and would never reach our destination. Every so often, new passengers would arrive, and when I approached them they were terrified because I was a ghost, haunting them. I’ve had this dream many times in my life. Dreams travel.
When C and I first met in the 1990s, we traded memories through the night, starting with branches of personal history and working backward until we reached the primeval muck that fuels a life. Propped on an elbow, she described a dream in which she wore a curly blonde wig that chewed through her scalp until she woke up in tears. In return, I offered my boyhood nightmares about mannequins, how my father had to cover my eyes when we entered a department store.
Years later, I discovered her stories had bled into mine. While making a sandwich or gassing up the car, I sometimes find myself remembering a dream I had about a flesh-eating wig. Dreams travel.
We recently got together with some friends to record our dreams, which became the backbone for tonight’s episode. C cooked her holy Taiwanese beef stew, and for two and a half hours, six of us shared and deciphered our dreams before a red blinking light.
—a man with pen-markings all over his face. There’s pen on his cheeks and in his hair—
—and the sky was filled with these looming beings who weren’t really doing anything but looming—
—bears were coming in through the windows, and soon I was surrounded by a sea of bears—
Sometimes it feels like a pointless errand, attempting to attach words to a dream. My dreams often evaporate the moment I try to describe them, as if they cannot withstand the weight of language. What had been known at a deep-boned level turns to vapor. Only fragments remain.
Describing a dream might be like trying to explain silence. This summary of Krishnamurti’s philosophy comes to mind: “You can say the word silence, but that is not silence . . . the only way to speak silence is to not speak at all.”
But the failure to adequately express a dream is what makes it fascinating. If these hallucinations were easily understood, they might be little more than simple entertainments, defanged and bloodless, completely drained of mystery.
The rupture is what makes anything interesting, much like two of my favorite pieces at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: the fragmented head of a colossal boy and the inked imprint of a shattered stele.
Neither would catch my attention if they were perfectly formed. And likewise, our dreams are composed of fragments and shards. They often begin sensibly: a familiar location, perhaps a few loved ones before the loopy plotting of the subconscious takes hold, descending into something murky and nameless like the material beneath the tongue.
Tonight's episode tries to capture this sensation by compressing two and a half hours of dream chatter into twenty-three minutes that drift in and out of focus like dreams tend to do.
S kicks things off with a stone classic: a nightmare about being chased by bears. Then comes O, who dreamt that C became a fountain of sugary water. C follows up with a dream about a drawing that led her into a forest of mysterious nests and enormous but speedy pigs.
Things begin to disintegrate with my dream about a regal bald woman who glided above the floor with her back arched like a vacuum. I said hello, and she said, "You're welcome." No matter what I said to her, she replied, "You're welcome." Then she zoomed away, leaving me alone in a long white room without any doors. Next comes Ch's frantic dream in which she discovers she's driving a replica of her old car before being detained in a room of chain-smoking shoplifters at a discount fashion store. Finally, M witnesses an epic battle of sky gods above his dead grandparents' house.
But I'm off to hit the buffet. Synchronicities abound on this cruise ship, even minor chords such as setting C’s dream to one of her favorite songs, which I only now realize is from an album called Silence.
- Abul Mogard - Staring at the Sweeps of the Desert
Works | Ecstatic, 2016 | Bandcamp - Black Polygons - Incarnat
Silence | 2014 | Bandcamp - Seefeel - Rupt (Cut Mix)
Rupt and Flex | Warp, 1995 | Bandcamp - Transient Waves - Soulspace
Transient Waves | i, 1997 | Bandcamp - Intrusion - Love in Lofi (Remastered by Pole)
Unreleased Tape Sessions, 2025 | Bandcamp
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Midnight Radio 29 | Download
