In Greek mythology, dreams were often personified as black-winged demons that enter our sleeping minds like bats to deliver messages from the gods.

An ongoing archive of my dreams:

  • Another tangled, richly plotted dream about picking up my teeth in the street while a gigantic man told me he was raised by a mountain and that I did not understand how to live. When I asked if I could bum a cigarette, he tossed me into the sea. I swam into the dark until I was rescued by an inflatable child who cried like a ticking clock. I woke up wondering if I would live my life any differently if I measured my age in days or hours instead of years.
  • Last night’s dream brought me to the ruins of a university where we played chess with pieces of tandoori meat. “You cannot withdraw from this game without suicide,” said my veiled opponent.
  • A fire destroyed the library, and I picked my way through the ruins. Among the empty metal shelves, people were doing grotesque things with each other in the dark—every act of violence and perversion—until they were flaying themselves into strips of flesh. I ran away, and when I returned, I realized they had figured out how to make books with their bodies, to replace the classics that were lost.
  • I discovered my consciousness was powered by someone forced to run on a treadmill.
  • A dream in which my mother was alive and serving a delicious tea brewed from stones. I woke up pondering the feedback loop of life: is there anything we eat or drink that wasn’t once alive?
  • I discovered a new substance called ‘onesium’, which are the forgetting cells.
  • My father won a silver medal at the Olympics. He was the first man with a lung transplant to medal in the hurdles, at first we cheered but then we cried because we knew this was not true.
  • A complicated dream about whether a mental breakdown occurs gradually or slowly. The debate took place in a crowded waiting room where I could not find a seat.
  • I ducked in and out of tiny record stores, spinning racks of cassettes and flipping through stacks of vinyl, frantically trying to find my favorite song. Turns out I was kneeling on it the whole time. Perhaps this dream was the result of my anxiety about having so many unheard songs in my queue—the lack of connection to an artifact, the impossibility of ever getting my head around music again.
  • A doctor told me I had a rare condition and no matter how far I walked, it would take one hour and twenty-two minutes.
  • C. and I watched a stuttering videotape. Somebody warned us that we shouldn’t watch the ending because it shows how we’ll die. Everyone in the movie had the flu and was lying down to die. We stopped the tape. She sniffled. I coughed. I wanted to run, but she shook her head and took my hand. I put on a record—A Million Miles to Earth—and we laid down.
  • Another dream about meat. I was cooking it for important guests but no matter how long I fried it or how much I seasoned it, it had no flavor.
  • I drank perfume and had a minor role in a detective show in which none of us could remember the name of the president between Johnson and Ford.
  • At the hospital my father threw a fit, fighting with the nurses and hollering slurs. I’d never seen him like this. He tried to smoke a syringe. “But you quit smoking twenty years ago,” I said. I look into his eyes and realized I’d been trying to rescue the wrong man.
  • I dreamt that each of my fingers had its own consciousness.
  • C. and I had a baby and it called me by my first and last name the moment it was born. We lived in a world made entirely of bread. The ground was soft and tasty, and it was wonderful at first—and then it wasn’t.
  • I was driving over hundreds of dogs, their bodies kerchunking beneath the wheels, and I could hear them howling. I sped up to put them out of their misery. The car veered onto a lawn, where my parents were moving into a new home. They were older than I would ever see them and I stood on the sidewalk, happy but frightened because they were not supposed to be alive.
  • I dreamt about the infamous “dishwasher episode” of a critically acclaimed drama.
  • I was on my knees, picking spaghetti out of the carpet, and the noodles turned into all the people who would ever want to hurt C., a long line of cruel men and a few women. I led them into a building and was given a choice: I could flip a switch and kill everyone who might harm my beloved or set them free—the promise of safety versus the possibility of grief.
  • I often find my father within the labyrinthine architecture of parking structures. I once woke in tears from a dream about hugging him after he told me I could always find him there. I asked him about the afterlife and he smiled. This was the closest I’ve come to experiencing a visitation.
  • With my mother, I tend to find her in small houses or remote cabins. She is living a new life and she is happy. I do not intrude.
  • I dreamt I painted a picture and could not tell if it was god or the devil because the image was too big for its frame.

Schopenhauer comes to mind: “What is to be expected of heads even the wisest of which is every night the scene of the strangest and the most senseless dreams, and which is expected to take up its meditations again on awakening from them?”