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I have this recurring dream that my house is being broken into. The conditions are always the same. It is a man, or group of men that I don’t know, and it is always through the front door. The lock stops working. Or the frame is flimsy. Or the most strenuous, I’m trying to lock it and the man is outside barging in. The constant being, I’m never strong enough to keep him out.
I try to stop this person from some predetermined threshold. I use my entire body weight, every trick and shove and baring of teeth to move him, but I’m never aware of why. It's simply a primal reaction. I sleep, I fight, I wake with pounding relief and then I do it all over again. The phantom insecurity and coruscating images of self defence, orbit around a central goal: the intruder must not enter my bedroom.
If I were to relay these dreams to a certain type of person they’d say, “that sounds like a nightmare.” And I don’t deny this, but I made this vow to stop differentiating between them - it doesn’t actually help when you’re trying to eke out meaning. A big part of my life is inventorying my dreams and probing the abstract recesses of my mind to find something of use in them.
My quest towards self-actualisation hinges on it unfortunately.
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During the first and more unreliable third of this year, the dream changed. Within it, the supernatural arises. I can fly. My antagonist can fly. The house is still under attack. This is not new for me (flight being another recurring feature of my dreams) but the amalgamation of the two, is.
I leap into the sky and take a chunk of flesh out of my attacker. A sizeable wad. More than a mouthful of their chest cavity that tells him I’m not to be fucked with. Months after the dream has come and gone, I can still recall the sudden strength of my jaw, the softness of skin against my lips and the gore trickling down my chin, whilst the injured thing flew away. Such is the visceral nature of my dreams.
Of course, it is fun to defy gravity but it is more interesting, in hindsight, that I defy my own quiet beliefs. The dream is irrefutable proof that I would call down God to save the ossuary my home contains. An ossuary I would not admit exists until now. My stance thus, is not about protecting any material possession but what a room - and the house it belongs to - can represent.
Despite my penchant for embellishment, my room is always perfectly reproduced in my mind's eye. A spatially crude replica. My mind palace is not a palace at all, it's a childhood bedroom. The recollections I store there: stresses and anxieties.
Prone to the grotesque as I am, I toy with the idea that there are corpses hanging in the wardrobe that my mother bought. Every dead version of myself lives in that bedroom, tucked into the articles of clothing I refuse to wear but won’t throw out; as frail and prone to destruction as the Ikea butterfly wall decals pasted to it. And each attempt at removal, rips the paint off the walls to show the grey-brown of the rendered plaster underneath. It’s a quirk about the room that I hate but still deem sacred, refusing to let my dream assailant close enough to know these things.
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At 23, the dream house I protect exists beyond my subconscious. Remapping itself onto the plane of waking life via restless introspection.
Places are never just places in a piece of writing... Setting is not inert. It is activated by a point of view — Carmen Maria Machado said that in her memoir. Is a dream a piece of writing? I wonder. Etched with a tool of the soul.
For argument's sake, yes - and so, the house in the narrative is haunted. A mirror shimmers in the glass of the front door, where the violence necessary to enter implies a violence needed for removal.
It feels callous to say it in such a way, but there is a specific sort of violence that comes with wanting to leave a home that has swaddled you for two decades. With an inanimate patience it has watched you come into being; the frustration of your very adolescence and the swallowing of every argument you’ve had with your mother, personifying it. The relationship you have with your home is as fraught as the one you have with her, because they are one in the same.
The metaphor of the house morphs, touching that place I don’t have a name for. Exposing an incorrigible wound. I love my home; I have outgrown it. I love my family and where I was raised; I cannot live with them much longer.
It is at this point I confess, charting a set of dreams is exhausting. I am envious of those of you who can’t remember the waters of your subconscious. Whereas I am here, trying to ring myself out into the bathtub of memory. Hoping to learn something pivotal enough that the incarnation of my anxiety will cease.
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I annotate The Contemporary Gothic by Steven Bruhm in the meagre light of my salt lamp. The heating chips in at 11pm and it cracks its knuckles swiftly, under its jaw, all at once like I do. I flinch at the sound as I’m putting an exclamation point by the quote: 'We must bond with our parents, but not too much; we must distance ourselves but not too much.’
I recognise the precarious root of the dream. At the centre of my dream is a fear of “monstrous invasion,” and the paranoid Gothic of my internal world mars the external. The monster in the invasion I’m fighting is me. I fight to get myself out whilst I fight to barricade myself in.
The hard truth: I seek to release myself from the emotional torrent that is returning home. Even when it feels like blaspheming to reject the arms of a home that has always been open to me. The knotting, achy, pulp dredged up by the reoccurring dream isn’t just insecurity - it is also guilt. A feeling I have to drain away from my body each morning like fluid from swollen lymph nodes.
I discussed this with a friend, as I’ve taught myself to do. You see, I'm building up my tolerance for vulnerability like you have to with a child, to free them from a tyrant allergy. Micro-dosing it daily, each crumb larger and more potent than the next. I tell her, ‘for a moment, a crab makes a home in the water even as it begins to boil.’
There are two sets of pincers in this scenario to use, those on the crab that the heat renders useless; and those of the tongs, that can save it from its fate. What a mind fuck it is then, to acknowledge that you’re both the crab and the hand in control of the tongs that put it there, and still be no closer to knowing what to do about it.
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this post is (painfully) sponsored by —
This is self aware and introspective and confrontational and honest. The margins of the mind are deep, dark, weird places your report on yours with an almost journalistic approach to sus out the “truth” of your subconscious. This piece sucked me in and spit me out with some satisfaction but mostly a lot of questions. I wanna hear more!