This dream is not from last night. I’m still lying in the bed I climbed into around 11 PM or so after a long trip into town to buy groceries and now, as a new day shuffles languidly toward the appealing diphthong in the word noon, I still haven’t managed to fall asleep. This dream is from the night before the night it was the last time it was night.
I had been planning to keep a detailed log of all the wildlife we encounter on our trips up and down our mountain with the eventual goal of using such a record for divination purposes. Unfortunately I haven’t been keeping up with it. Despite the majesty of nature that is rarely more than ten feet from me in any given moment I have an unfortunate habit of being distracted by my device.
When I am riding in a car and looking at my iPhone the internet becomes like a cup of tea where I can no longer remember if I was waiting for it to become cool or trying to finish it while it remains warm because I’m just absently sipping at it while subconsciously cradling the knowledge that I will inevitably pour out at least the last third of liquid because it simply isn’t the kind of beverage one would ever have the intention of finishing.
Of course in the internet’s case you just leave the liquid in the cup and never pour it out. It’s a bit like bottomless breadsticks or shrimp in certain family oriented chain restaurants.
This is one of the things that life is now. It’s not too bad over in the little details but it can feel daunting if you switch to the wide angle lens. Anyway I bring it up because this tendency caused me to almost miss our solitary fox sighting and the mother bear that was walking with three anxiously tethered cubs.
It’s not like I never look at all. I’ve forgotten the date part but I did commit at least one bifacial data point to memory:
“one deer down. two bats one jackrabbit up.”
Jackrabbits tend to be an “up” sighting. It could be due to time of day but it just occurred to me that the morphology of the mountain itself could amplify the sounds of a car traveling from peak to bottom but have the opposite effect when it’s bottom to peak. It’s an interesting idea and I’m sure if I put my mind to it I could come up with a better experiment than whether or not I see jackrabbits.
On the topic of jackrabbits there were three or possibly even four of them (another lookie latey I’m afraid) as we came up the mountain last night. They don’t generally strike me as gregarious creatures in this particular biome but last night they did seem kind of clustered together like office workers waiting around the parking lot after somebody pulled the fire alarm. It was steadily raining from the highway to the rabbits but soon after progressed to sleet and finally despondent snow as we rode on to our target elevation in retrograde defiance to all the cold and different kinds of water the darkened heavens had on offer.
My initial theorem for the unfamiliar behavior was that their burrows might have flooded and they were simply waiting for them to become dry again. Almost immediately I mentally slid this idea over to the “wrong” pile and didn’t bother with formulating a replacement. Even for a naturally inquisitive mind there is a solemn grace in simply not knowing.
I really should be done with rabbits and onto cars by now but this next little bit boasts a sprinkling of both so I’m not a total reprobate. Anybody that lives near jackrabbits and paved roads probably already know this but they have evolved a threat response where they run in front of anything big and loud in zig-zag lines. This works great for visual predators that may misjudge target position due to direction change and create a window for escape by overshooting.
It’s actually very similar to what they say you’re supposed to do if someone is trying to put projectiles into you at range and you would prefer for them to go into things that aren’t you. It does depart significantly, however, from the ideal suggested strategy if somebody is trying to run you over with an automobile. When you factor in that the sawtooth wavelength of the jackrabbit’s Hail Mary is approximately the width of the space between the two front tires of a car the deficiencies in this strategy leap out like they are blood traces in a suspect’s bedroom fluorescing under a black light.
Fight or flight responses are contagious in the same way that yawns are so the entire spectacle becomes very emotionally charged as every person in the vehicle instinctually rallies around the rabbit and wants it to escape. It quickly devolves into a figurative ping-pong match as the fleeing lagomorph disappears into roadside greenery, eliciting cheers of excitement, but then immediately dashes back in front of the tires, inspiring groans of frustration and fear.
Once established the pattern persists for an indeterminate number of cycles:
“YEEEEAAH!!! AAAUUUUGGGH!!! YAYYYY!!! NNNOOOO!!!! etc.”
Thankfully this has always concluded with the rabbit finally escaping to somewhere other than the road but it occurs to me that our uphill course is winding and a long straight shot might perpetuate the drama for however long the creature’s energy reserves might hold out. Also our good fortune in never having to scrape rabbit blood from our car’s body panels should not be taken to indicate that there haven’t been plenty of white knuckle moments and near misses.
Anyway I’ve landed near the basic concepts of cars and fear so this is a good spot to force the transition to this next bit. It would not be accurate to say I am “afraid of cars” but vehicular horror is a staple genre in both my nightmares and waking anxieties. Vehicular horror movies do exist in the form of Maximum Overdrive and Christine, both Stephen King adaptations, and while each film contains compelling performances by celebrated character actors I get the impression that most fans of the genre consider them duds in the Horror department.
[Author’s Note: I was incredibly wrong about Christine. I just watched it again and it is beautifully shot and paced, legitimately menacing and has the requisite ambiguity of all my favorite ghost stories. I’m almost certain it influenced Matthew Barney’s Cremaster films and River of Fundament. Finally, almost certainly by coincidence, it features the same green light as the nightmare I’m about to relate.]
I actually tend to agree. There’s nothing particularly scary to me about the concept of a homicidal car with nobody controlling it. What terrifies me is the concept of me being responsible for controlling a car in situations where lives are basically always on the line. My aversion is so intensely visceral that simply sitting in a driver’s seat and twisting the ignition to life fills me with an urgent compulsion to throw the keys out the window and run as far away from the vehicle as humanly possible.
My mother was a horrible driver. I don’t think she was called on to do very much of it on the commune or around Arkansas but once we’d relocated to the suburban sprawl of San Diego there was no getting around it. To her credit she stepped up and got me and my siblings to and from various schools and other activities without so much as a fender bender. There were certainly close calls – like the time she drove onto a freeway on-ramp but turned in the opposite direction of oncoming traffic.
My anxiety is a direct result of her anxiety. She didn’t really have the constitution for freeway driving and changing lanes at high speeds was especially stressful. From the moment I could speak she would scream frantically for me to check her lanes for her and I did not feel like I had developed to the point where I could make life or death decisions for a rapidly moving metal box.
Other toddlers love delegation of authority and the importance earned by successfully fulfilling such desired functions. That wasn’t me. I stared out the window in mute, uncomprehending horror with no clue of what I was even looking for. My silence augmented the emotional urgency:
“I gotta get left! I gotta get left! God damn it is it safe to go left?! Do you want to fucking crash!?”
The trauma of these experiences leaves me unable to drive although I have been slowly taking command of trips up the 1 – 2 mile road that winds around our mountain and is guaranteed to be virtually empty. The next step is down the mountain but I’m terrified of gravity. Public roads and freeways seem totally impossible but people learn and grow, right?
If we’re going to have a baby LaPorsha can’t drive to the hospital as her water breaks.
Anyway on to the nightmare. Rather than draw things out I’ll copy/paste the summary that I sent to the two unfamiliar artists featured in it. It is written for Maggie Dunlap specifically as I didn’t consider Ben Ditto’s appearance until several hours after writing it:
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As in many of my dreams it started with me in the body and from the viewpoint of a character completely unlike myself. I was a small statured vaguely androgynous girl with short red hair and glasses, dressed in a basic solid colored t-shirt and jeans and driving a cheap, anonymous Asian car like a grey Geo Metro or something. For contrast I am a 6’4” 43 year old married man with long dyed hair, a long white beard and am terrified of driving cars and have thus never learned to do so.
I do wear glasses. The dream took the form of an automotive themed horror or thriller movie.
As this girl I was slowly driving along the side of an industrial warehouse style building when I received a text from a number I didn’t recognize:
“Passing you now. Follow close. You won’t want to miss this!”
I looked out my driver’s window and saw a newer black luxury sports car with bright neon green, almost Monster Energy colored LEDs running along the bottom below the doors, encircling the license plate and in thin strips where the head and tail lights would ordinarily be. Looking inside there were black leather seats and it was being driven by a young man in a muscle shirt with a brown goatee (the kind that encircles the mouth) and hair that was shaved on the sides with curls piled on top of his head.
He smirked back at me then pulled in front to take a right at the corner.
I felt compelled to follow him. The street he pulled onto was split into two lanes for opposite directions and moderately busy. As I watched he revved his engine and quickly accelerated to something like 90 mph bearing down on the much slower car in front of him. Just as it seemed like he’d be ramming into it from behind he quickly pulled into the oncoming traffic lane, narrowly missing a car coming towards him, and pulled in front of the vehicle he’d just been tailgating then sped off.
A new text appeared on my phone:
“That was fun! See you soon!”
This is where I’m going to slightly sabotage my storytelling due to a slavish obsession with total accuracy. The fact is that while I often remember my dreams with atypical levels of detail I can recall only the vaguest outline of the second incident. It was also bookended by texts and involved this man driving at unsafe speeds on the same road. Maybe he played chicken with somebody or something. The important thing is that there were three of them.
As the third incident began it was beginning to get dark. Once again my cell phone lit up:
“Here comes the finale! You won’t want to miss this one!”
I’d been more or less hanging out on the side of the same warehouse and he passed me, taking the same right, with the same sardonic smile. Once again I felt compelled to follow and witness whatever mayhem he had in mind. Once again he rapidly sped up to around 90 mph but this time he made a sudden u-turn and swerved toward the cars in the opposite lane. The cars were tightly packed on that side and I thought for sure he’d just be slamming into one but instead he somehow popped up on his two rear wheels and was able to just barely jackknife into the half car length between two drivers on that side.
The car that was now behind him slammed on its brakes as did the car behind it. Miraculously nobody ran into anybody else and this created just enough space for him to ease back down onto four wheels and continue moving with the traffic. While he’d disappeared in the opposite direction the first two times this time around he drove straight back through the intersection he’d been turning right at before passing out of sight. His final text of the dream came through:
“That’s enough for tonight! I’ll be seeing you where you live later!”
At this point I suddenly manifested in the dream as myself, sitting in the passenger’s seat. The red haired girl wasn’t speaking to me but I could hear her thoughts:
“Hah! He thinks he can find where I live! The jokes on him because I’ve been living in this car!”
She passed back by the warehouse moving in the opposite direction and after a couple of blocks came to the kind of small parking lot that sits between two businesses in a “historic downtown” style shopping district. She pulled into the rearmost parking space and tilted her seat back, continuing the internal monologue:
“I’ve been sleeping in this parking lot for weeks and nobody’s discovered me or knows I’m here! He’ll never find me!”
While she was settling in to fall asleep I was frantically looking around this new setting. The rear wall of this parking alcove was made of bricks and about two car lengths away from us without any kind of metal pole or cement divider to shield us from movement in that direction. I felt very certain that a person who mysteriously knew both the cell phone number and real time locations of the woman driving would have no issues whatsoever locating us.
I felt trapped. I could neither leave the car or convince my companion to drive somewhere else but with dread I pictured the obvious conclusion to this night. After I’d succumbed to sleep as well we would both be suddenly awoken by the sudden flash of his green lights and the sound of his engine roaring to life but at that point he’d already be accelerating toward us from the brick wall with just enough space to reach a speed where our bodies would be torn apart in the moment of impact.
In this feeling of helplessness and abject terror I continued to look around the parking lot. My female companion had pulled in parallel to the brick wall with her window facing it but when I looked out my window for the first time I saw that the lot was about 3/4 full and all the other cars were also occupied by young women. There were two girls in the car next to us but I only focused on the driver: slightly chubby, slightly goth with a black dyed graduated bob haircut that was shaved in the back.
Her car was one of those little ones that people tend to cover in stickers – like a Fiat, modern VW beetle or a Scion or something. It was purple. I was able to read two stickers on the side of her door. They were both white ovals with black text. One said MOCA and the other said Maggie Dunlap.
At that moment I woke up with the residual feelings of neurochemical panic that always accompany snapping into consciousness from a scenario of impending but unavoidable harm. I thought your name sounded vaguely familiar so I googled it. I do follow contemporary art which makes me feel nearly certain that I had no familiarity with your name or work whatsoever after viewing your website.
My dream is only tangentially related to some of the themes I saw briefly perusing your website, namely horror and the concept of gendered violence against female bodies, but those tenuous connections and the mysterious nature of your name appearing at all felt like sufficient reason to share it with you. I hope you find it interesting.
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I perused Maggie Dunlap’s internet presence while my wife still slept, noticed the vaguely similar themes surrounding gendered violence in her work and sent the e-mail before my wife even woke up. Perhaps I should explain what I mean by gendered violence: horror based around the threat of women being violently victimized by men due to the inherent power imbalance posed by sexual dimorphism and many men’s tendency to lash out violently when they feel unimportant or unwanted.
Slumber Party Massacre slasher film type stuff, horror movies and the “final girl” trope, the concept of “fridging” or killing off female characters in films specifically to fuel a male character’s revenge motivations and character arc, the list could be an essay in itself. Anyway I was surprised to see these themes in Dunlap’s work despite none of it being automobile based.
When my wife awoke I described the dream to her and she immediately wondered if the menacing male character could be internet artist Ben Ditto. Unlike Dunlap I was familiar with Ditto and the prospect seemed unlikely to me. I did a little dive in his photos though and saw a comparable build and hair color but these seemed too generic. Then I saw it: an old pic with a head full of rotini style curls; not the most common hair type.
While not 100% convinced that the dream’s antagonist was played by Ditto, it was certainly plausible, and I sent the summary to him as well. He shared it anonymously on his popular Instagram page and a few people either made tulpa jokes or questioned my veracity and motivations. The suspicion was warranted as both he and Dunlap have larger internet footprints than me but if I was going to just invent something for their attention and shares I’d like to think I could have come up with a story that wasn’t so much of a nothingburger – all things considered.
Regardless let’s move onto what it all means. In my opinion it means nothing. While I had no awareness of Dunlap, my wife follows her and we share Instagram accounts. Perhaps my eye scanned over something and unconsciously filed it away. This happened all the time with music magazines I read in High School – my eye scanned over a Lida Husik ad in 1996 and 25 or more years later I suddenly decided to pull up her music on a long drive – great stuff especially the black and white covered albums.
The world has become intensely more information saturated. My eye is scanning over much more, I still must be filing it away and probably even less conscious of it. Maybe I saw a post with her slasher/horror themed work, maybe I only saw her name or of course it could all be a pure coincidence – neither Maggie nor Dunlap are super uncommon names.
Ditto is a separate question but I’m near sure I’d never seen the distinctive curls of his natural hair. Occam’s Razor is not advisable to use as an instrument of self harm and rather than delusions of spiritual connections or extra sensory perception I will go with something on the spectrum from coincidence to light unconscious correlation to avoid covering my inner arms with nasty scars. If you want to read more in it that is both your prerogative and not my problem.
Let’s move on to dreams. In the crassest terms possible I think that dreams are the subliminal version of shit. You eat food, your body digests it and shit comes out the other end. All day long we collect sensory data and fill our minds with thoughts and ideas. When you fall into deep enough sleep your body is also processing all of this and creates a dream – almost like a feces of senses and ideas but without the putrescence created by a substance called skatole.
This doesn’t mean I think that dreams are bad or worthless and anyway plenty of people love shit – either as an area of serious scientific study or a sexual paraphilia. Dreams absolutely fascinate me as much, if not more, than memories and in certain eras of heavy depression my Dreamtime was more vital and exciting to me than my waking life.
I’m not good at lucid dreaming, I’m terrified of sleep paralysis but I have three arenas I love unconditionally about dreams:
- Depersonalization: I am often not myself in dreams but experience them as a totally different entity altogether: a native woman thousands of years old searching for her lost immortal brother, a young near androgynous woman, a malevolent underwater monster that I never see but see from its perspective, a conflicted cop who loves his partner, Bob Dylan’s nephew, etc.
- Dream Knowledge: This one is probably my number one favorite. In a book or movie world building has to be done through narration or dialogue. In a dream it may be the case that a dangerous monster is a room away from me, trees are intelligent walking creatures or the ocean represents a total negation of the self if it’s even looked at. I don’t need any in-dream exposition or storytelling to inform me of these things, I just know them. Exactly how I know countless things about the waking world of reality. The difference lies in my store of real world knowledge staying consistent while “dream knowledge” changes every night.
- The Proto-City: A close second for favorite. I didn’t actually learn cardinal directions until I moved to Chicago in 1999. Without ever learning to drive or ride a bike my spatial knowledge was almost one-dimensional. I knew the memorized routes by bus or foot that would lead me to places I wanted to go to but only as a system of steps and turns based on visual landmarks. When my friend Paul visited me in Oakland he asked me what direction my house was from the BART station and I told him to just pour water on the ground and follow it as my preferred exit sloped downward toward my house. He chose the wrong exit and the water only pooled. He did find the house, slightly miffed, but I miss the feeling of a city as a group of discrete locations with no discernible layout and can not return to it due to my irreversible knowledge of North, South, East and West. Thankfully the Proto-City of my dreams features recurring locations but they constantly shift in relation to each other so I need not fear getting oriented.
Are one person’s dreams of any value to anyone else? I think they can be. In Jung’s famous Man and his Symbols he talks about how the chemist who discovered the molecular structure of benzene had a dream about Ourobouros and realized on waking he could solve his Lewis Dot Structure issue with a ringed molecule. In a far stupider example a person who falls asleep driving a car can hit another person, car or house so if the actions of sleeping people can affect the waking why shouldn’t this extend to dreams?
We are approaching the technology that can render dreams into a series of computer generated images and while this is rudimentary and concept based it can only improve. I’ve had dreams with ornate stained glass windows or elaborate articles of clothing that exceed my artistic capabilities and I could never hope to accurately reproduce.
While technology may reach the point where these designs can be reproduced by a computer in perfect detail I don’t necessarily see value in this. Stable Diffusion is getting better and better and could give me hundreds of beautiful stained glass window designs on par with whatever I’ve dreamed up at much less cost and effort. Maybe I’m underestimating the value of ideation by a genuine human mind but only time will tell.
If you didn’t decide to watch the recent Nicholas Cage thriller Dream Situation it begins with an ordinary man appearing disproportionately in the public’s dreams and ends with disruptive marketers developing a technology to invade people’s dreams with obnoxious advertisements. I interpreted the movie as a cautionary tale on hitching one’s wagon to the collective Id but I might as well address the question of pop ups and banner ads making their way into dreams.
No, I don’t think that’s possible for reasons that should be obvious to anyone with a basic understanding of the human mind and technology.
Instead I see huge potential for dreams as a content source – once the technology to turn them into videos goes through a few generations of improvement. First and foremost will come the dreams of the already famous. There is already a huge demand for content from these people’s waking lives to fuel the parasocial relationships of their fans and followers and dreams (probably prescreened to remove the overly personal or embarrassing) will represent an entirely new level of emotional intimacy.
A kind of OnlyDreams instead of OnlyFans and of course such subscriptions would bring in a lot of money. What artist wouldn’t want to make money in their sleep? Obviously many wouldn’t but if the technology is commonplace anyone who wants the revenue but values their sleeping selves privacy could just script AI videos and sell them as dreams.
I do think a decent number of ordinary people will become “dream stars” if their dreams are either especially interesting or fucked up. Once again we face the issue of pawning off scripted AI scenarios as authentic dream captures so perhaps we will have a technology to differentiate the two. This is already an issue with art hand created by waking minds but the technological questions will be more pressing as AI is already a necessary ingredient in translating dreams into videos.
I started this piece months ago so whatever the first paragraph says about time and the Maggie Dunlap/car thriller dream is inaccurate. I had that one months ago. Fortunately I can usually remember a high level of dream detail as long as I make a conscious decision to close my mind’s hand around it as I’m waking up. Here’s a bit of last night:
I was somebody whose job involved helping rapper Brooke Candy open her fan mail. I wasn’t myself – if it matters to anyone I think I was a girl with magnetic powers who used them to steal play structures for my hamsters. We were opening a package with several larger objects when we found a smaller pouch in the center wrapped in tissue paper.
At first we thought it was dried out bird and lizard legs, and were both slightly concerned and grossed out, but then I realized it was delicate versions of these made out of lampworked glass. I carefully removed all three of them from the paper and the last was green with incredibly fragile long twisting fingers. Suddenly the person who sent the package was standing beside us.
He was a young black fashionable hipster guy who had started living an isolated life as a shepherd and had brought one of his ewes and her lambs along. While the adult sheep still had regular white wool each of the lambs had been dyed a different color of the rainbow and they hung behind her in a line so it looked something like a caterpillar.
He was in town not for the concert but for a convention for people who realized their souls were rabbits. I looked around the section of the Proto-City we were in and started noticing billboards for this convention with a large rabbit logo – it was sponsored by Disney. Brooke decided to give up public life and go live with him in his rustic shepherd’s cottage.
I wondered if the isolation was a good idea which is odd, as real life me is all about isolation, but once again I wasn’t me. I was a girl with magnetic powers and pet hamsters who worked for Brooke Candy in some capacity involving helping with fan mail. Anyway this dream conveniently presents some interesting questions if it happened in the future and was captured and monetized.
Brooke Candy is a real life performing artist and Internet personality – would she get a chunk of that monetization? The glass legs appeared because I saw on Facebook that glass artist Jenine Bressner just made a pair – would she get a chunk? The sheep appeared because I finally found a complete version of Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 3 on archive.org and watched it last night – would he get a chunk?
I ask these questions because I thought it was really intriguing to see the way that Trent Reznor set up the instrumental piece that became Lil Nas X’s Old Town Road for fair use, scale and monetization but perhaps I should be asking myself a simpler question:
Are dreams even interesting?
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 