I shot awake this morning. A chill ran down my back from the impervious feeling that I was already incredibly late for my day. My alarm didn’t go off, or I missed it. Did I set it correctly last night? I felt cold. If I was late, I would miss my classes, my office time, my deadlines; I’d be sitting on the train stressed that my tightly constructed timetable for the week was falling apart before my eyes. Everyone would hate me. I’d be a disappointment again. I would be stressed and bring everyone around me down, and I’d hog the conversation with my stress like I feel I always do, a trait I fear is pushing away the friends that I’ve not prioritised in months.
All of this anxiety condensed itself into my body in several seconds, like an accordion being hastily squashed in and out of tune in a haphazard musical mess. I then realised I didn’t know how late I was. I had to check so I could aptly assess the damages.
I panicked, threw my quilt back, grabbed my phone, and saw that it was 5am.
Thank God. I took a moment to breathe. I was early. I’ve been so anxious and high-strung lately that the impending sense of doom perpetually in my bloodstream had somehow infiltrated its way into my subconscious while I was asleep.
I then shot awake again. I had this immediate chill run down my back that something was wrong. Didn’t we do this already? I had chosen to fall back asleep, so I assumed I was in some loopy half-asleep time continuum, but I didn’t put my head back down on the pillow.
Slightly confused, I threw my quilt back, grabbed my phone, and saw that it was 8:35am. Ten minutes before my alarm.
Dreamception.
This has happened quite a bit the last few weeks. I dream of sitting in bed as things happen around me. Parents knock on my door. Stray cats crawl through the window. Strangers wander into my room and make it a home. Then I snap my head up, gasp for air, and centre myself in the room I’m really in.
It is shocking to learn how little we actually know about the act of dreaming.
We have plenty of scientific theories: something something processing memories from the short-term to long-term, diluting stress and traumas with visual stimuli, bringing trauma to the forefront of your mind.
I’m a believer in the idea that dreams are a deconstruction of your day, a way to abstractly process the emotional truths which filter through the front and the back of your mind. Push something down far enough and it’ll come crawling back eventually, preening through your scalp skin and quite literally haunting your dreams.
These days, that usually involves dreaming with my phone. For a while, dream scientists (technically called oneirologists, but that’s so boring) believed people could not dream with their phone. It could only be treated like a brick, lifeless and useless.
Yet I’ve been dreaming with technology since I was a child, about texting or checking times, sometimes in third-person like I’m a character in a video game. This also involves transposing all of my phone anxieties into my dreams. We all know the ones, the way your heart races when your pocket vibrates, the overwhelm of a big big list of notifications (which isn’t even that large), awaiting a call that isn’t gonna come. My phone becomes the primary medium of experiencing anxiety. Anxiety is the primary way I experience life. Thus, my phone becomes not a third limb, but a veil, obscuring my cognitive expression of the world.
If I process the world through my anxiety, then of course my dreams become shuddered with the anxieties.
So what do I do then? How do I pierce the veil? Well, in a way, I have the map right in front of me.
I sit in the anxiety. I wake up and I rewind my dreams like a cassette tape. I press pause on the scenes that shrivel in my stomach, and I unfurl the truths from the haunting shadows that linger in my mind. The pseudo-realism of an anxiety dream is fruitful grounds for figuring out why I’m so perpetually frightened of myself all the time. If I can make them occasional visions, then they become of use.
I also turn the phone off sometimes. Unsurprisingly, it actually helps.
