on dreams

daydreams, nightdreams, and finding potential

To borrow from singer-songwriter Lizzy McAlpine: I’ve been having strange dreams.

In one of them, I starred alongside pop star Jack Harlow in a YA movie shot in the style of a more wholesome version of Euphoria. I’m blaming this one on the inflatable igloo from his Thanksgiving Day halftime performance that haunts me constantly.

In another, I dreamt that I walked for days to my elementary school and was welcomed by my favorite teachers and current faculty advisors. I love the badass women on my dissertation committee, but it’s difficult to imagine them wrangling sticky toddlers.
“How do you feel about ineffability, little Timmy?”

In another, I was in a roller paintbrush relay race where my teammates and I had to swipe paint in the correct direction as we lapped a concrete track. The race was endless, and paint was everywhere and on everyone.

In several others, I am going on quests for love and friendship and magic vegetables with old friends I haven’t spoken to in years, but whose faces flicked across my Facebook timeline earlier in the day.

There was a three-week stretch where most of my morning pages were eaten up by recounting the basic plot points of my dreams. I know that writing down your dreams helps you remember future ones. So, it’s very possible that I have been holding onto more of them thanks to my daily journaling practice. But they also just felt more memorable than usual: the colors are sharper, and the physical feeling of being in familiar locations is stronger.

I have also been listening to Creative Pep Talk, a podcast hosted by illustrator Andy J. Pizza. To start the new year, Andy has been releasing a series about tapping into your dream world as a way of chasing creative potential. He’s asking about how to pay attention to messages from our unconscious mind to provide direction for achieving our hopes and dreams. Based on insights he borrows from Jungian dream analysis, Andy lets listeners walk through his inner monologue as we realize that we can fuel our own creative accomplishments. It’s a reminder about how we already have the stuff within us to make our lives great. It’s a reminder not just to dream, but that to dream in our preferred medium so that we can build associations between our dreams and our craft, as he recommends in the episode linked below: hence me transcribing them on paper most days.

I have often struggled to trust my own instinct, largely because of the people-pleasing tendencies I’ve carried with me as an anxious person, eldest daughter, and so-called “high-achiever.” Directly asking myself what I want is fraught because my voice drifts away in the sea of outside voices from friends, mentors, influencers, etc floating rent-free in my brain. Often, it feels easier to ask: “What are my thoughts right now, including the ones I’m not aware of? Where is my brain going when she’s bored or falling in love with the wind in the leafless trees?”

I wrote last month about not being unsure of what’s going on, and that’s still an accurate read of the situation. My nightdream life seems to be latching onto feeling lost and craving newness. Those voices are telling me to be a little braver, a little bolder, a little more colorful.

My daydreams, though, are full of words and doodles. When I’m not typing away or scribbling in my journal, I desperately want to be. It’s too bad that creative energy is not inexhaustible: maybe I would have a novel out by now, or maybe my dissertation would be done. But I’m working on detaching from end-products and focusing on losing myself in the journey. My roommate (sry bestie) and I have this conversation all the time, the one where I praise the value of making small, consistent progress on goals every day, and where she asks, “but isn’t it just sooooo nice to get it all done all at once?”

Those who know me know that I hold onto everything, whether it’s little trinkets from a trip, stickers, or memories. And I want to hold onto everything as long as I can, and having a slower process lets me linger dreamily for a little longer.

I obviously have goals of publishing in such-and-such a journal and writing xyz kind of book: goals that have a destination at the end. But when I’m busy falling in love with the windswept trees, I dream of living a life where the process of arriving feels good, too. I want to savor the practice of creating every day, the way that really lovely ice cream coats your tongue as it slowly melts. I am in a season of savoring, it seems.

My word of 2024 is ease. I dream of a life where I am making all the time because scribbling in ink or watercoloring landscapes come so easily to me that I can’t not do them. I want to allow myself to feel a little lost rather than needing to be in control all the time. Beautiful things emerge from the unpredictability, like the huge glittering beet at the end of my quest with some of my high school girl friends. I am dreaming of a life full of long walks that pour imagination back into me.

My nightdreams are telling me that maybe I’m a little lost. But my daydreams whisper back: “You’re okay. Keep walking.”