American Dreams

Rabbi Joseph the son of Rabbi Joshua the son of Levi fainted and went into a trance (he dwindled away and his spirit went forth).
When he returned, his father asked him, “What did you see?”
“I saw a topsy-turvy world,” he replied, “the higher ones were on the bottom and the lower ones were on top.”
“My son,” he replied, “you saw a clear world. And how are we, (the scholars;
how is it for us) there?”
“Just as we are here, so are we there.”
–The Talmud¹

Like many people, I’ve always had the occasional bout of insomnia. When It started running for President, the insomnia got worse. Soon I knew what to expect: right around three in the morning, I’d wake right up out of a dreamless sleep. You learn not to fight it. You can lie there and try to relax, or you can get up and thrash on the couch. The more you reach out for sleep, the farther away you are. You feel your body going into paralysis. Your legs get heavy. Your arms go numb. But your mind’s in spasm, clenching and unclenching, like a heart or a fist.

Eventually my mind gives up and I fall into the deepest sleep. I have the most intense dreams. I dream about the ocean: pure, endless, omnipotent, sterile. Once when I was swimming off a tiny island in the Pacific I got caught in an undertow and watched the bottom go from blue to black. It was like a dream: my legs and arms were moving but I wasn’t getting anywhere. You fight your way around it and get back to shore, or you don’t. You float out. For a second you’re still a part of it, struggling in the water, then you dissolve.

But I’ve also been meeting new people in these dreams, people I’d never meet in my day to day, and I wake up wondering how they got there.

I dreamed I was standing in a light rain under a broken umbrella, talking to a pair of Serbo-Croatian immigrants who’d just lost their construction business. A little rainbow shot through the fine mist on the grass.

There were two of them, a tall one and a short one, and as we talked we kept passing around the umbrella, even though it was dripping rain right on us. The tall one had long straggly hair and big gap in his front teeth; he was telling me about how losing the business was going to affect him and his family. The short one didn’t say much. I felt close to them. I wanted to hear them and see them for who they really were, and the tingling of some kind of hope lifted me up, but when my alarm went off the first thing I thought was that Serbs and Croats were actually different peoples, who’d been at war not long ago, and it was so dumb of me to want that.

I wondered why I’d started having them now, the insomnia and the dreams. I didn’t think they had to do with politics, which I had always tried so hard not to think about. Then again, maybe trying so hard was the cause. I noticed a lot of people had been dreaming about It. Therapists were seeing patients with the same pattern of symptoms: It was getting into our heads. Maybe It was already there. Even my five-year-old, who sleeps like a log, had a nightmare about It. That was before the election; I told him It wasn’t going to win, and he went back to sleep. I wondered how It had gotten ahold of him. We didn’t talk about politics in our house.

My friends had been dreaming about It, too. The night before the election, my friend dreamed a tsunami lifted his entire family off the beach. He realized he couldn’t hold on. He woke up. The ocean again: the split-second before you let go. I saw in the paper that It is germaphobic, which made sense to me. Its power is pure. It swallows whatever you put in, you can’t touch It. One of the curses of American society is the simple act of shaking hands. It takes your money, then It sanitizes. It gets angry when your baby cries. You can get the baby out of here.

Another friend dreamed a rabid pig was chasing her. It had sores all over its mouth and body. She kept running but she couldn’t get away. Finally it caught up with her and bit her. She tried to get to an ER, running through a restaurant, past a friend’s house, but couldn’t find one. It caught up with her again and bit her again. Then it died. She tied it up in a black plastic bag and kept looking for a hospital to see if it really had rabies, if she did too, if she was going to go crazy or die. She asked her friends for help, but they were having a party and wouldn’t pay any attention.

He’s Jewish and she’s black, by the way. In their dreams, they’re alone. There are people around but they’re helpless, or not helping. Of course my other white friends were dreaming, too. One dreamed he was invited to the inauguration. He had to stand around and be polite, feeling awful but trying not to show it. He hadn’t told anyone about his dream. He said he was ashamed.

Another friend dreamed she was in the White House kitchen cooking dinner for the President’s kids while he and Michelle were at some function. She went out to the garden and picked some asparagus, rinsed it off in the sink, sauteed it with some prosciutto and lemon. She turned her back for a second and the asparagus was gone: the girls had snapped it up while Michelle came in and joined them at the kitchen table. They were eating the asparagus and catching up on their day. She watched them from the corner, then she slipped out.

My friend said she felt something like what I felt in my dream with the Serbo-Croatian guys: a sense of naturalness, intimacy in simple things. Nothing pure, nothing diseased; you rinse off the dirt and eat. The warmth radiates right into your skin.

That was easy to understand. What I didn’t understand was this other thing, the power It had.

Everywhere I looked–art, translation, meditation, television–I kept seeing the same triangle:

The straight line from A to B, from concept to expression, is in the conscious mind. You make a plan and follow through. You make an X on the calendar; the day comes just when you expected. A lot of things work like that, but creativity doesn’t.

The creative mind, the unconscious mind, has to take a step back before it can go forward. Before you get an idea there’s an inspiration, an itch; before you see a picture, you get an image; as you translate a sentence, you make a gesture, feeling blindly for the space in your language where that movement fits, and put your hand on it.

All this happens in a third space that’s hard to describe. It’s like a wormhole with no entrance; for a second you’re in it, the next you’re on the other side. It’s like falling asleep; the harder you reach for it, the farther away it gets. It’s like breathing; it’s always there, you just don’t notice it. You hold it lightly or not at all. When your mind falls in sync with your breath a wave washes over you. A second later you’re back in your head, pacing like an animal in a cage. You have to let it go. You can get by without it. Some days, you have to. You translate mechanically, practice copies of the classics, push around citations. You go to bed grumpy, hoping tomorrow it will come back, and you dream.

In dreams, everything is waiting. Bits and pieces that didn’t seem to fit get jigsawed together. Dreams don’t take time. Dreams skip the gap between A and B, the pedestrian rhythm of the sun. Dreams don’t tell lies. Anything is possible, nothing is true. You’re waiting there, but you’re unrecognizable: compact, encrypted. An empty set. An egg in its shell.

Leaders dream and make us dream their dreams. Or deep in our sleep we dream them and they dance while we lie paralyzed. We conjure them to kill the monster. Easy intimacy with faces on a screen reflects long nights nestled together in dreams or the faces thin and fade. Desire, power, fear: words for the rising and falling where sometimes we wake coming up for air.

But different leaders dream different kinds of dreams. I have a dream: that’s a prophecy, not a dream. Prophecies, like creativity, come from dreams, but they’re already filtered through words. Their words are mirrors: the image is already whole, clear, intact. It came as a joyous daybreak to end their long night…from the dark and desolate valley…to the sunlit path…from the quicksands to the solid rock.

The prophet draws from a teleology of hope: he promises rain from the heavens, flowing relentlessly forward. “Justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

The prophet speaks in a trance, the Spirit holds him by the tongue: he knows the power of dreams, their topsy-turvy logic where opposites attract and weird mixtures are born. But he doesn’t succumb. Prophecy jumps the gap, moving forward: the fierce urgency of Now. The tranquilizing drug of gradualism. The prophet is a dreamer, but he wants you to wake up: there will be neither rest nor tranquility. He tells you that B is A: all you have to do is realize it.

The prophet doesn’t tell you about the ocean: the inarticulate chaos where the river meets its end.

The progressive tells you about his dreams, but they’re in the linear time of the conscious mind. What he sees is calm, reasonable, compelling. Here we are at A: let’s try to get to B, together. He doesn’t make empty promises. Of course it’s gonna to be tough. That’s the truth. He doesn’t bluster. Look, he often begins, when we want him to say Fuck you, pig. He pats an invisible puppy’s head with his hand, keeping steady, soaking up hate like a sponge.

What It sees isn’t a dream. Not really. You have forty days to make every dream you ever dreamed for your country come true. That’s not a dream: it has no specificity, no moving pieces. It doesn’t talk about Its dreams, but It is in yours, feeding off them like a parasite. It speaks their language. You will have this beautiful flowing sentence where the back of the sentence reverts to the front and they cut the back of the sentence off, and I say I never said that. So, I said, you know what, I am not going to deal with them. They are very dishonest people, I said.

The figure of a Möbius strip, pure dream-logic: the back of the sentence reverts to the front. No inside, no outside, no front, no back. A twisted circle.

They are very dishonest people. They resist the hypnotic rhythm of sentence-fragments, insinuations left open for you to imagine. The dream-logic of Maybe. The logic of You said it, not me. The logic of I don’t, but I could. I don’t steal. But would you care if I did? I don’t think so. I won. I don’t kill. But would you care if I did? I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody. I don’t rape, I don’t have to. When you’re a star they let you do it. I don’t lie.

Lie? What are you talking about? I never said that. You must be talking to yourself. You must be dreaming. Go back to sleep.

One of my first memories is standing on a beach in Mexico pressing a seashell against my ear. My mother told me it was the sound of the ocean. The seashell was like an ear, bumpy outside with smooth dark pink flesh underneath. I heard the roar. I took off the shell and listened to the waves. They sounded the same. My father told me it was the sound of my own blood. I put the shell back to my ear. I didn’t understand how my own blood could be like the ocean. I remember the smell of sunblock and that echo… overwhelmed by the roar, sick with fear, though I didn’t want it to show.

Now I live in D.C. Some nights I write late at the Library of Congress on Capitol Hill. I’m often the last patron to leave. The Hill is empty, except for a few staffers in suits and security guards. I stand at the corner between the library, the Supreme Court, and Congress, waiting for a cab. It’s like a dream: the floodlights on the white stone, rising up out of the dark. I spit on the ground, testing gravity. The insomnia, the dreams, the screens, all the lies run together like the tide, a strip with no beginning and no end.

Rabbi Joseph’s father tells him that scholars are the same in the topsy-turvy dreamworld, or the real world, as they are here, in our day to day dreams. The weight of their learning and esteem keeps them upright. That must be reassuring for the scholars listening to his story. But later on, an anonymous scholar continued Rabbi Joseph’s dream. He added what Rabbi Joseph had heard in the upside-down world:

“And I heard them saying: Blessed is he who comes here with his learning in his hand.”

In this context, Rabbi Joseph’s vision seems to prove his father’s point: even in the dream, where everything is upside down, the scholar is blessed. But elsewhere in the Talmud,² the same line means something else: Rabbi Joseph, or another scholar, says it to fend off the Angel of Death.

They’re not quite finished with their learning yet, they insist–and surely the Angel of Death knows that in Heaven, they expect you to have done your homework. In Rabbi Joseph’s dream, too, he’s dead: he dwindled away and his spirit went forth. But he comes back and adds a new piece of learning. He becomes a bridge between dreams and reality, the living and the dead.

There’s one more piece the anonymous scholar added: one more thing that Rabbi Joseph heard. This dream doesn’t have any parallels in the Talmud.³ Maybe it was his own dream.

“And I heard them saying: Those martyred by the State–no-one can stand within their boundary.”

Sometimes, even in dreams, we fight.

NOTES

¹ Tractate Pesachim 50a (with Rashi’s commentary), paralleled at tractate Baba Batra 10b.

² Tractates Moed Qatan 28a and Ketubbot 77b.

³ It is in Hebrew rather than his spoken language, Aramaic, so it may be an earlier tradition that he remembered. In the parallel at Baba Batra 10b, commenting on the phrase “The higher ones on the bottom and the lower ones on top,” the medieval commentators the Tosafists report, in the name of their teacher Rabbenu Tam, an ancient tradition that their predecessors the Geonim passed down “from one teacher’s mouth to the other” about the topsy-turvy world. This world, they say, is what Samuel saw (tractate Shabbat 55a), when a woman asked his teacher Rabbi Judah for redress, but he insisted that it was a matter for a higher court. Samuel rebuked Judah for not helping her. The Geonim preserved a self-critique: scholars, too, turn the world upside down when they place the hierarchy of power above the demands of justice.