I dream in books

What would a history of dreams look like? Did the prehistoric humans who decorated cave walls dream in handprints and animals in the flickering light of a fire?

I guess it started with the pandemic. Or more specifically, the months when we all binge-watched TV like our lives depended on it, holding onto each episode like it had the power to banish the horrors that existed outside the safe, blue, glow of our screens. Not that we weren’t binge-watchers before then, but there was an extra level of desperation then.

And then that wave broke (I’m not counting anymore) and we stopped binge-watching and sports started up again and for a long, long stretch, sports have been pretty much all we watch, but I don’t dream in sports.

I don’t know how it started, I just know I stopped watching shows or movies and spent even more time reading than I had before. In the summer. In the fall. In the winter. In the spring. I stopped tracking the number of books I read this year when I passed 146. Even when we watched sports sometimes, I was still reading. Maybe that’s why I started dreaming in books.

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What did dreams look like before there were movies? Did movies change our dreams forever or are movies just an exterior, if incomplete, version of our dreams? We know now that if you grew up watching black and white TV, your dreams are more likely to be in black and white than if you grew up with color TV. This suggests that the media we consume infiltrates our sleep in intimate ways.

What would a history of dreams look like? Did the prehistoric humans who decorated cave walls all over the world dream in handprints and animals brought to life against the relief of the cave walls and the flickering light of fires? What would a cave art dream look like? Or Ancient Greek drama dreams? Would everyone in your dream be wearing tragedy masks? Did Van Gogh dream in swirling whirls of color? Was he giving life to his dreams on the canvas or did his canvases infiltrate his nights? Which came first—the dream or the painting?

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What I know is that since I stopped watching much TV that isn’t sports, I dream in books. Or that’s what it feels like. I’m 47 and call it age or menopause, but I don’t sleep the same way I did ten years ago. I fall asleep and then wake up. Fall asleep and then wake up. Often at three in the morning, I feel more awake than I do at any other time in my day. So maybe what I’m feeling isn’t even really the dreaming, so much as it is the waking.

But in those waking moments, there’s a narrative voice inside my head and that voice is the same as whatever book I’m reading. Wry and humorous if I’m reading a funny romance. Dry and dusty if I’m reading a historical novel. The narration is not telling the same story as what I read in my waking hours. I’m not re-living the book. It’s the voice that’s the same, as if I have absorbed that consciousness into my own and it is reemerging as soon as I close my eyes. As if my mind has been colonized by words and pages.

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So what is this? A menopause thing? A stress thing? Is there really nothing different about my dreams at all and it’s just how my brain is filling these half-awake moments that have grown longer and longer? What is my brain doing and why can’t it do the same thing when I’m awake?

I’m a writer, after all. To be able to seamlessly internalize and then reproduce voice—that would be more than a little useful. But whatever’s happening in the middle of the night doesn’t matter much for my actual, waking, writing life.

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Voice in narrative is such an ephemeral thing. Ask writers and editors and readers what they mean by voice and you’ll get mostly incoherent rambling. It is the quintessential, “I know it when I see it.” Voice is either there or it isn’t. Maybe it can be created, but I don’t think I’ve figured it out. Characters either arrive in my head, fully formed with a VOICE, so loud that even my clumsy efforts cannot suppress it. Or they arrive without that VOICE and try as hard as I can, I’m not sure if I ever succeed in creating it for them.

When I’m awake, voice is mysterious and elusive, a complicated creation of words and pauses and sentence structure. But when I’m asleep, my brain becomes a perfect master of it. Or does it just feel that way in the muddled darkness? Is my brain just taunting me?

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I’ve never dreamed I could fly. Falling, sure. Flying, no. Even when I’ve tried all the techniques for lucid dreaming, imagining myself flying before I fall asleep. Even though I would so like to fly in my dreams, it’s never happened. What I get instead are dreams of forgetting my locker combination or forgetting my lines in a play or forgetting a class I’m supposed to teach. I dream about my brain’s failures.

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Sometimes in those waking interludes, I can stay inside the narrative. I can shape it and change it or ride it like a wave to see where it takes me. In the morning, I can’t tell you what the narrative was or where it went, but in the moment, it feels like a comfort.

Other times, it slips away and I’m merely awake, in the middle of the night, listening for the sound of cars outside to judge how close it is to morning. Then I just breathe in and out and wait for sleep to return. For the voice to come back.

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Last newsletter of 2021! Hope everyone is having a wonderful holiday. If you’re interested in keeping up with all these books and books and books I’m reading so you can know what random voice I have in my head on any given night, I review the best ones on Instagram and also add them to my bookshop (buy them here and you’re supporting indie bookstores) and not as reliably, but also on Goodreads. Thanks as always for reading and sharing and subscribing and commenting!