Bole and Bough are Burning Now
or: on hope and nightmare because apparently that's all I know how to write about
My friends and I have all been having nightmares lately.
We dream about fascism and famine like we might have once dreamed about being back in high school naked. We dream about stormtroopers that aren’t from Star Wars and we dream about tear gas and guns.
To be fair, I’ve been dreaming about the apocalypse for decades now, and sometimes those dreams are even halfway pleasant.
This moment though? My dreams are darker.
I’ve got a few friends who trust me with their dreams, and honored for that. There’s an intimacy and vulnerability to sharing dreams, and not just because they’re the work of our subconscious. Dreams are what our waking mind tries to shake, to destroy. Dreams are a threat to reality, so our brains work hard to keep them at bay. When we trust each other with our dreams, we’re asking others to hold onto something valuable, something we ourselves will likely soon forget.
So a few friends tell me their dreams, and I can tell you that those dreams are getting worse.
I came back from Minneapolis more on edge than I’m used to. I feel activated, not in the “now I’m even more of an activist” sense of that word but in the "therapy speak” sense by which I mean my nervous system is all fucked up. Well, to be honest, I’m both versions of activated, but I’m going to focus on the latter.
I’ve got a lot of experience with this activism thing, and I’m not used to feeling quite so raw, quite so vulnerable. I’m not used to crying when people describe what they’ve just gone through—for better or worse, I’ve always been decent at setting my emotions aside to sort through later.
Ever since I got home, I’ve been sleeping less and I’ve been sleeping more, and I’ve been tired and cranky, and it was only a day or two ago that I made it through my overflowing inbox to tell people “sorry you haven’t heard from me in weeks.”
I haven’t written a personal post in quite a while, because maybe part of being activated means I’d rather give reportbacks about Minneapolis at social centers, or talk with friends about how they’re going to talk to their neighbors, than sit with how I’m feeling. I’d rather do my strange podcasting job, for which I sometimes read and talk about partisans fighting the Nazis in the war my grandfather fought, than confront this pervasive sense of doom that I wake up to more mornings than not.
Because there was one dream I had recently that really shook me.
And since I’m an asshole, here’s where I’m putting the paywall.
