Sleep is so lurid that sometimes it feels more real than living.
It’s like this camera I had once; it had a setting that made all the colors pop. I went around taking pictures of DC and Beijing and Chengdu and Tibet and all these places I’d been, making the colors pop because to me that felt more sincere than the dull lighting of the real.
When something is very dull, very unremarkable, it loses focus and can feel unreal. Like you’re looking at with crossed or tired eyes and the sharpness there is gone. I’d feel this in Minneapolis, going grocery shopping when my shoulders were sore and my mind was foggy from lack of sleep and my ill-fitting boots were rubbing the skin off my big toes. The bright red Target sign could’ve been greyscale. I wouldn’t have seen the difference.
Sometimes people ask my sister, a professional-level photographer, to give them the unedited photos. She never hands them over.
A lot of times I go to near and far places when I sleep. Far, as though my own eye hangs in the distance and watches my body walk through these places. Far like I’m somehow isolated from these places. Near, like I could still feel them anyways, feel them in a more real sense than I’d felt a lot of things I touched every single day. Near like I really knew these places.
A lot of these landscapes recur consistently enough to mean something to me and add a layer of the daily familiar to the odd world of dreams. The places I see most are The Cliffside, The City, and The Coast.
Last night I was at The Cliffside. There’s always a very deep ravine that The Cliffside empties into. It’s a steep face that sometimes plummets into green – forest and river – and other times into desert. There’s always a path to go around the cliffs, sometimes these winding walkways that remind me of the Grand Canyon or the many smooth, amber plateaus in the Southwest.
Other times, it’s been ziplines tied between trees and narrow footholds on the side of things. I’ve had cords attached to me then and sometimes I swear I die in these dreams, only to reset at the top. People trip a lot, get ugly scrapes and bangs, and there’s a fear underneath that. But it’s more an exhilaration than a dread – like if you dropped it wouldn’t matter, it would just feel like it did.
The Cliffside is old too. It always has ruins, bones, and ghosts that run through the cracked dirt or wet mud. It’s a lot of old things that people retread and rediscover and at times I know those places are still living in their own right, like there’s a full visit I’ve had of them that I can’t remember. Other times, the ruins are just that – emptied and peaceful.
Sometimes the cliffs are romantic and when they are, I’m with a woman. Never anyone I recognize. Everything is very bright and the sky radiates blue.
It’s the opposite way on The Coast. In the times those dreams get romantic, it’s always with men. Sometimes people I recognize, but not usually. I wonder idly if the water held latent feelings when I was kid. Something about the sleek and sunbathed bodies of men or the way that space felt free when I was young. Even though you couldn’t run.
The Coast is also always new. There aren’t ruins under the waves that I could see. There are only long lines of new buildings with glass sheens and new people coming and going.
In the dream, The Coast goes on for what feels like forever and at some point or another I’m at a vantage where I see the water – and it really does go on forever. The water is intimidating but in a way you may as well deal with because there’s no way you couldn’t.
All the colors are dark. It’s all overcast and dark blue, a storm that’s implied until it’s a tidal wave. These dreams bottom out that way, with the ocean coming to the coast, rocking the earth in these giant waves with crests that rise so high you can’t see the tops of them.
A lot of times, I’m in this glassy kind of house that rises up from a hill and I’m seeing the rain and the water build into this rolling tide. Sometimes people are moving from it, trying to get. Other times, they’re just getting swallowed whole.
Either way, the urgency is mixed. Once again, it feels like if you died, you didn’t. Everything is as transient as water, changing shape. Many times, I’m just there, in the intransigent buildings on the coast, waiting to see what happens when it all melds. Sometimes rooting for the distinct shapes to hold and sometimes not.
Then there’s The City, where it’s more about life than death. It’s a kind of cross between a lot of places I’ve been. In particular, there are always these grand, Chinese style parks that dot the place. They’re large like Central Park but they’re more frequent and less like centerpieces. Each green park is inlaid on the iron and steel and it has its own character. There are often rolling hills and little lakes, like in Minneapolis.
In the cities I always meet people. Usually there are a few I know but they aren’t at the core of the dream. They come and they go for as long as we’re walking the same way. I sometimes see old friends and faces I might have totally forgot to name in my waking life – and that’s a memorable thing.
But the people that drive the dream are always strangers with schemes. Shifty people with shifty designs, sometimes I’m up on them and I can lay their plan out before they can. Sometimes that’s enough and when we lay things out bare on our palms in front of each other, it’s fine. We become friends or rivals or two strangers with mutual respect.
And then other times it’s not enough. Sometimes they get something from me – like a wallet or an electronic or a bus pass or something indecipherable. Sometimes they slip right by and I think they lift a piece of me out of the whole.
These interactions do get close to blows sometimes. Things boil up and even while I’m still dreaming there’s a nasty feeling in my stomach that I know because it sits there for a while in the morning. The conflicts are never totally right things on either side. It’s a mix of weird animosities happening between the both of us and as things crest, it feels in some ways bigger than the waves on the coast or the faces on the cliffs.
When someone, somewhere in the dream, comes inches away from losing their mind, I wake up. I think it comes that way because of how many times I’ve been inches away from someone’s full inner city breakdown; how many times I’ve been inches away from that breakdown myself.
Anyways, these cities are always impossibly big and constantly under repair. They are bright and reflective, like Chicago, with subways that run like Beijing, busses that run like Minneapolis, and blocks that go a long way. Like Indianapolis, it’s all very clean and very dirty.
But The City is always the same at the core even as it changes around the edges. I know this by its feel. All the colors pop, like I’m living inside that camera filter. Things are both dark and bright, wide and narrow, and when I fall out of there and back into my body in Indianapolis, it feels like I knew The City as well as anywhere else. It goes the same for all these near and far places.
Austin Roger Ryan writes 