Fever Dreams

You wake up around three in the morning soaked through, heart hammering, and for a few seconds you don’t know where you are. Your brain has been making a film that breaks every rule of logic, and it always will.

Dreams are what you do when you’re tired of being yourself. You get to be a pirate, a criminal, something that matters, and no one gets hurt. Some people treat their dreams like prophecies. I think it’s lazier—your brain is just bored. It wants to play a game where the rules change constantly and nothing has to mean anything.

I’ve been having these weird ones. They run into each other without stopping, violent and fast-cut, like someone’s slicing between scenes. I’m with a girl from school in the Andes and it’s sexual and then I’m on a field in Berlin with some punk musician, singing sea shanties with him. Before that even ends I’m in a bathtub with an ex-girlfriend and her karate instructor, both of us naked, taking photographs, and somehow the bathtub is a level in a video game I’ve never seen.

I wake up wrung out, confused in a way that doesn’t fade. The dream stays with you. It’s still happening while you’re eating breakfast, while you’re working. You’re half somewhere else. Half still in that tub. Half still singing with someone who felt important to you in that dream-logic way real people never do.

I know I’m not alone in this. Everyone has dreams that make perfect sense until you wake up and they evaporate. But there’s something unsettling about how real it feels while it’s happening, how solid and necessary. Then you surface and you’re alone with it, soaked, staring at the ceiling, wondering what your brain was trying to say. Probably nothing. Probably it just wanted to play.