Tag: Dreams

  • Not the Dream I Wanted

    I don’t remember my dreams. Or, it’s very rare that I remember a dream. When I do remember one, what sticks with me is an image, or a feeling. People and places will be there, but it’s like everything is frozen in a moment that I am very much aware has events that happened before this frozen moment, and sometimes, I even know what will happen after. It’s all very strange.

    The rarest dream that I have is the full-blown narrative, and interaction with people. That’s what happened to me last night. And it was awful.

    I dreamed about people I used to work with, and not the friendly and good people who became my friends. No, I dreamt about all the awful people that I didn’t get along with, or who went out of their way to make my employment as unenjoyable as possible. In this dream, I was holding open a door to a church so people could enter. And then all of my former co-workers showed up, and refused to go through the door I was holding open. They didn’t say anything to me, just made eye contact, and then went to a different door. The overwhelming feeling I was getting was that when I went to work on Monday, I was going to get fired.

    Yeah, it was a terrible dream, and what made the dream worse was when I woke up, I thought the dream was real, and I had to get up and go to that job. It took a second for me to come out of it, knowing that I didn’t have an office to report to, but that feeling of dread and anxiety has been hung all over me this morning.

    Dread and anxiety is what I felt when I went into the office most days. Some of it was caused by the people I worked with, who starred in my dream. But, most of it was caused by me. Most days, as I packed myself on a subway car, listening to music and reading The Times or New Yorker on my phone – doing my best to shut out the world on my commute – I would wonder if this would be another day wasted? That if this was a job that was slowly killing me; sucking out my ambition and drive and all the reasons why I wanted to move away from home and try something different. As I get more space and time to reflect on my office days, I can see that some of the issues I had were me not being happy with the situation I placed myself in. Don’t get me wrong – the shitty people were still shitty people, but I allowed them to get to me for far too long.

    But that’s the point of reflection, right? To learn lessons from your own life and actions. What I now know is that when I sense those feelings of dread and anxiety, I need to get the hell out of that situation. Odds are that I will return to an office one day, and if I do, I know the warning signs to watch out for.

    That’s progress.

    But I can’t figure out why I was at a church in the dream…

  • Short Story Review: “The Complete” by Gabriel Smith

    (The short story “The Complete,” by Gabriel Smith appeared in Issue 6, of The Drift.)

    At the start of the pandemic, my wife was on one of those huge group chats with her friends, all attempting to use Zoom, and recreate some sense of normal human connection. This was probably April or May 2020. Most of my wife’s friends are in the creative fields; writers, actors, directors, poets. My wife told me later, that on one of those early calls, they all started discussing how they thought the pandemic was going to be portrayed in movies, TV, theatre, novels, and so on. Some thought it would usher in a new version of hyper-realism, another group thought it would be treated how 9/11 was. I don’t know, but since those early days, it feels like every couple of months, someone writes something asking, “How will the story of COVID be told?”

    Gabriel Smith’s story, “The Complete,” is the first work of fiction I have read that has tried to take a crack at it. I don’t think I could give a quick summary, or even a long one, for this story. It takes place in London, sort of. It’s about a writer, kind of. And COVID is happening. While the story doesn’t have a formal plot, it does have atmosphere, mood, and an almost tangible ethereal presence. Oh, and a real good sense of humor.

    Two main things struck me with the story. First, I felt like someone captured what my brain went through during the dark days of the pandemic. How my imagination would wander and drift, break things apart and put them back together. I had so much time to think about everything that had ever happened to me, and way too much time to think about the end of the world. Second, the whole piece worked in this wonderful staccato rhythm, with each section of the story coming in, then cutting to another part, then another cut. This method of storytelling wasn’t new to me, I have read other attempts of this style, and I was aware that at some point all of these tangents would tie together. But the fun wasn’t waiting to see if it came together; The fun was watching how it came together. Because I can see how someone might complain that this story is all style and no substance, yet I would argue, strongly, that the substance, the weight of this story, was in the style which captured a still undefinable time.