stolen dream

Sometimes I worry I’ve stolen her dreams.

The other day she had one about us moving again. “I had a dream we moved again,” she said. “The house had lots of porches, like five of them, just porch after porch, but none of them had doors.”
“We bought a house with no doors?”
“It had doors but then someone stole them just before we moved in. Then when we were moving in people kept coming by who had been squatting there and they would just walk right in and we kept having to say ‘this is our house! get out of here!’ and they would say ‘this is Jane’s house!’ and we would say ‘this isn’t Jane’s house anymore! It’s our house!’”
“It sucks that we have to move now, since you dreamed about it.”
“They were like teenagers, just coming by to have a place to smoke and mess around.”
“Ugh! Teenagers!”

I stole that dream just now, and gave myself the last word. That’s how it works. I’m going meta to sidestep my own anxiety, plus I hope it makes me seem thoughtful, and the fact that I feel guilty about it, well, that’s a mark of feminist credentials.

I stole the dream of staying in the UK too, and of staying in her home town and living near her family. I guess the kids helped. All children are dream thieves.

I worry she’ll sour on it all, pack up, pack it in. Over the years I’ve had two or three nightmares that we’ve divorced, and whenever she’s running late - and she’s always running late, always - part of my mind jumps to ‘what if there was a car accident? What would I do without her? A single parent of three small kids, and I’d miss her so much!’ Notice that it’s about me now. It’s always about me, that’s one of the marks of a dream thief.

The divorce nightmares are the most realistic of my dreams. Two of them had me waking up nearly in tears. Other times they’re about apocalyptic things, the sky breaking apart like glass with just darkness behind, murder and bloodshed, being hunted by monsters, that kind of thing. It’s all very dark and larger than life, you wouldn’t understand with your small dreams like being able to visit your parents across town for an evening jaunt.

I heard a Cloud Nothings song recently. It came on randomly on Spotify. I’d written them off as combining the mediocre elements that I dislike about pop punk and indie rock. I stand by that assessment but have to revise it to include the vitally important caveat that some of their shit is fucking genius. Note here that I’ve moved on to talking about music. Men who talk about music are invariably dream thieves.

“I thought! I would! Be more! Than This!” the vocalist sings, then yells, then bellows hoarsely, then screams with a ragged sounding throat. It goes on for eight minutes, basically taking Mellencamp’s “life goes on long after the thrill of living is gone” and showing it musically rather than telling it lyrically. The music is grindingly repetitious which is to say true to life. It’s powerful and I relate to it, as someone who is in general less (except my weight, never thought I’d be quite this much…) Ah poor me, you see I don’t want to steal her dreams, it’s just that I’m so put upon and weak, I would be better if only I had the strength, it’s not you it’s me… Dream thieves never take responsibility, it’s part of the code of our guild.

I like to think they’re small thefts, maybe I only stole bits, a color here, an image there… hemmed them in rather than stole them. In a bit of loyalty and decency I didn’t mention any of her larger dreams (of course, that’s also a bit of betrayal as I’ve painted her as distinctly small dreamed here). The truth is nobody really gets to be who they wanted to be. Instead you have to figure out how to want to be who you got to be, with at most some tweaks around the edges.

Of course the real fucking monsters are the ones who wake us up early and keep us up at night, the people who are the reason we have to have alarm clocks, their wealth stealing our literal dreams and their thefts of our time standing between us and our metaphorical dreams. Note the gesture to class here as pointing to a common enemy we can rally toward - I am but a small dream thief, look at the worse ones, stand together! - and how this is another excuse. In the face of monsters and their thefts many of us, I think especially men, cope by thieving from those around us, maybe just a little but still, minor vampires biting and sucking just a little of the life of those around us, hoping that the major vampires mean our small thefts will be overlooked. Maybe the best dream is just sleeping soundly.