ASK SOMEBODY #4: Perchance to GO AWAY

It’s been a minute and I am sorry to the letter writer, mostly, but I hope you’re out there and you read this. Things happened: babies, war, more babies, which I think is copying Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse-Five but here we are. I’m gonna keep doing this. Also it’s P O E T R Y month, so maybe I’ll send out some poems? Postcards from the road? All the road songs I listen to? You can of course still send questions HERE. I really hope to be less shitty about it and also maybe I'll enjoy using this as a fun experiment more for whatever I feel like. At least we still have tumblr.

So: what’s up?

How do I stop having sex dreams about my exes? Like ancient history exes—many many years ago, no contact anymore. I wake up feeling gross and conflicted like “was that a nightmare?” Or “Am I so touch deprived that I’m trawling the depths of my unconscious mind for memories of human contact?” The idea of sexy dreams is awesome and generally I’d be pumped, but why do these particular people have to be there? Can’t I dream of -insert hot celebrity- instead? Or even nameless faceless shapes? I’d be down for dream sex with nameless faceless shapes. Lately I’ve also had dreams where the ex or exes are there, but we don’t have sex. I can’t decide if this is better or worse. I’d there be no ancient exes in dreams, regardless of sexual activity. Do you have any tips for how to accomplish this? Ps I don’t take sleep aids; so I can’t blame pharmaceuticals.

-Sleepsex in Seattle? I can’t think of anything good, if you can, go for it!

Great signature, well done, you did think of something good.

I guess let’s move onto the thoughts that aren’t feeling good, which in this case seem to be dreams. I’m going to try not to get TOO Heather Havrilesky here which, you know, she has her place in my life! But I hope this can be about YOU, even though we’ll start with me.

I woke up today and realized I had to get on your letter, because one, I’m a slacker, but two, my dreams have been fucking with me. It’s the oddest sensation to have that vivid dream about someone that has been so far removed from your life, for whatever reason, and wake up with some sort of truth you’ve woven in your subconscious. There’s a line from a Joseph Arthur song (thanks, The L-Word), When I sleep sometimes I still think we speak. It doesn’t even have to be something as heart-pinchy as a breakup: sometimes it’s just someone who has fallen off the square of our map. Some reminder that people remain with us, which is kind of incredible if you think about it, and, also, awful.

It’s also strange to remember dreams as though they’re memories. A decade and a half ago at this point (Christ!), a friend had a dream I’d crawled into a dryer, turned into a bird, and flew away. Then the mother of someone I loved told her this is how it had to be. I still think about that dream. Maybe because sometimes you get tossed into a tumble dry, and the only way out is flapping the fuck on. I digress.

There’s a lot of questions here and I’ll start with, Was this a nightmare? Which, that’s a good question! Are you having nightmare sex dreams? If so, I’m sorry. I remember a dream I had about a truly terrible ex who stole my bike (in the dream) and I had to wake up, sprint down my walkup stairs in my boxers, just to ensure my bike was there. And it was. I dream about my bikes A LOT. A real source of anxiety for me.

So: why are these people there? Where are the celebrities? How to get rid of ancient exes? Let’s start with where are the celebrities because PREACH FRIEND. Where ARE the celebrities? How can we get sex-dream-Cameo for our brains? Just kidding, let’s never ever the fuck do that. I don’t know if I’ve ever had a really fun dream about celebrities but I also don’t tend to find celebrities in my garden variety afternoon delight fantasies. Like, I have to find sort of character actors to wander into my pleasure garden. Got any time, character actor with a neat arc on prestige television or old British mystery show/sitcom? Welcome to Carmen’s Sexy Shakespeare Festival, you can rotate in for the summer.

And maybe this gets to the question of why? Remember: I’m a failed writer who works at a nonprofit, not any sort of brain expert. But I don’t KNOW Jamie Clayton (who btw, IS out of my fantasy league, for sure). She just exists in some collective queer unconscious and it would be nice if as I fell asleep, my brain could click JC-12 on the ol’ dream jukebox and we’d have a really nice time riding around on her motorcycle and cleaning up her boots for her.

But instead the brain jukebox is BUSTED and the imprint of a dream figure is a bunch of EP’s of “ancient exes” I bought at Hot Topic in 2002 and those are the ones on rotation. This metaphor is a little busted, too, but stay with me. I don’t know if it helps but sometimes remembering that our brains, even in dreams, are just a bunch of chemical impulses going pew pew pew pew pew!!! at rest while the brain does some other stuff. There’s probably a lot of really cool research out here on this, or podcasts, or SOMETHING.

As someone with a wacky brain (you think exes dreams are bad? Try psychotic breaks where during the day, IN REAL TIME, you are apparently seeing a whole lotta folks who may or may not exist play into narratives that would make some intense prestige television) it sometimes helps me to remember that sometimes our brains are littered with the detritus and recycled cells and experience junk that some mental Wall-E is trying to organize as best that little robot can. So your ancient exes show up because at one time they were part of the bricks and mortar of your lived experience. I like to think of it as they took up a bunch of space, so your brain goes, eh, that’s an easy meme for this brain to use tonight. Let’s put this one on shuffle.

Is this scientifically accurate? Probably not! But I do think it’s based in something and maybe it helps you to know I think that “something” is probably arbitrary. If you were exes with Jamie Clayton (which…. are you?) she’d show up! Even though I want her in MY dreams!

The other truth is you ARE dreaming of other people: ancient blurry faces and friends and relatives, but you don’t remember them for whatever reason. Even when we can’t remember our dreams, we ARE dreaming. Your ancient exes are just the WE BUY JUNK HOMES flyers that will not go away from the lightposts in your brain.

For a while I did the thing where you write down your dreams. I would NOT recommend this. I realized I didn’t want to wake up remembering my dreams. My life was stressful and sad enough as it is: why did I want to wake up exhausted because I had to live through that? If for some reason this is what you are doing, I recommend you stop immediately. If you are a morning journaler, stop writing about your dreams. Write about anything else. Have an ancient ex dream? Wake up, do some push ups, drink a glass of water as fast as you can, shake your head real quick like a cartoon, do anything to move on from the dream. There probably is something in here that, well, if you can’t STOP dreaming about them, you can at least try and forget them faster.

Being touch-deprived and pleasure-starved is so painful. It’s been a long two years, and I don’t know where you’re at with COVID, how you need to protect yourself, or just how fucking sad it has gotten to try and connect with people. The apps just coldly sitting there and nobody with any more spark or energy to try and make something happen. Lex awash in a sea of cries for help. Judgement about play parties or happy hours. And then to have a brain fuck with you? I think acknowledging we are lonely and terrified we will forget the feeling of a hand on our skin is brave, and that doesn’t mean you’re a sadsack because you have a sex dream about an ex. Your brain is your brain. Navigating how to feel good should not be this hard, and yet here we are.

I don’t think I can pull an Eternal Sunshine and snip out the ancient exes, and I don’t know if you can either. So maybe start thinking about how to get some deep sleep. I’m going to list out all the important things I think of for sleep, because I really believe in sleep, and feel free to take or leave. But getting good sleep helps I think, and so making sure you’re having a chill way to go to bed, turn off the phone and the TV, indulge in some diddling off about NOT ancient exes, and sleeping in a cool dark room probably might make sleep NICER. Valerian, kava kava, and melotonin are always good, as are indica gummies I am told. Drinking less, etc. Make friends with sleep again as sleep, not like, the graveyard where your ancient exes return, and maybe you’ll start to find you focus on the other dreams that show up.

You used the word “ancient ex” and “no contact” and I’m wondering if maybe these are people you wanted to forget. Which makes sense! But the word ancient and the lack of appearance in your day-to-day has me truly wondering if this is just the setting for the trawler of your dream brain: it picked up something from the depths and it’s having a hard time letting it go. Again, I wish I could help more with the icky feelings. But you’re not doing anything wrong. Your brain is just doing its thing and is not trying to tell you anything about your choices, your sex life, your past. If some part of you is feeling weird because you are deriving pleasure from people who you once said, no, no thank you, this is not good for me…. that’s OKAY! Please know that’s okay! Our desires, especially in our dreams, do not have to make sense or be “good”! Sometimes they are weird (GOD KNOWS mine are weird) and nothing is wrong with you.

This is how I think dreams tell us things. They’re often arbitrary, we aren’t Cassandra, and we can’t control them. But what we wake up remembering probably has room to create meaning in our life. I woke up the other day from a dream stunned by how much it felt real, or rather, how real I wanted it to be. This is a person I cannot figure out how to fix the circuit of love I either do or do not feel. There was a sexual element to it, I think, but what I remembered in the dream and in the waking was the keen joy that existed. My brain very much creating a meme from the memories of us I still cherish. But when I woke up, what the dream meant to me was that I missed that. And it was only something that lived in a dream, in my memory. That I had no control of it coming back.

Try not to focus so much on how you can fix this. There’s nothing to fix. What are the rest of your dreams? What are some other earthly symbols, like in Tarot or poems, that might lead your brain in a different direction? I hope spring has sprung a bit in Seattle, and maybe there will be opportunities for you to feel warmth on your skin again, that we will be more open, in general, to finding pleasure again, and that there will be more of the world to filter into your brain for it to pick up, as opposed to ancient history. And, well, there’s always Carl Jung.