Haunted by Ghosts in Dreams
Your dreams take you to strange places - even back in time to places that no longer exist
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I still dream about Revelstoke, at night, when I sleep. Twice again just in the last week. This Revelstoke of the Dream World appears different each time but is always a snowy place, different to its real-life form though its true spirit is understood seamlessly and instinctively. These dream worlds shift and dissolve and re-emerge from one night to the next, but it’s always the same old story. I try to snowboard, and even find some success sometimes, but mostly it’s oh-so difficult. Encountering long lost friends but always searching for someone else, always out of sight, always at some other place. I trip up when I get to the top of the most incredible pistes in the world, or in any world, as these worlds are so often fantastical places which defy the laws of physics, they begin much like ours but it changes as time moves on until anything is possible, bar, it seems, success. I fall over and over, tumbling down to the bottom time and time again, getting lost in an overly-complicated lift system, turning around to see that where I was facing has become somewhere else entirely, only regaining my balance in time for it all to melt away at the end. My board hugs the edge of a 900 foot cliff for dear life. I keep on pulling my dead rubber legs through snow 15 feet deep, though it only comes up to my thighs; my legs are 20 feet long. I plough on through a blizzard to the gondola though when I get there it has moved, up beside a castle on a clifftop, and my friends are not there, or if they are, they aren’t looking at me; and if they do, it’s to point out everything I’m doing wrong. We ride smaller tracks on the way to get to the bigger ones, the one we’re always looking for, but I keep sliding off and ending up at the bottom, and I’ve to go all the way back up, and we’ve no time, everyone is going to be gone, gone home, gone forever. At some point I might plough into some innocent bystanders and cause some kind of injury or harm, and the world itself might appear to turn inwards on me.
Everything accelerates as the dream reaches its climax, for time seems to terraform the world itself far more starkly than our own world does, the physics explode into the stuff of Mario Kart fantasies, we all make impossible jumps on death-defying pistes, at the top of an impossible peak and caught in a never-ending blizzard, or a Rainbow-Road style magical rollercoaster that I hold onto for dear life and try to ride, always just about making it to the end by holding on for dear life, sometimes it’s even exhilarating and somewhat under my own control, anything could happen, though never dying – it seems that along with finding what I’m looking for, death is the only thing that cannot happen. And as everything accelerates, the world begins to dissolve, and my awareness of my surroundings and where I am begins to increase – I begin to understand I’m in a dream, because everything has become so ridiculous, so fantastical, so impossibly difficult that it couldn’t even be real life. And I become aware that I’m running out of time. Though it doesn’t matter. Although I’m somewhat conscious and lucid and start to understand I’m dreaming, I have no greater control over my body. My limbs still fail me, moreso than they ever did on a real snowboard. My body is limp. At some points I fly but I’ve no control over where I go. I crash to the ground though I’m not hurt. I make it to the top of the greatest run, sometimes I even get started on it, and meet some friends though often I’m too late, the snow has melted, everyone is ready to leave, I’m left stranded with no idea where I am. The world begins to evaporate around me, its fabric being ripped apart. It is time, for now, for us all to go home, back to wherever we are when we’re awake.
The dreams usually follow some kind of familiar pattern or theme. There’s an early enthusiasm at finding myself back in this most wonderful of places after all these years, though as things progress this excitement wanes and turns into frustration, horror, humiliation, until I become stuck and can go no further.
They haven’t gone away. It’s been 10 years since I left, and I had two more just last week. It’s probably not as bad as it sound. In fact, they can be strangely enjoyable throughout the rollercoaster of emotions which would be negative if experienced entirely in isolation – much like real life.
Some would advise to exercise great caution when sharing your dreams with others, because you will inevitably tell people the things about yourself that you are unable to see for yourself; for that, by their nature, is what dreams are. But things are clear enough here, much clearer awake than when asleep in any case. My hopes and fears and desires and regrets and, well, my dreams, and so on. You can draw your own conclusions about what they say about me, my consciousness, my unconscious, the state of my mental health. I don’t care. All art is a depiction of your dreams and nightmares, that’s what this is about, whether you realise it or not. At least I realise it.
And besides, my own beliefs about the nature and implications of our dreams are far wilder – and far more terrifying – than any accusation about the state of my mental health, self-image or unrealised aspects of the unconscious that a would-be psychoanalyst could level at me.
The place seems to follow me around, as if a living person or an entity all of its own. I fall asleep and find myself in a place I left a decade ago, and still it follows me around, its ghost, and the ghosts of all the people who I knew there, and the ghosts of all the people I could have met there but never did – they haunt me in my sleep, and always silently scream at me:
“You need to go back”
“We need to go back”, as went Jack’s memorably whined meme to Kate in the original binge-watching cliffhanger-vehicle TV show Lost.
[complete spoilers of every aspect of the TV show alert]
Although the show’s ending was controversial, partly because nobody knew what the hell was going on and the metaphysics of the show’s world were never adequately explained, I did always enjoy its central theme, developed from the point at where this band of castaways actually achieved what it was they were looking for: to get off the bloody island – before some of them began to quickly intuit that the island was most important thing – and place – that would ever happen to them, and their relief at escaping turned into an existential dread and feeling that they needed to return to it.
Jack and others would make it back to the island to fulfil their spiritual missions and almost inevitably, with hindsight, Jack would die there. Upon his arrival to what surely must be heaven, he is greeted with smiles by everyone he ever knew on the island, even though some of them are still alive in the ‘real world’, or an alternate dimension of the real world, and many have died at varying stages throughout the adventure, at different times, sometimes years apart and with the aid of time travel (it was destined to never make sense!).
“We need to go back”
How many of you have ever spent some amount of time in a foreign land, had experiences that profoundly impacted you, and have spent days of your life since dreaming, by day or by night, of going back to relive them?
Parts of you get scattered in the places you visit, depending on how much of yourself you allow to be left there. And when you move on somewhere else, whether home or somewhere new, you become aware of what you left behind. The memories come to you without warning, though sometimes you do sit there, looking out the window, or staring at the road ahead, and actively try to conjure up those most meaningful of memories into your mind. You create an absence from the place you are right now, maybe your normal home or doing some routine job, effectively embarking on a psychedelic trip in those moments, where you are not here, you are wishing you were somewhere else, but somewhere else that you’ve already been to.
These memories are strong.
You leave these places, maybe never to see the people you knew there ever again. They exist only in your memory, in your mind, or your brain, or wherever the waking hallucinations we use to navigate the so-called real world reside. You step off the plane at home and all you’re left with is that lingering resonance, and an inability to fully articulate the world you were in and what was so special about it. You ramble when you talk. You discuss trivial little things. You laugh at things that, objectively, are not funny, or even interesting. You talk in tangents about specific days of your life and when someone snaps you back into it you realise you don’t even know yourself why you began talking about it. You can’t explain the trip fully even if you remember it all so clearly, and in any case, no-one cares – and why should they? – and for all intents and purpose it might as well have all been a dream.
What’s the difference? The parts that stay with you are every bit as bizarre as the dream world; you try to describe them and your throat catches and your voice remains silent and your limbs fail you every bit as predictably as in those dreams, except this time you think you’re awake, in the safety of the familiar world you know.
You may be safe from the apparent harms of the dream world, and even if you cannot remember any of the details, you’re often left with a profound and lingering resonance, one that affects your waking moments every bit as bizarrely your dreams.
All of the people who existed in that foreign place are effectively dead, their memories nothing more than spirits, their social media profiles the communications of ghosts, like those animated paintings in Hogwarts, a real-life vision in the here and now of the Black Mirror dystopia that Elon Musk promises us, where people’s consciousnesses are kept alive by artificial intelligence, pretending old friends live forever, though they die every morning when we wake from our sleep.
In time the memories fade until only the strongest ones are able to be recollected at will. Other events in your life will trigger random flashbacks, but mostly all that will remain is the memory stored inside you. Forever the world ahead of you is changed, so powerfully so that you will wish you were back where you were. But you can’t go back. Not in the same way, at least. If you do, you have to understand that this is a new visit, and that even if things are just as they were, you are not, and the two places do not mix so well. Just because you’re here now does not mean that you’re here now. You remain a tourist, an observer, the watcher of a film.
***
To this day I still have never met again any of my friends from Revelstoke, or anyone else I met at that time, one of the most important times of my life (though I’ve had some interesting meetings with mutual friends and family of the people I knew there, in later places where I’d end up). It pained me for many years. Almost all of the gang were from the other side of the world: Canada, Australia, New Zealand. Social media kept things on life support. Kept alive the ghosts of the past. Messages. Comments. Sharing of photos and liking them. Birthday wishes at the prompt, the people from faraway places are the most reliable well-wishers, as your relationship now only exists through the intermediaries of apps and notifications, which are technologically re-enforced, though perhaps spiritually dead. The preserved memories keep the heart warm, for sure, though maybe these memories are only supposed to live on as long as they do live on. And maybe the ghosts haunt your dreams because you haven’t let them die. You’re supposed to move on.
For a long time I dreamed of going back. I tried first to recreate the feeling of being there in other countries and places – it failed. I tried to do it at home, but could never recreate the sense of freedom. I came to realise that it was the place itself that contained the magic. And I dreamed of not just going there again, but moving there again, first as I planned of moving to Vietnam – “something new, something different, I want to travel” – and then before I moved home from there again.
But deep down I always knew I could never go back.
By day I sometimes still dream – not as strongly, but I allow myself a little of the vice – of meeting up with the Family again, and we’ll reminisce about all the old times, and all the old places. And everyone I meet who was ever in that place will be as happy to see me as I will be to see them.
And we all will remember things the same.
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Incredible. Poignant and thoughtful, imminently recognizable slice of humanity.