Strange News from Another Star, No. 6: The self
A mirror in the other world
This is the sixth edition of Strange News from Another Star, a collective dream journal and investigation into the geography of the other world. Briefly: readers send me dreams; I try to work out what’s going on.
Last time we looked at the home, and the weird extra dimensions homes seem to have in dreams. It was a fun piece—by the end, I was advancing the argument that the modern, Western style of interior planning, with rooms branching off a central corridor, was actually an attempt to mimic in architecture the weird, wormy houses of our collective dreams. Since there are now several thousand more readers here than there were back when it was published, I’ve taken the unprecedented step of unlocking the whole thing for free subscribers so you can see what we’ve been up to. Check it out.
This edition is about the self, and it’s in two parts. Free subscribers can read the first part, about dreams in which the self doesn’t appear at all. The second part goes into some much weirder stuff, including ‘temporary conscious entities’ and the real reason your reflection is always so fucked up in a dream, and it’s for paid subscribers only. I’ve seen what you people will pay to read on Substack, and it’s a very dismal collection of cretinous political takes and fraudulent stock tips. I promise that this is the good stuff, and it can all be yours if you just click the button below:
The next edition will be about animals. Have you dreamed of mythic, totemic animals? Have you dreamed of being an animal? Do you have any insight into the content of your pet’s dreams? If you’ve had any interesting dreams about animals—or any interesting dreams in general—you can contribute to SNAS by emailing them to me at snas.substack@gmail.com. As always, include your name if you want to be named, otherwise I’ll keep you anonymous, and include a link to any personal project or deranged manifesto if you want to be linked.
Some news:
Building Big Things, the inaugural print edition of Damage magazine, is now out, and it’s a really beautiful 100-page volume, featuring essays from friends of the Lodge including Amber A’Lee Frost, Dustin Guastella, and Anton Jäger, along with one from yours truly on Saudi megastructures and the spirit of modernism. Damage is a great project, and one of the last publications still offering a serious, committed left-wing critique that responds to human life as it’s actually lived. A print subscription gets you two issues a year plus access the the entire digital archive for $40, but Numb at the Lodge readers in the US can get a special 15% off by mashing the big button below:
(The offer is also available for international readers and digital-only subscriptions; you just need to mash a different button.)
In The Point, I reviewed Elon Musk, Walter Isaacson’s enormous new biography of Elon Musk. It’s one of those mean, takedown-type reviews. I think I was assigned the book because I’m the kind of person who can be relied upon to hate Elon Musk, but I actually came away from it absolutely hating Walter Isaacson. He is possibly the most dog-brained, tin-eared, intellectually cowardly mediocrity who ever picked up a pen. He is also a fantastically successful writer who churns out dependable bestsellers. What does this mean? When people buy books, what are they actually looking for?
In Harper’s, I reviewed All Desire is a Desire for Being, the new Penguin Classics selection of the works of René Girard. Girard has had a weird trajectory—once a minor literary critic, after his death he was transformed into a kind of business philosopher, full of actionable insights to help you grow your shitty dropshipping enterprise or whatever. More recently, he’s become one of the intellectual lodestars of the New Right, proclaiming that progress is impossible and the libs are all secretly trying to cut your heart out with a stone knife. The Penguin volume srikes me as an attempt to rehabilitate him as a vaguely ethical and not particularly interesting thinker. I think all these versions get the man badly wrong. Fundamentally, he’s a crank, and that’s not a bad thing!
I have a short story in the fourth issue of Heavy Traffic magazine, alongside more extremely hip new fiction from Natasha Stagg, Sean Thor Conroe, Kyle Chayka, and more. It’s about eating the Sun. It’s out in March but you can preorder now.
I was in New York again late last year, which meant I obviously had to return for nearly three hours of totally unfocused conversation on the Our Struggle podcast, this time with friends of the Lodge Willy Staley and Dean Kissick. I have absolutely no memory of what we talked about. I think it might literally be nothing. Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever.
That’s all from the waking world. Into the night.
According to Abu Hurayra, the Prophet Mohammed once declared that ‘whoever sees me in a dream has truly seen me, for the Satan cannot assume my form.’ This hadith is collected in the Sahih al-Bukhari—the most authentic source of sunnah, and possibly the second most important book in the entire Islamic tradition. But in a way, the whole book emerged out of that one hadith. The story goes that around 846 AD, Imam al-Bukhari had a dream in which he was standing in front of the Prophet with a fan in his hand, driving away the endless clouds of flies that were trying to settle on Mohammed’s body. The dream interpreters told him this indicated his destiny, which was to dispel the myths and falsehoods that were trying to cloud the true religion. Because the Prophet appeared in the dream, its message was true. But if you take the hadith seriously, this means that what al-Bukhari saw wasn’t an image or a metaphor, but Mohammed himself, two hundred years after his death, who really was standing patiently in some zone of dream-space, actually allowing thousands of flies to buzz around him, waiting for the dreamer to arrive and swat them off. The people you see in dreams might be actual people. Or they might be the actual Satan.
Now, we know better. We dream alone, and everything in a dream is made of the self. Of all the folk-oneirocritical ideas floating around out there, maybe the most widespread is this: that everyone you encounter in a dream actually represents some aspect of yourself. So in al-Bukhari’s dream, the Prophet was actually just whatever aspect of himself he held in particular esteem. The flies were his secret doubts; the fan was his attempt to rein in his baser impulses. You get the picture. Dreaming is an adventure across the terrain of yourself, and any insights you receive through dreaming are secrets of the innermost self. It’s all about you.
But based on the dreams you’ve been sending in, I might have to push back on that idea just a little. Maybe it’s because the self is so all-pervasive in dreams that its edges start to blur. Sometimes it’s difficult to distinguish yourself from other people. Sometimes parts of yourself fall away: your name, your face, your teeth. Sometimes you take on a very different shape.
Last time, I asked if any of you had ever dreamed about looking in a mirror. Absolutely everyone who responded said it was a very upsetting experience. Some of you saw reflections that looked a bit like yourselves, but weird and mutated, faces distorted, bulging eyes or too many teeth, like a glitchy AI image. One reader’s reflection shattered like porcelain. Lucy saw herself as ‘a withered crone, mashing my grey, toothless gums.’ Yuri reports that his reflection had ‘black pits for eyes seeping with a clear sap-like material.’ Tori writes: ‘I look in the mirror and see that I have really pale blue eyes and dark hair (in waking life I have brown hair and eyes), I look down and see that my hands are smaller with stumpier fingers. Suddenly I break down and start crying that I miss my old body.’ An anonymous reader’s reflection was screaming in terror, and as soon as they saw their reflection they were assaulted with the sound of ‘violently crashing pots and pans.’
Anecdotal accounts from elsewhere on the internet seem to bear this out. While a few people insist that their reflections are perfectly fine, places like the r/LucidDreaming subreddit are full of stories of the horrible demons that appear in dream-mirrors. Usually, this is explained through the pop-psychological idea that mirrors symbolise your innermost fears about who you are. Or maybe it’s a bad idea to look in a mirror in a dream for the same reason that it’s a bad idea to look in a mirror on psychedelics. I have another theory. We’ll get there in the end.
But in the other world, even stranger things can happen to the self. Sometimes, it can disappear altogether.
1. Dreams without a dreamer
Ciaran writes:
I’ve never actually been present in any of my dreams. I always thought it was odd when people talked about themselves ‘doing things’ in dreams, but I always assumed that they were retroactively putting themselves in the dream after they woke up. But no, it turns out that you guys are all walking around and having conversations in your dreams, just like in waking life. My response when I fully understood this was one of baffled horror, like when I heard that there are people who don’t have an interior monologue or who can’t picture objects in their minds—it seems crazy to me that people can’t dream without having an avatar of themselves. My dreams usually take the form of one very intense image. One that stuck in my mind a few weeks ago had an irrigation ditch full of very thick muddy water, where a group of people were performing ballet while wearing VR headsets. Their movements were very beautiful but their white costumes were absolutely soaked with mud.
Ciaran is unusual in only having purely imagistic dreams, but I think the phenomenon might be more common than he supposes. One reader writes:
I don’t know if this counts but often I don’t experience myself at all in dreams, it’s more like watching a little movie or sometimes even a cartoon. Here’s one from my dream journal:
A kind of cute anthropomorphic cartoon can of condensed milk is given a lump of what looks like smoking magnesium—he’s delighted by the gift—smiles at it—hugs it lovingly to his tin-can chest—at which point the reactive metal burns through his body and the condensed milk comes gushing out—expression of pure uncomprehending horror & heartbreak—how could this thing I loved so much hurt me like this?
Ian has another:
I recently had a dream where the person known as Ian was in no way present. The dream was a lost episode of Key and Peele, in which the writers forgot to include any humour. The two of them lived in a small apartment in Queens above the laundromat they owned and ran together. While walking back from an exclusive laundromat industry party, Jordan told Keegan that he felt like he was getting sidelined in favour of Keegan’s new life partner. Keegan responded by asking Jordan if he was tired of the same routine, day in day out. ‘I’ wasn’t there. I was a camera held about waist height that looked up at the duo in long continuous shots.
Beth had this dream in the 1990s, during the hopeful high point of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process:
The camera of the dream looks directly across a huge expanse of a green baize table. The table is crowded by men in suits. The camera is directly opposite Yasser Arafat who is centrally positioned and in an intense and chaotic negotiation. My camera eye view is floating above the heads of the people on the other side of the table. I’m not part of their world. There are other important people there and the camera isn’t completely focused on Arafat. But at some point a black disk appears in the middle of his forehead. Nobody has noticed yet but dark blood begins to seep from the bullet wound. No sound was heard from the firing of the gun.
What’s really notable here is that both Ian snd Beth use the same metaphor, of the dream-perspective as a camera. A camera is something that sees but is not present, an imaginary observer. The obvious question is this: are these dreams a product of the film camera? Did the invention of the abstract observer change the way we dream?
For once I can give a clear answer here: no, it did not. In fact, this kind of dream is very, very well attested in pre-cinematic sources; maybe you could call it the prophetic mode of dreaming. If we go back to the Sahih al-Bukhari, we’ll find one there: Ibn Abbas relates that a Muslim dreamed of clouds with their undersides dripping with butter and honey, and people collecting the sweet greasy mixture in their hands as it fell. But the dreamer wasn’t among them; he wasn’t in his dream at all. In the Bible, the two most prominent dreamers in prophetic mode happen to be kings. When Joseph is imprisoned in Egypt, he interprets the dream of the cupbearer, who dreams of squeezing grapes into Pharaoh’s cup, and the baker, who dreams of birds pecking at the loaves he’s carrying to Pharaoh on his head. (Joseph predicts that the cupbearer would be pardoned, while the baker would be hanged. Birds would peck at his corpse.) But in Pharaoh’s own dream, he doesn’t appear. ‘Behold, seven ears of corn came up upon one stalk, rank and good. And, behold, seven thin ears and blasted with the east wind sprung up after them. And the seven thin ears devoured the seven rank and full ears. And Pharaoh awoke, and, behold, it was a dream.’ In the Book of Daniel, there’s a really fascinating incident: Nebuchadnezzar has had a bad dream, and he wants a wise man to interpret its meaning. But he refuses to tell anyone what his dream actually was; if they’re really wise, they should be able to guess. Obviously this is impossible, so he has all the magicians of Babylon executed. All except Daniel, who receives the content of the king’s dream inside his own dream. ‘Thou, O king, sawest, and behold a great image. This great image, whose brightness was excellent, stood before thee; and the form thereof was terrible. This image's head was of fine gold, his breast and his arms of silver, his belly and his thighs of brass. Thou sawest till that a stone was cut out without hands, which smote the image upon his feet that were of iron and clay, and brake them to pieces.’ The statue represents the empires of worldly history. The rock that destroys them is God.
For what it’s worth, I’ve had some of these non-participatory dreams myself. I don’t experience a succession of images, or a cartoon playing out in my head. There’s no visuospatial element at all. Maybe it’s because of my particular vocation, or my habit of drafting essays in my head when I don’t have anything else to do, but I sometimes dream in text. I am not reading the text; I am not writing the text. In fact, I’m not there at all. Instead of myself, there’s just a sequence of words. These words are usually an incredibly brilliant and witty essay or work of fiction. I don’t think I’m the only one to have these; as I mentioned a few editions back, Samuel Taylor Coleridge received his poem Kubla Khan in a dream. Like Coleridge, I’ve occasionally managed to hold onto these dream-texts just long enough after waking to write parts of them down. A selection:
“Bird oil” “Dog oil” “Frying a steak in dog oil”
Please Abhor The Closing Of The Door
Fate has decreed that he must perform the Five-Man Step (which only has four steps)
What’s going on with these prophetic dreams? The dream researcher David Foulkes might have an answer. From 1968 to 1973, he conducted a massive longitudinal study of children’s dreams at the University of Wyoming, and discovered that very young children—those under five years old—seem to dream almost exclusively in the prophetic mode. Later, in his book Children’s Dreaming and the Development of Consciousness, he described the findings:
Social interaction, which is the prime currency of the dream world in adult reports, was almost wholly lacking in the children’s reports. Only very rarely was there a description of an active self character, that is, of a self who actively participates in dream events, which is another general characteristic of adults’ dream reports. Only a quarter of the preschoolers’ reports described any locomotion or generalised movement; their dreaming was more like a slide than a movie… An animal dream report might be something like the following: a bird singing; a calf in its barn; chickens eating corn… Children rarely reported feelings of any kind in their dreams.
As children get older, their dreams change. First, between five and seven, the static images become dynamic and eventually turn into small narratives. Instead of dreaming about animals, the child starts dreaming about other people. Between the ages of seven and nine, the child starts attaching emotional content to their dreams. Finally, children start to take an active role, inserting themselves into the scenario to perform various dream-activities. More cognitively gifted children might reach this stage around their seventh birthday.
Foulkes was very surprised by this, and I can see why. We make seven-year-old children sit exams, but his data suggests that some of them are not yet conscious of their own selfhood. And other studies bear this out. Guardo and Bohan (1971) found that younger children are sometimes confused by questions like Are you the same person as when you were a baby? or Would you still be yourself with another name?—but around the same time that they start inserting themselves into their dreams, they also start to conceive of themselves as a continuous, stable, bounded entity. Maybe the dream-self is an expression of this new awareness. Or maybe the work of getting there takes place in the dream, which is where you slowly learn to encounter yourself.
But where does that leave those of us who aren’t always represented in our own dreams? Are we mentally deficient, stunted, dumber than a seven year old? That really does seem to be the clinical consensus. In a 2021 study I mentioned last year, Roesler, Konakawa, and Tanaka associated dreaming without self-representation with ‘a lack of subjectivity and self relationship, which manifests in a consistent refusal to participate in school or occupational activities, withdrawal from social relationships etc.’ The study’s participants were psychotherapy clients; those that just dreamed successions of images also found it difficult to ‘refer to the relationship with the therapist, in some cases even to consider the therapist as another person.’ Well, that kind of indifference to other people and nondelineated sense of self is probably what you get when you’re the Pharaoh of Egypt or King of Babylon.
This seems a bit harsh. Maybe we can just be Freudians here. We’ve learned that dreaming is ontogenetically older than the cohesive self, and as Freud points out, ‘in the realm of the mind, what is primitive is so commonly preserved alongside the transformed version which has arisen from it.’ Here, Freud is talking about his friend Romain Rolland’s religious, ‘oceanic’ feeling, in which the self becomes limitless, or melts into a world that is not distinct from it. Freud’s read is that this oceanic feeling is a remnant of very early childhood, before the ego detaches itself from the id. ‘An infant at the breast does not as yet distinguish his ego from the external world as the source of the sensations flowing in upon him.’ A few decades later, that milky infinity provides the raw materials for God. But it’s also there in dreams—after all, in a dream, the sense of not being distinct from the world around you is literally true. Imagistic, prophetic dreams might just be a stronger remnant of the world of early childhood, and we might all have more of them than we think.
Part of what makes early childhood so strange and interesting is that we don’t remember what it was like. We are cut off from our own pasts by a general amnesia. No wonder Freud decided all the essential truths of the psyche must be located there. But this might be because of the late development of the cognitive self: it’s hard to recall events that did not, strictly speaking, happen to you. But we also have difficulty remembering our dreams. They evaporate as soon as we try to think about them in terms of the waking bounded ego. If you were having imagistic, prophetic dreams every night—are you absolutely sure you’d realise?
2. I am the Moon
One of my favourite dreams ever submitted to SNAS is from Abigail, who sent this in more than a year ago. When she was a child, Abigail dreamed that she was the Moon:
I felt my soul ascend to a rocky object orbiting the Earth, where I soon realized that I had inhabited the body of the Moon in the sky. I tilted at an angle and I observed Earth. I was stuck there for thousands of years: the time was all sped up, I felt the heaviness of enormous amounts of time passing, and I moved in a circle around Earth, changing perspectives.
The thing about the dream that stayed with me was the kind of absence of emotion and identity I felt as the Moon moving around Earth. My identity was sort of void, but it was also, in a weird way, my perspective of Earth. It was all I could see. I felt a more physical existence than I’d felt as a human, no feeling, just movement. I was lonely in the happiest way I had ever known. I felt beyond enormous, and I felt very ‘sure,’ in a way I don’t think I’ve ever felt since. But despite all of this, space was so deeply cold, like a metal box or like the wind getting sucked out of you. I was all wrapped up in nothingness :( and when I woke up I was a very happy little girl.