Damien Galeone

As a kid, I spent a great deal of time outlining in detail the contents of my dreams to those around me. If you’re assuming those numbers plummeted throughout my early life, your assumption would be correct. And, though I’m not exactly certain of the numbers on household murders immediately following the detailed recounting of a dream, I’m sure they’re in the high nineties.

And, yet, somehow I made it to adulthood, where I still hadn’t grasped the idea that one’s dreams are only interesting to them. Oh sure, we all want to hear a dream if it’s graphic in a sexual or violent nature. Our curiosity is piqued if someone we have a crush on might let on that we made an appearance in their deep sleep theater, more so if we weren’t wearing pants. Otherwise, the social rules are: keep your dreams to yourself and we won’t hit you in the face with a shoe.

With that being said, what follows now is a mild foray into my current dream life. So if you stumbled onto this blog and are now regretting it, I hold no hard feelings if you run away to the warm, comforting arms of Instagram, Facebook, or one of those websites that gives you a real time ticker on all the lies that Donal Trump tells. Otherwise, enter at your own risk.

In the last few years, my workload was increased immeasurably. This is good in some ways – i.e. I have money to buy and eat food. It’s also less good in some ways – i.e. anxiety has become like a drunken roommate who steals my waffles in the middle of the night. And this anxiety has also invaded other areas of my life.

Over Christmas, a time of peace, relaxation, reflection, quiet, and serenity, I took to waking up around 3 am in a sweaty panic and walking around the house trying to remember what it was I was supposed to do. Though I can’t – and never can – recall the task in detail, I do know it was a weird and complicated task. Nothing so straightforward as calling someone or sending an email. No. My dream task involved esoteric steps, just-out-of-reach visuals, and clandestine reasons.

Others get a dream lover, some smooth-bodied sex god(dess) to soothe their real-life troubles and pleasure their dream bodies and spirits. If those people wake up early, it’s usually with a smile on their faces. I get a dream job and dream tasks delegated from some nameless, faceless, voiceless entity like the little box that signifies ‘the board’ in Severance. A while after waking, I do become vaguely aware that I don’t have dream tasks, but there is still that niggling something in the back of my head – some lever I have to pull, a checklist whose points I had to tick off. This anxiety doesn’t dissipate upon waking. 

So, when Burke asked me at 3:10 am on December 23^rd what exactly I was doing holding my tablet up against the Christmas tree, my answer “well, I have to find the . . . do the thing by morning . . . that had to be done before the day . . . yesterday when the thing was sent” didn’t exactly clear things up.

Our university’s testing period lasts about five weeks. Five weeks of very little teaching, very little student interaction, very little day-to-day face-to-face worry. It took about three and a half of those weeks for me to unwind enough to stop getting dream tasks in my dream job. But we started back to school last Monday.

Around 3 am, I awoke in a sweaty mess (pillow saturated, just like in the movies). I then embarked in a small journey around my flat, checking windows and bookshelves. The cat raised her head from her bed on the couch and asked me with her eyes: what you doing, old man? I had no real answer, I think I said something like “Good morning, B Monster, see I’m just practicing for my old age, a period of life towards which I am careening with the hopes that I might get some sleep then.”

The cat found my explanation lacking.  

I know that anxiety is the cost of doing business in the 21^st century of Planet X. But when did that become a reality? When did anxiety start? Were my Neanderthalic great aunts and uncles waking up with a start in some cave wondering if they’d hung up the sabertooth cat hides? If they did wake up with a start, it was probably more to do with the plausibility of waking up with a sabertooth’s sabered tooth perforating their jugular while they slept.

After waking at 3 am and being unable to drift back into a state of, evidently, quasi-productive unconsciousness, I decide to do some research. I sit on the couch, the cat covers her eyes with her tail, and I start reading. Since neither the Neanderthals nor the Cro-Magnons wrote anything down (including, sadly, dream journals and, more sadly, sitcoms), we can’t be sure that they had anxiety. But evidence suggest they both did.

In the first place, both communities had to deal with ice age conditions and competing rival groups that created aggression and social conflict. Moreover, their short, hard lives probably involved making it from cave to cave or mammoth hut to mammoth hut while being stalked by giant animals that viewed them the same way I view a hoagie and fries. They had to worry about strategic hunting, getting and storing food, and creating tools, which meant getting to places with resources. And probably having to fight other groups when they got there.

Additionally, both groups would have been graced with the amygdala – the fear and anxiety center of the brain. So, their brains prioritized survival and motor skills and vision over abstract thinking or innovation, it still did them the favor of leaving then fear and anxiety. Sure, this would have come in helpful when understanding not to flick the testicle of a cave bear. But the fact that the brain didn’t make room for the capacity to develop a fidget spinner, a Xanax, or just a couch to lie down on seems sort of mean. I wonder if further anthropological interpretation of the hand-print cave art will reveal Cro-Magnon artists who just needed a hug. Who knows, maybe the cave art is a result of some insomniac Cro-Magnon who kept waking up with the vague notion that he had to sharpen his axe. Again.      

In the Assyrian Empire, men did a three-year rotation – one year of military service, one year of public service, and one year at home working their farms and impregnating their wives. In a militarized society led by aggressive kings, war would have been commonplace. Things like torture, pillaging would have complemented brutal combat. And it was during their year at home that the post-traumatic results of that would manifest in waking up and seeing ghosts at night and being unable to scream out.

At 4:30 am, I am satisfied that my distant ancestors were as stressed out as I am. At least in my case there’s very little chance of being attacked during sleep by a cave bear. I take that as a point in my favor. I finally yawn and head back to bed, where I will now dream of ambiguous paperwork, Assyrian torturers, and dull axes. That is, until 5:21 am, when I get up to clean my wall with my bedside lamp.