Every Dream is a Dream of the Apocalypse
Every Dream Is a Dream of the Apocalypse
(*headphones recommended)
1.
I don’t remember the first time I can’t sleep but it doesn’t matter. Every time the insomnia creeps back into my life it feels new, anyway, like speaking my first word, except instead of ‘mama’ the word is ‘pleaseGodletmehaveoneminuteofshuteyebeforeIhavetoworkat9AM’.
2.
I have developed rituals now, for nights where I can feel the insomnia setting in. I lie, very still, between sheets that are both too hot and too cold, careful not to disturb the meditative limbo I am sometimes able to will myself into. I try not to think, then fail at not thinking. I do not move for hours until finally, the sun rises, and I can pick up my phone again to check my Instagram notifications.
3.
The degree of self-control I have to exert to avoid picking up my phone at any point throughout a sleepless night is immense, and often limit-testing. But I am motivated by my biggest fear: becoming someone who can’t sleep—doesn’t sleep—because they have an Instagram addiction.
4.
Courtney Barnett sings about insomnia. In ‘An Illustration of Loneliness (Sleepless in New York)’, she lies awake, and thinks about:
Palmistry
Her dinner plates
French baguettes
‘You’, as in a distant, fantastical lover
5.
When I lie awake, I think about:
Every conspiracy theory I have ever read
Childhood trauma
Emailing, not as in sending any particular email to a specific recipient, but the concept of emailing itself
‘You’, as in me
6.
Does anyone else think about themselves in second person? In January 2020, KylePlantEmoji sends the internet into meltdown by tweeting:
I wonder how other people—those with internal narratives—think about themselves. I wonder if addressing myself in second person forces me to be more reflective (it doesn’t) or more direct (it doesn’t).
7.
Q: What do nineties style icon Fran Drescher and Australian anti-vaxxer celebrity chef Pete Evans have in common?
8.
Sometimes insomnia isn’t that different from being asleep. When I lie awake for hours, I begin to feel stuck inside a waking dream (or nightmare). When I do manage to doze off, I often have fitful dreams that, upon waking, carry the illusion of not having slept at all.
9.
My insomnia sounds like this:
10.
Nabokov liked to record his dreams, to test a theory that they were a ‘proleptic view of an event to come.’ The Paris Review publishes part of Nabokov’s dream diary and adds:
In this first installment, Nabokov dreams about eating rare soil samples. Three days later, the soil samples appear in a documentary he’s watching on TV.
11.
My mum tells me I could see the future as a child. We are sitting in a car outside a Chinese grocery in Eastwood. She goes in and I stay there, seatbelt buckled, thinking. Later, I ask her to explain what she meant but instead of answering, she says, you could also see demons.
12.
In 2016, I am diagnosed with anxiety. When my psychiatrist tells me this, I say, well obviously, and then I recount all the anxious things I think about when asleep and not asleep. I want her to say, don’t worry, your dreams are just anxious because they contain visions of the future that send your brain into overdrive, but instead she says, I want you to read a book called Feeling Good (2nd edition) by David D. Burns.
13.
A: Both Evans and Drescher believe that 5G causes cancer. I add this to the list of conspiracy theories I will think about next time I can’t sleep.
14.
There is a dream I’ve been having for as long as I can recall. In this dream, which takes place in a void, an amorphous shape sharpens into view, ballooning outwards at breakneck speed to cover my field of vision. Then it becomes small again, shrinking to something palm-sized, smooth and shiny, glistening as if wet. The dream looks like this:
If dreams are glimpses into the future, then this one is of the apocalypse.
15.
J tells me she has started lucid dreaming. She posts about her lucid dreams to her 10,000 Tumblr followers, many of whom reblog and respond enthusiastically. In her lucid dreams, she sees Mischa Collins and Jared Padalecki, stars of the CW show Supernatural (2005-).
16.
Q: What do sleep and sleeplessness have in common?
17.
Feeling Good (2nd edition) costs $20.99 and is only available from Amazon, so already I am not feeling good. The book arrives and I almost pick it up three times but each time I spy a better offering instead. I read:
Sleeveless by Natasha Stagg
Enigma Variations by André Aciman
The Fault in our Stars (re-read) by John Green
I do not read Feeling Good (2nd edition).
18.
When I am eighteen, I go to my first music festival in Newcastle. There are acts there I’m dying to see but I end up missing them because I spend all of my time texting people. I LOVE YOU, I write in all-caps to eight different friends, I’M SO GLAD I MET YOU. It feels good to be high on life, I think to myself (but this is a lie because I’m high on more than life).
I also text C, who is from Newcastle, and ask him where I should go out afterwards. Like, Argyle House?, he replies instantly. I go there and get higher on life, maybe too high, until I can’t feel my anxiety anymore. That night I try to sleep but can’t. My heart thuds and every time I close my eyes, my jaw clenches, and I can hear the sound of my teeth gnashing like a tidal wave crashing onto a rocky shore, again and again and again.
19.
For a week afterwards, I cry:
Spontaneously
During an elimination episode of Project Runway
When I write my application for an executive role at a university society, filled with aphorisms about how much I love university life
Don’t worry, my friend says, this is normal. Is it also normal to be hearing voices in my head?, I ask. He leaves me on seen.
For months afterwards—maybe three, maybe four—I experience auditory hallucinations every night. Eyes shut, just as I am on the verge of falling asleep, I hear whispering, chanting, a bass drum, a crowd, a screech. It sounds like a glitch, like this:
20.
Did you read Feeling Good (2nd edition)?, my therapist asks me. Yes, I lie.
You told me you had been having anxious dreams, she says, are you still having them? No, I say, truthfully, I haven’t been dreaming at all.
I don’t tell her about the voices.
21.
A: Both sleep and sleeplessness can feel apocalyptic. Every dream is a dream of the apocalypse if you try hard enough to interpret it. Every bout of insomnia leaves you wishing for the apocalypse the next morning.
22.
In Knowing (2009), Nicolas Cage plays a professor who discovers that a fifty-year-old time capsule given to his son in class contains clairvoyant visions of every major catastrophe in recent memory. It ends with “EE”, Everyone Else, a prediction of an apocalyptic event that is realised by the movie’s conclusion: a solar flare, that engulfs the Earth.
23.
I watch Knowing (2009) in cinemas when I am twelve and have dreams about the apocalypse. My mum says to my dad, I can’t believe you let him watch that, you knew he would have nightmares.
24.
One day, the auditory hallucinations stop. They stop without warning; I have not taken any concerted measures against them. I have not told anyone about them. I have not even Googled them, for fear of what I might find (the apocalypse).
More time elapses. I forget that the hallucinations ever happened. I am sleeping eight hours a night for the first time in my life. I am sleeping so much that I decide, why not make productive use of this time to lucid dream?
25.
In 2016, my friend starts a Facebook group called ‘dream shitposting’, where people post detailed recounts of their dreams. There are posts about:
Popping pimples
Dating Kim Kardashian
Moving house
Swimming pools
I join the group and decide I will post if I can successfully lucid dream.
26.
An all-stars season of Masterchef begins on Channel 10 and I join a Masterchef discussion group on Facebook where every member’s picture is one of three things:
A car
A sunset
A selfie about 40% too close to the face
Feeling bored, I post about an episode where Curtis Stone is a guest judge:
Does anyone know what Curtis Stone’s views are on 5G?
The post gets thirty angry comments before it is deleted.
27.
I watch YouTube videos on lucid dreaming. I read how-to guides from websites which Google Chrome tells me are unsafe but I click ‘proceed anyway’ and feel like I am entering dangerous territory (I am not). I practise all the methods:
Recording my dreams in a journal
Disrupting my sleep halfway through, then falling back asleep
Keeping an object on me at all times to check for reality
Yes, like Leo DiCaprio’s spinning top in Inception (2010)
None of them work. I am still unable to achieve anything close to lucid dreaming. On the contrary: sometimes, after my alarm rings four hours into my sleep, I am unable to nod off again so I lie there, staring upwards with laser focus until it is time to check my Instagram notifications.
28.
C and I start dating. For the first time in years, I feel not-anxious, which isn’t so much the opposite of ‘anxious’ as it is a separate emotional state entirely. I feel so not-anxious that I stop seeing my therapist. It takes me two months to learn that ‘not-anxiety’ is another form of anxiety. Everything is going so well, I think, but why? I try to push these thoughts out of my mind because something miraculous happens. I lucid dream, for the first time.
29.
The dream goes something like: there is a sunset, and there is a hill with a winding path that leads to a cottage in the distance. Because this is a lucid dream, I can beam anyone into it at will. I think about who I will pick. Jared Padalecki? No. Mischa Collins? No. I beam C in instead, and we walk towards the cottage, and we kiss.
The dream, which I recount in ‘dream shitposting’, looks like this:
30.
I ask my mum about my childhood again, hoping to catch her off guard this time. It works. I don’t remember much, she says (a lie), but when you were a child you used to point at empty spots in the air and cry.
So?, I say.
So your grandmother visited a sage in China, who said what you were seeing was a malevolent spirit, and you were having visions of what it would do to you.
I look unconvinced. This is why I didn’t want to tell you, she says, you’re too young to understand.
31.
C breaks up with me a week before Christmas, and I spend Christmas Day in bed crying. If my break-up was a movie, it would be Lady Bird (2017). I listen to Dave Matthews Band and keep sobbing.
On Boxing Day, I cry again but I also manage to post a picture of the sunset on my Instagram story with the caption Stunning Gladesville ✨. It truly is a stunning sunset. That night, I try to lucid dream again, making a secret pact with myself—my brain— that if I am successful, I will never try to lucid dream again. Please, I say, you owe me this.
I close my eyes. I picture C, the sunset, the hill, the cottage. You got this, I think (as if I were a personal trainer deadlifting a lucid dream). The pact fails. No lucid dream. No dream at all. Instead, the screeching, clawing voices return.
32.
I do not try to lucid dream again. The fear of the voices returning is too strong, second only to my fear of becoming someone with an Instagram addiction.
33.
Q: What do meditation and kiwi fruit have in common?
34.
I start seeing a different therapist and this time I tell her the truth. I tell her about:
My sleep habits, alternating between apocalyptic insomnia and apocalyptic dreams without any in-between
The auditory hallucinations I have had, and am terrified of having again
Knowing (2009)
My mum’s story of the sage and the spirit
Should I read Feeling Good (2nd edition)?, I ask. No, she says, I think you have a disproportionate fear of the apocalypse.
35.
The fear turns out not so disproportionate after all.
36.
I am having difficulty sleeping again, now. No voices to blame except my own. So you’ve been having weird dreams during lockdown, too?, The Guardian asks. No, I say, I haven’t been dreaming at all.
37.
People begin burning down 5G towers around the world, blaming them for the spread of COVID-19.
38.
A: Both meditation and kiwifruit are offered to me by well-meaning friends as sleep aids. Neither work. I am too anxious to meditate; I am too picky to eat kiwifruit every night before bed.
39.
I read about other people’s dreams on Neptune, an online archive documenting so-called ‘pandemic dreams’. There are dreams about:
Deep oceans
Blood-soaked sculptures
Family reunions on street corners
I read these dreams to inspire myself to have the same ones, or at least to dream at all. Until I do, I will be riding out this wave of insomnia like any other: through gritted teeth, lying between sheets that are too hot and too cold, thinking about all the different ways the Earth will end.
40.
Localised arson attempts continue, but they are no match for the worldwide spread of 5G towers. Their rays penetrate deep through the Earth’s surface, rippling 6,378km to reach the Earth’s core, which spontaneously shatters as a result of 5G’s vibrational frequency. The core collapses in on itself, and everything—every copy of Feeling Good (2nd edition)—crumbles as the Earth implodes in a fiery nova that blossoms into the void. It looks like this:
Michael Sun is a writer and designer from Sydney whose work revolves around the intersections between queerness, memory, and technology. His essays and criticism have been published in Guardian Australia, The Monthly, VICE, ABC Arts, Overland, and more. In 2020, he is the Kill Your Darlings New Critic.
