Dreams + Ichabod Crane + Candlesticks
I spent 119 days alone this spring without touching another person. In deep isolation I felt things. Fear and paranoia braided my hair. Despair in many shapes interlocking and shifting. What really makes life worth living? If I can’t be with people, how do I know who I am? I looked forward to dreaming, to entering a different space, one that might be less fraught. But I dreamed of angry unmasked masses turning on me as I walked through malls, stores—public spaces that became places of terror in my dreams. I dreamed I bought a special pair of glasses that obscured a revolution happening right in the street. I dreamed of trying to support the economy; buying a doll from a store in trouble. The only doll left cost the exact amount of the one stimulus check I received. Division, hatred, mistrust, disinformation, disease, power imbalances, job loss, poverty growth, violence, self-sacrifice for capital gain, and isolation ripped through my unconsciousness just as much as in my waking life.
Months before the pandemic, I requested a book through interlibrary loan, Charlotte Beradt’s The Third Reich of Dreams. When lockdown started, I sat on my couch and dove in. Beradt describes her purpose in collecting the dreams of Germans from 1933-1939 as “to collect the dreams the Nazi regime had generated,” to prove that one cannot escape living in a dictatorship, even when unconscious. Beradt insists, “The Nazi official who maintained that people could lead a private life only in their sleep certainly underestimated the power of the Third Reich.”
People dreamed it was illegal to dream. One man dreamed that he was dreaming in triangles, squares, rectangles, abstract shapes so as to escape punishment. People dreamed of homes with no walls, tapped phones, thoughts somehow transported directly to authorities. In 1934, one man dreamed he confessed to his brother on the phone, “Nothing gives me pleasure anymore,” and as soon as he lay down the phone, he was immediately threatened with arrest. I’ve said this aloud to my plants, or my dirty dishes, and sometimes I wait for a knock at the door. Someone to drag me away and say, “this is America, you’re not allowed to be full of displeasure.”
One of Beradt’s dreamers writes in his diary, and she summarizes: “in these dreams he sees his friends standing about with the same ‘impassive expression’ on their faces.” Beradt describes a dream theme essential to the German experience during Hitler’s reign, “the lack of concern on the part of their fellow men.” Compassion fatigue. “The stifling atmosphere of total indifference which constant pressures create.”
In my waking life, I have seen people impervious to what is right, what is safe, what is kind, what is reasonable. I witnessed total indifference. At the grocery store in April, a man triumphantly pulled his mask down and coughed loudly, looking around proudly at the fear he created. The impassive people, myself included, too afraid to say anything, do anything. In August, me standing in front of a classroom of blank-faced students shouting through a mask: what happens if I end up in the hospital? The dreams confirmed for me what I already knew — there is no escape from reality, there’s only the willful decision of what to believe. Things that scare me more than the virus: we have populations now living in competing realities. Choose your reality, and your dreams will follow.
Election season: the culminating experience for our celebrations of fear and death. This October, I revisited Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” The political underpinnings in this tale hit different in the red and blue strobe lights of this election. Ichabod is us, newly minted America, scared, and in lust, and walking through the wilderness. He’s unable to fully enjoy his boring life without the ghosts of those that once ruled us (the British). The headless horseman is also us: it’s our worst fear, a headless body, an ungoverned space void of monarchy, new America. When Crane encounters the ghost, the Hessian has found his head, and in a rage throws it at Crane, as if to say, “Go rule yourself!” America often has been afraid of itself, has not trusted itself to do the right thing. Not all Americans supported separating from England. Many were terrified that we were incapable of self-governing. America has beheaded itself before. I wondered on election night if we had the courage to do it again? I watched results ticker in; was America capable of doing the right thing?
During the height of the first wave, I stopped at a neighbor’s rummage sale. A risk, but I took it. I happened to have $20 in my pocket. She had many things on display and I looked hungrily with my eyes. Sparkly shoes with bulbous straps, cups and glasses with marching bears, children’s board books shouting multicolored ABC’s, and puffy pink ski boots. She told me anything I liked, she would wipe with bleach if I wanted to touch it. She had a mask, gloves, a table replete with every bleach product imaginable. She kept offering me a khaki trench coat. She sprayed it down with Lysol as she offered it, but I declined. I never really liked khaki. I settled on a glass striped pitcher, two cut glass candlesticks, and a ceramic hippo. Walking away, I realized I had imagined hosting people in my home. I would use the candlesticks for a dinner. The pitcher to make a signature cocktail. As I washed the objects in my kitchen sink I wondered how long it would be until I used them. A year? Two? Why did I buy things specifically to share with others when I’ve been so alone? The urge to share is still there. The hope of not being alone is there. I was imagining again, something that has kept me safe and sane through the pandemic. Imagining other realities. Not dreams exactly, but close. I put white candles in the candelabra and lit them that night. Maybe best not to wait. Maybe best to enjoy now. Dinner with the elements if not with people; a glass pitcher of water, controlled flames. Maybe best to light them and say, “this gives me pleasure.”
