To Sleep, Perchance to Dream

I want to tell you about a dream. Most dreams happen at night. In one sense, this one is no exception. The events of this story take place at night. The dream did not. I dreamt that I was in a motel room. I didn’t know how I got there or why I was there, and neither of these questions so much as crossed my mind. The focus was on the future, or not present at all. I don’t remember if I looked around the motel room, but my memory of it is entirely jumbled up with every motel I’ve seen in any work of art. This was the motel from that movie I watched that one time. This was the motel in that game I played and then forgot about. This was the motel that I drove past in California, when I was too young to even know what a motel really was.

Picture that quintessential motel room. Picture me (you) sitting on the bed. No – I think I was lying under the covers. Actually, to be quite honest, I don’t remember where I was or what position I was in, but I think freshly awake is the most evocative option.

I woke up in a motel room bed, feeling like something was waiting for me outside. It wasn’t the feeling you get when there’s a person outside your door about to knock or ring the doorbell. It was something else, like a hunger that wasn’t in my stomach but instead across a forest that I hadn’t even seen yet and wasn’t sure was there. The strangest part of my awakening was the sensation of sunlight on my eyelids. I would have sworn that the touch of sun was what had woken me up, but there was no sign of sunlight through the single motel window. I checked the bathroom, half expecting to see a makeshift photo darkroom set up. There was a bright pink potted plant, which I picked up. I grabbed the flashlight by the door as I stepped out, thinking nothing of any of the strangeness but absolutely certain of where I needed to go. I should say that the certainty was not a logical certainty, but a sensory one. The hunger was on the other side of the forest that I could feel in front of me, so I went towards it. I could feel the eyes of a few owls looking at me, and I felt more kinship with a rat than I ever had before. I do not consciously remember how I traversed the first half of the forest. Half of my memory appears to be that of a rat, while the other half was my simple plod through the forest, clinging to my flashlight as if it alone could ward off whatever obstacles impeded my journey to what my dream-self hungered for. The rat memory was cut short by a silent predator plucking it from the ground. I can’t tell how much separation I should use for the rat. I was the rat but the rat died and I kept going but maybe a part of me died with the rat but this was also just a dream so it wasn’t real. It wasn’t real.

My stomach grumbled. I could feel the sound from the forest around me, reverberating inwards towards my stomach, instead of the usual reverse of that. Once again, I thought nothing of it. The eyes were still on my neck, and wherever I pointed the flashlight, I could see them swiftly disappear. They wanted me to know they were watching, but they wouldn’t let me get a good look at them. I can’t decide if they were aliens or human scientists trying to collect data on some poor confused fellow in the woods. They could’ve been something else. I kind of like the idea that I was part of some lab experiment, and the motel was an elaborate testing facility. But the eyes quickly receded from my conscious mind as I reached the other edge of the forest. I only remember flashes and moments from this point on. I remember the biggest moose I’ve ever seen (it was probably an average size moose; I’ve never seen any). I remember a stabbing red light. I remember the click of a camera shutter. I saw someone’s face. It was likely an amalgamation of all of the people I hate right now. There was a bright flash, and I woke up.

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” – H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

Do you remember Sarah Connor’s nightmare in Terminator 2? It has wormed its way back into my brain lately. I think it’s great. I also think it’s deeply inadequate. I also think there’s no other way it could be. The flames of nuclear annihilation falling on the people of suburban LA is the worst possible thing she can imagine? These imaginations are a consequence of our atomization/alienation, but mostly – they’re pragmatic. It’s not truly possible to imagine the suffering of those who you do not know, those who are separated by oceans or languages. We should all have a basic human connection, but our imaginations are only so big. This is why we cut down and chop ourselves up into communities of shared experience, this is why we imagine these borders and realities for ourselves. To make it all bearable. To make it possible to understand it.

This is not to say that this is an acceptable paradigm. We should not live in a world that forces us to compartmentalize suffering and pain of this magnitude. While it feels deeply horrifically psychotic to discuss real and current horrors through the lens of fucking art criticism, I truly do believe that art is a revolutionary thing. Critical thought is revolutionary! In a world that desperately wants us to compartmentalize and twist our psyches to avoid truly understanding and grappling with any aspect of our society, it is radical to discuss things as they are. Critical thought of any kind is a valuable element of a radical existence – it is important to “grasp things by the root” as Marx said – but we must never delude ourselves into thinking it is enough. Action/practice cannot exist withouth thought/theory, but thought/theory is useless without action/practice.

A lot of horror art seems to avoid truly systemic and revolutionary critique mostly because the critics we listen to don’t hold those politics. The truly great works of horror are entirely tailored to revolutionary politics, because they are so good at diagnosing the problem. When I first watched Rob Zombie’s Halloween II, I explicitly connected it to the horrors of capitalism, “we haven't created a michael myers yet, but how different is one boogeyman from countless meaningless deaths every single day.” When I think about the Lovecraft I’ve read, I connect it to the unsustainability of our current world order. Where Lovecraft leaned into despair by placing the blame for the alienating and crazymaking rot of our society on ancient beings, I can reach for radical hope in the fact that even a comically psychotic bigot saw many of the same issues that I do. Lovecraft’s stories (and many other works of horror art) resonate deeply in a world that is full of such suffering and evil that it should drive every single person alive insane. I sometimes worry that my dreams aren’t crazy enough. The blood runs deep, it’s the least I can do to send my mind down there too.

“Being crazy’s a requirement, sonny. Who else could understand the world when it’s like this? It takes crazy to know crazy.” – Odin Anderson in Alan Wake