How to dream with your eyes open

“Bottleneck”, by the astounding Ben Zank.

When you dream in bed at night, your brain sorts through the day’s events, separating out the ones that don’t matter. Then it tries to piece together whatever’s left to try to make sense of things.

Dreaming is really important! Without it, the world would be just one chaotic event after another. Without it, we’d eventually go bonkers!

But you don’t have to have to wait until you’re asleep to dream. You can dream whenever you want!

Here’s how:

First thing’s first: I highly recommend you avoid the internet as much as possible. Scrolling all those feeds only leads to mental clutter. And who’d be able to sort through a house full of stuff?

Next, write things down. It doesn’t matter what. Get a pen and paper and sit at a nice, smooth desk and start scribbling. Your words will start out silly and random. You’ll probably apologize for not having something to write about.

But write for long enough, and you absolutely will naturally find yourself with the urge to talk about some topic or another. I guarantee it.

Maybe you’ll write about something funny your partner does. Or your stupid boss, your hilarious child, or the way flowers close up shop for the night. Maybe you’ll finally write that thing you realized as you watched your father pass away right before your eyes but couldn’t bear to articulate until now.

See? You’re doing it!

You’re performing the same task your brain does when it dreams: you’re picking and choosing the most important bits and seeing if they can fit together in a way that makes sense. You’re realizing that Dad wore nothing but weird random holiday reindeer tee shirts because he was no longer able to dress himself anymore, and Mom put those shirts on him because the man she’d been married to for over forty years had become very much like a child again, and so the shirts were not random at all, but indeed were the most perfect and pure and innocent garment for that truly disorienting time ruled by nature’s unrelenting gauntlet.

And you stitched all those disparate memories together while your eyes were open, using nothing but a pen and paper! The reindeer tee shirts finally make sense.

Great job!

If you don’t have pen and paper, the next best thing is a book. Carry one with you at all times if you can. Books make the perfect excuse to buy a new bag, and bags are the most comforting accessory of all (more about bags in a future newsletter).

A book is the record of someone else’s writing, and since we’ve just learned that all writing is really dreaming but with the eyes open, that means that all books are dreams on demand. Isn’t that great?

Some of these dreams may be scary, or beautiful, or insightful, or titillating, or just meh. They can be amazing, or they can suck very badly. What matters is that, like all dreams, they are a mind’s attempt to make sense of what is actually an arbitrary sequence of events that ultimately add up to nothing but the blank void from whence we emerged.

I just wrote a book, titled Version Zero, which goes on sale tomorrow. It was my waking dream attempt to make sense of the internet. It felt very cathartic to write, even though I failed to make much sense of anything, except for the fact that it is impossible to make sense of the internet.

Anyway!

If you don’t have a book, or hate bags for some reason, maybe you can listen to music. Music is definitely like dreaming with your eyes open, although some songs are so powerful they can bend your dreams to the exact will of the musician. Billie Eilish makes me sad and wistful, even if I was just feeling peppy. Beyoncé’s Sorry makes my wife Nicki righteously indignant with me, even though she knows I haven’t actually done anything wrong. That’s how immediate music can be.

If you don’t have a pen, or books, or music, you can always stare. Staring is a wonderful activity that requires no equipment at all. You can watch the dust motes drift forever in a yellow slab of sunlight (They never rest!). If you’re lucky enough to live in a city with trains, you can stare out the window for your entire trip. Otherwise, you can stare at trees, or clouds, or the wool newsboy cap hanging in your closet that Dad wore during his short-lived retirement.

Just like with writing, or reading, or listening to music, if you stare long enough your wandering mind will eventually find a pattern to walk along, like a scurrying tourist stopped in their tracks by a floor labyrinth, stopped by the meditative act of focusing on nothing but a single beautiful line weaving and wefting into a perfect self-contained sphere, stopped by sheer wonder itself.

Even staring with your eyes closed is a form of dreaming, sometimes called day dreaming. You can re-open your eyes once you feel like you’ve had enough sifting and sorting and piecing together, unlike Dad, who toward the end dreamed non-stop until he became the dream itself.

And that, my friends, is how you dream with your eyes open!