The Necessity of Nightmares
I do not think of myself as a sadistic person. I have been, at heart, a pacifist from my teenage years. I was a strict vegetarian for 13 years because I did not want to benefit from the suffering of animals, and even now, an omnivore, I only occasionally eat meat. I have spent a lot of my professional academic career working against the cruelty that often pops up in education. I believe that anger is a poison and kindness is the only sure guide to ethical behavior.
And yet ... I love it when readers of my stories tell me they were disturbed, unsettled, uncertain, discombobulated — and I especially love it when they say, "Your writing gave me nightmares."
For instance, a friend who picked up an advance copy of my new story collection at the AWP Conference texted me:
Reader, I love this reaction.
Like laughter at comedy or arousal at pornography, a nightmare is an involuntary response. In their own ways, such responses are the ultimate praise for the work because they do not rely on critical judgment. There's nothing to argue with. You may think a joke is stupid, puerile, even indefensible ... but if it makes you laugh, it has, at a very base level, been successful. Similarly, you may think a story is badly conceived, badly written, fundamentally immoral ... but if it finds its way into your dreams, it has achieved something.
What, though, has it achieved? Aside from the sense of power that comes from momentarily nudging someone else's unconscious mind, does giving other people nightmares have any value?
After the end (or diffusion) of the Theory Wars in academic literary-critical study, new paradigms asserted themselves, including trauma theory and affect theory, that moved away from the indeterminacy of language and toward the supremacy of feelings. In the last decade or so, mainstream culture has embraced what an ungenerous critic has called trauma plots. I, too, feel that the term trauma has been used so much that it is more sound than meaning, but I also every day feel despair at the immense suffering of the world, the vast injustice of existence, the violence that suffuses our lives, the impending dooms staring us all down. I can easily believe that trauma is the most common experience of contemporary life. I would be suspicious were it not. What would it mean not to be traumatized? I can barely imagine.
Within this context, when living itself is a nightmare, what good comes from creating nightmares through art?
The topic is not a new one. There are countless essays and testimonials about why people are attracted to horrific art, including explorations of horror as therapy. That's not what I'm wondering about, though. I'm talking about nightmares as nightmares. Terrible dreams dreamt after reading or viewing a work of fiction. That experience is more precise and more intimate than a jump scare or a frisson of eeriness. It's someone else's imagination infecting your own.
The question of the value or even necessity of nightmares relies on what we understand dreams in general to be. And of course nobody knows for sure. I've read around in Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, an interesting book to read but not one that holds much truth I can see about dreaming. A 2020 study of dreams and nightmares in The Lancet mentions theories of the purpose of dreams and concludes that "no consensus on these theories has been achieved yet, given it is empirically challenging to test whether and what type of consequence dreaming mind has on waking mind and behaviour." A new study in Neuroscience & Behavioral Reviews of sleep and dreaming as functions of homeostasis dubs dreaming "relevant but evanescent". (The scientific literature tends to distinguish between nightmares as negative dream experiences that cause the dreamer to wake and bad dreams as negative dream experiences that do not cause the dreamer to wake. I am not distinguishing between these types of dreaming here.)
In general, and unscientifically, I think of dreams as the off-gas of thinking, perceiving, feeling: the mind clearing out patterns and associations in pursuit of balance and relevance. Spandrils of neuroactivity, mostly without deep meaning.
It seems reasonable to see nightmares as accumulations of anxieties and fears, but also as the metastasized residue of those anxieties and fears, homunculi of disquietude.
Because dream amnesia is common even in people who think they remember their dreams well (which the recent study linked above relates to the abrupt rise in cortisol upon waking), our knowledge of dreams is not a direct knowledge of the unfiltered dream but of our memory of that dream. Remembering and dreaming are different processes. The act of remembering itself makes selections and imposes forms on the dream material. We have no conscious, unmediated access to dream material — what we know of our dreams is deeply affected by the act of remembering, which itself is deeply affected by our assumptions, desires, and bodily states. (I'm not even touching here on the likely significant effect of the body, especially the nervous system, on dreaming.)
The equation dream plus memory-of-dream allows a certain portrait of the mind's processes if we ask questions such as, "What is my memory of my dream telling me about what I think is important here? What am I choosing to hold onto, and why?" Such questions (common enough to psychology, mindfulness practice, etc.) can begin a process of reflection that might be useful for self-exploration. Perhaps nightmares can be an impetus toward such healthy reflection.
In my experience, nightmares provided by a story offer a way of knowing ourselves and our world — and, paradoxically, a way of feeling better about existing in that world.
When the pandemic really started revealing its reach in March, April, and May 2020, I (like many people) had trouble reading, trouble writing, trouble doing much of anything. The perils of the world wouldn't let my attention rest. (There have been multiple studies of dreaming during the pandemic, which unsurprisingly show an increase in troubled sleep and nightmares.) Finally, I was able to do some reading by returning to a set of books that had, a few years before, really given me nightmares: David Peace's Red Riding Quartet, particularly the last two novels, which are the most oneiric and apocalyptic.
I first encountered the novels after watching the excellent trilogy of films based on three of them. I love the films, and think they're some of the best literary adaptations of our time, but for all their horror, they've got nothing on the books when it comes to making nightmares, because the books are — as the late Mark Fisher said — incantatory. Read one after the other, as I did both times I read the series, they have an astonishing accumulative power. The first novel, Nineteen Seventy-Four, was Peace's first book, and as he has said in interviews, he hadn't really found himself as a writer yet, he was still exploring. This actually works well for the overall effect, because it's the most conventional book in a highly unconventional series, and to a certain extent it makes us lower our defenses. We think we know what we're in for. It's claustrophobic and bleak and bloody, but it's still recognizably a crime novel, and it wears the influence of James Ellroy openly. With Nineteen Seventy-Seven, Peace is clearly becoming something more than what he seemed in the first book. It's a book of fragments, whispers, screams. Narrative gets fractured in montage and barely returns from the breakage. By NIneteen Eighty, any pretense of conventionality is gone. The world is broken, the story is broken, the language is broken. With Nineteen Eighty-Three, we're in the apocalypse, we're in hell. It's a challenge to hold characters, events, situations in mind. It's a challenge to keep going, to keep reading through it all. The brain strains. Maybe the best thing to do is stop. But the incantation continues.
The first time I read the books, I almost didn't make it through the third or to the fourth. I had to stop reading for a while because I was having persistent nightmares obviously caused by the novels. Not fun nightmares. Smothering, terrible dreams of dismemberment, torture, death. I paused for a bit, the nightmares stopped, I finished the third book somehow and moved on to the fourth and then the nightmares returned, even more vivid now, but less smothering, more open, a sense of worlds ending.
Though these were not by any means enjoyable nightmares, they had a certain thrill — I was thrilled that words on a page could be so vivid (so incantatory!) that they would do this to me. My mind had strained to make the material of the books hold together, and that effort poured into my sleeping mind's work. It was no surprise that I would need to flush this stuff out of my subconscious at night. Whatever else they may be, nightmares are the unconscious mind's attempt to cleanse itself of toxins.
Something in my mind had latched onto the imagery and rhythms of the Red Riding novels and films and needed to use those images and rhythms to scrub something (what, I still don't know) out of my brain. It did not feel good at the time. But soon after, I recognized that I was ... somehow lighter. Healthier. Able to feel more and differently. Less stressed out. Less anxious.
I think this is why I returned to both the films and books in the early months of the pandemic. Nothing else felt like it got my brain into the right space. Nothing else felt so grounding. It was as if I needed to tune my brain. The world was a horrorshow, and I needed to get on its wavelength to deal with it. It wasn't just the pandemic that was freaking me out — it was also the mass corruption in the government, the terrifying rise of rightwing authoritarianism, imminent threats of violence, the actuality of murder and death. Nothing captured this for me as well as the Red Riding books. They vibrated in the same way as the world we lived in, and helped me get myself tuned to that terrible reality. I had nightmares, but the nightmares were my brain doing the work it needed to do to get me through those days.
Sonic metaphors are what I reach for in trying to explain all this. For me, getting through the days and experiencing less anxiety and misery is not about having hope for the future (I have none); rather, mental health is, if nothing else, about trying to get my emotions in tune with the reality of this life, because for me anxiety and misery are produced not just by the objective fact of the world's awfulness but by my feelings — my emotional vibrations — being discordant with the underlying hum of reality. Mental illness, for me at least, is a kind of affective dissonance. To reduce that dissonance, I try to adjust my ideas of desire, I try to let go of expectations, I try to embrace present moments. And I seek out nightmares with which to modulate my inner sense of experience with all that lies beyond me.
Those are the sorts of nightmares I aspire to give readers. Nightmares that, in some ways, connect back to Aristotle's idea of tragedy as purgation. I don't aspire to write moral stories that will tell you how to live. I do not know how you should live. I do not know how I should live. I do not aspire to entertain. I like entertainment, need it, seek it out, but it's not what I got into writing to do. I aspire to write stories that might help us, the traumatized citizens of a corrupt and violent world, tune ourselves to the pitch of this existence so that we resonate more harmoniously — which is to say more productively, more healthily — with a reality that is itself a nightmare.
Why did my story (I'm assuming it was "After the End of the End of the World", the first in the book) give my friend a nightmare of being eaten by a glacier? I filled the story with my own anxieties, frustrations, angers, and despairs about the state of existence. A recurring image in the story of melting glaciers serves a kind of metaphorical tension: warming hearts and a warming world. How to care about each other when the biosphere is dying? How to hold onto anything when everything soon enough gets lost and forgotten? Painful existential questions.
I wrote from the place of my own nightmares. A travel report from a land of hurt, but also a map toward something maybe like grace. I couldn't find a way toward that grace, though, without depicting the contour lines of fear and despair. The topography of my nightmares is there, but I hope the map, however sketchy it may be, also shows an opportunity for awakening.
So yes, while I do take a giddy (sadistic?) joy in learning that my work disturbs you, unsettles you, gives you nightmares ... my grandest, most grandiloquent hope is that the disturances, the unsettlements, the nightmares may be in service to helping us get through the truly horrific reality into which we were all born.
Certainly, those are the nightmares I want artists to give me, and I try to return the favor in kind.
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images: 1. Sergei Pankejeff, The Wolf Man's Dream; 2. text messages; 3. 19th C. engraving of homunculus from Goethe's Faust, Part 2; 4. still from Red Riding: The Year of Our Lord 1974; 5. print of Emperor Go-Daigo, dreaming of ghosts at his palace in Kasagiyama, 1890
