unpeeling an orange

16 Mar, 2025

Last night, I dreamt of a movie that doesn’t exist: The Long and Slow Unpeeling of an Orange.

The dream comes apart in layers. In the first, I am within the movie, watching the characters pass by - ghost in the narrative. A layer up: telling a friend about the plot (more than a little perplexed and irritated with it…"Why would they name the movie something so unrelated to the main storyline?"). Even further up, I find myself in a space where I’d already awoken and was trying to explain the first two layers of the “dream” to my mom over the phone.

I always feel disoriented in the mornings after waking within a dream. There's a series of hours after I surface where I have to watch things closely, worried that I'm in yet another tier of dreaming. (Perhaps Paprika (2006) or Inception (2010) has contributed to those fears a bit...?)

I pay close attention to my dreams. This is mostly because - in the instances that actually I remember them - they are incredibly vivid and cinematic. I find this humorous, considering I don’t think I have a good internal sense of visualization when I'm awake. On the Aphantasia Apple Visualization Scale, I think I might say that I fall somewhere around a 3. (I've always struggled to imagine a perfect picture of what characters and clothing look like when described in books, for example.) Yet my dreams, when I look back on them, are full-scale, movie-level 1s. They feel just as real and tangible as these keys beneath my fingers; a world I could surely interact with, for how detailed it seems.

I can see sunlight pooling like molten oil on a river’s surface, and the mottled reflection of a train on the bridge crossing over it. I can see the distinct shading of the undulating darkness in a hallway as I creep towards a distant light; the chip in the egg-brown coffee mug next to me in the cafe; the freckles and blemishes on my friend's flushed face as she greets me in the cold outside of the theatre, wrapped in her puffy blue jacket.

Does it mean something, then, that my imagination in sleep is so daring? Why can I see an old friend for dinner in a dream, but fail to remember the color of her glasses and the line of her nose when awake? It feels, in some ways, like lighting a match in the day versus the night: just a flash of color, when the sun is up; but a stark illumination in the dark.

I'm not the type to read too deeply into my dreams. In most ways, I know that they're the reconfiguration and consolidation of data that our brain has picked up over the day, so when I wake from something that feels a little too close to 'a meaning', I try to let it pass over me without letting it consume me.

(My mother is a 'meaning' person. She can find a line of connection in all of my dreams - even the ones I'm sure she'll consider the absurd firings of my neurons in the night.

Me: This odd little character kept stealing into the house to try to marry me and I ended up in a screaming match with it in the driveway telling it that I wouldn't accept its proposal while it howled, "NooooooooooOOoooooOOoooooooooo," with its fingers in its ears. Weird, right?

Mom: Well, that's obviously about Set-Up.

Me: NO! I think it was just a movie I watched the night before!)

Still, sometimes I wonder what my subconscious is trying to tell me. Does it mean something; a dream of a movie about a train line that takes the dead to a place between life and death? Is life the orange, unpeeling? Is death? I wasn't afraid in the dream, just present. I see, so clearly, the platform between worlds: a perfect, lush forest. So quiet and speckled with light, and filled with the gentle shadows of other people who are waiting on someone to arrive.

What is the lesson? Is there one?

To quote Alice Notley's "The Poetry of Everyday Life" (1988)¹:

I'm saying: we dream stories and scenes, but we don't live them. [...] What about the fact that we dream while we're awake? And why can't I be better at that?

I just don't know.

Good luck out there,
Eve

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#personal #ramblings #reveries