Last night, nightmares. They pulled the waking world’s benignity out from under me like a rug. Objectivity was a foregone luxury. I was like Alice thrown into a garden of flowers grown irrevocably angry at me; neuroses blossomed, each unique, in a field of needles. At any moment the mirror might swallow my image and refuse to give it back, or the doorknob might chomp off my thumb, interloper that I was in this hostile world of allied and flustered objects. I was in constant danger of reacting to imagined threats.

“The world is not out to get you,” my friend counseled. I had awoken him, panted and gestured my way through the dream’s jumbled narrative. His expression was apologetic. “No offense but—the world has bigger fish to fry.”

It’s true, of course. I’m no big shakes. But it often seems that I’m in danger precisely because I’m a little fish, too small to protect. As the question turns over in my mind, the whole paradigm reverses. I’m hardly viewed as a little fish by the society that depends entirely on little fish. Maybe I am a pretty decent-sized fish, big enough at least to be targeted by the malevolent figures that appear in my dreams. If the world does have bigger fish to fry, I’m going to be passed up and left to rot. And if the world thinks I’m a big fish after all. In that case—well, I’d better watch out.

When you have nightmares on a nightly basis, the novelty wears off. While the imagery surprises us from time to time, the general message couldn’t be any more grotesquely self-indulgent, any more grotesquely primal: the dreamer places herself at the center of the world. Through dreaming the psyche expresses the conviction that ill befalls the subject because she uniquely attracts it.

And yet, in our nightmares, we are not seen for the uniqueness of our characters. We do not feel truly seen by nightmare logic even as the whole construct of a nightmare rests on our mind’s peculiar associations and concerns.

We are forced to make hellish decisions that reflect our conceit that the choices we make in real life are game-changing. Simultaneously, our nightmares often sadistically divest us of all power of choice: we must watch as fate overtakes us, as our running and hiding becomes nothing more than a futile drama.

I have come to classify nightmares into two genres: those that place the dreamer at the center of universal ire, and those that pass over the dreamer as the world rushes past. Dreams of pursuit and sabotage are of the former kind; dreams of exodus and falling are of the latter.

Childhood is the magical union of two distinct sensations: that 1) you (i.e. the child) are the center of the universe, the epitome of special, and 2) that an infrastructure built to take care of people exactly like you is already in existence.

This infrastructure is comprised by your parents and the world to which they gradually introduce you. It would be no fun for a child to believe himself to be hopelessly and tragically special. On the flipside, no true child thinks of himself as just another part of a functioning hive. Where would a cog-child derive the drive for discovery, for joy, for unbridled selfishness and risk-taking? Why even bother to get up and suckle in the morning?

Obviously, these two ideas central to childhood—specialness and safety—contradict one another. Their mutual fade and dissolution—both through reason and empirical disproof—troubles kids and adults alike. Confronting the fact that we don’t deserve the world is, I would say, the crux of becoming an adult.

There’s a fine line between grand dreams and political reality, and the successful adult navigates that line with the child’s confidence and the cynic’s self-effacement, the child’s trust and the cynic’s rainy-day stash. But to have mastery not only of both sides of the coin but of navigation between the two is impossibly difficult. To understand oneself as both unique and natural is to achieve an unearthly peace.

Depending on whom you ask, this state of Zen is boundlessly bleak or boundlessly joyful, and this ambiguity is the source of my nightmares

By Annie Atura