On Dreams, Mold-Making, and Learning To Try.
The world is collapsing and I feel fine.
It’s currently Thursday, April 16th, 2020. If this year were normal, I would still be in my dorm. Instead, I’m at home. The coronavirus pandemic hit the world like a freight train, and just like that, we all had to pack up and leave U of M. Michigan (the state) was hit especially hard for some reason; most people I know have been watching the number of cases and deaths ratchet up everyday like a doomsday clock. Mental health in general is definitely taking a nosedive.
Even though we’re literally in the middle of a global pandemic, I feel… weirdly okay. I am lucky enough to be safe and financially secure, which can’t be said for everyone. I’ve been very fortunate throughout this pandemic.
There’s a certain irony to having an upswing in your mental health coincide with a global crisis that shuts down everything. I’m alone a lot because we have to social distance, but I don’t feel isolated. If anything, I feel like I’m finally allowed to slow down and breathe. It really goes to show how much your internal life matters.
My mental health was much worse last year, my sophomore year, than it is now. I was lonelier and more isolated than I had ever been-- everything felt grey and blurred together. I wasn’t present and I wasn’t attempting to be.
I began to spiral after a breakup that happened at the end of my freshman year. I remember thinking about Matt as if he were a limb I'd lost, as if breaking up with him was a physical harm to my body. I thought about the way trees sometimes grow around street signs and bicycles, and when that foreign thing is removed, it’s as if you’ve taken out part of the tree. It’s hard to grow upright again.
I felt a lot of grief after that. I also withdrew because I didn’t really like my friends at the time. Everything grated against me, annoyed me; people tried to talk to me and I brushed them off like fruit flies. In my head, none of it mattered; there was work to be done, and work did not care about the grief sloshing around inside me. The grief rushing through my head and roaring in my ears. I ignored it all. My pack of friends and I bumbled across campus, complaining about the dining hall food and our art homework and the dorm elevators and the way the bus smelled and a myriad of other things. Their constant negativity and anger annoyed me, but it felt safer than being alone. It was kind of nice to blame my general unhappiness on stupid and petty things like one ply toilet paper or centipedes in my apartment.
As time went on, I tuned out further. Sometimes my friend’s conversations registered as a low drone in the back of my head while I thought about due dates or my next meal or literally anything else. Looking back, it was like I was underwater. I had become this person who met life with apathy and disgust, who wasn’t emotionally available enough to even attempt connecting with other people. It wasn’t like I was unaware of the change in my demeanor; I just didn’t care. My personality felt completely muffled, my head in a fishbowl. But I was functioning, and besides, I’d always been kind of irritable. So no one noticed, and my indifference went on.
In retrospect, this pattern of mental absence obviously wasn’t sustainable. All the hurt I felt didn’t disappear the way I wanted it to. It festered instead, spread through me like a blood infection. I noticed I was becoming increasingly depressed. It wasn’t a sharp sadness, more of a gradual weight that permeated my brain, my life. Basic tasks- socializing, schoolwork, picking up my feet, giving a shit- became increasingly heavier, harder to do. Whatever. I was a 20 year old Giles Corey, ready to be crushed under the sadness I felt. My brain wouldn’t let that happen, though. Something in me changed.
I started dreaming.
I dreamt all the time. Every night, nearly. It was an onslaught. The dreams were vivid and strange. I was naked in public a lot, often with overdue library books. I could fly if I ran fast enough. I didn’t experience pain. In one dream, I walked through neighborhoods that resembled my suburb, admiring tall pastel houses with neat yards and picket fences, turning down winding sidewalks that lead to nowhere in particular. In another, a dark movie theater with a low ceiling held a small, intimate play, and I glided down the aisle like a ghost. Sometimes I was inexplicably a man, or sometimes a small child. I died. I had sex. When the dreams started, it was like playing pretend; meaningless. Harmless.
After a period of time they became recurrent, more purposeful; frenzied, almost. Frantic. I dreamt of what I didn’t have. Underneath my apathy was a hunger.
I dreamt about sex a lot at first.
I dreamt also of a more general closeness: talking, touching hands. The men in these dreams were often kind of nebulous. Sometimes they were people I knew, but often it was like I was dreaming about an archetype. The idea of a person who could care about me. My fears surfaced in the dreams, too. Sometimes the person I was with wasn’t who I imagined them to be-- sometimes they were cruel or boring or flaky. Other times they were wonderful and compelling but wholly uninterested in me. Or-- my favorite-- they liked me and there was nothing wrong with them, but they would just vanish in a puff of smoke. My brain cycled through a hundred scenarios of intimacy with people I didn’t know and people I did, sometimes including my ex in the narrative, sometimes leaving him out.
One theory on why we dream, according to a Scientific American article on Contemporary Dream Theory by Ernest Hartmann, is that dreams are meant to reduce traumatic stress by “Diminish[ing] the emotional disturbance or arousal” caused by the traumatic event (Hartmann 2006). This means that we often dream about the way the trauma made us feel as opposed to the actual trauma.
For example, Hartmann says a rape survivor might dream of being “swept away by a tidal wave,” which would make them feel terrified and helpless-- the same way they felt during traumatic event. The brain then connects this dream to the memory of the traumatic event and slowly lessens the intensity of the dreams until they return to normal.
Dreams, according to this article, allow the brain to process the trauma by connecting it “with other parts of the memory systems so that it is no longer so unique or extreme.” (Hartmann 2006) This diminishes emotional arousal and allows the person to return eventually to a more normal emotional state. While this is only a theory, it could explain why things that bother us show up in our dreams. Even when an event isn’t necessarily traumatic, it is common to have recurring dreams connected to the event.
I would not count breaking up with Matt as a trauma, but I think this theory on dreams makes a lot of sense. Sometimes I dreamt about him, but I mostly dreamt about the grief I felt from losing him. At some point it stopped being about him at all; Instead, I dreamt about the hole he had left in his wake. That hole became the center of everything for me. I perfected it and shaped it. Wondered what or who could fill it.
The next year, my junior year, I finally began to connect these dreams I’d had and this internal life I’d created with reality. It happened through a mold making class.
Mold making a process where you make a form out of clay and then make a mold out of that form with plaster, and the mold allows you to make perfect multiples of your original. It's tedious and solitary, and it can take a long time. Steep learning curve, too. You have to make a lot of shitty molds before you get an okay one. If you do succeed, it’s likely the mold won’t even work. Mixed your plaster in too much water? The mold will crumble like a sandcastle when it sets up. Didn’t stir the plaster thoroughly enough while it was still a liquid? You’ll have air bubbles. And, if your clay form is oddly shaped, it could get stuck in even the most well designed mold. It is possible in mold making to do everything right and still fail.
I fell in love with the craft, though. When I started making molds, it was like the upside down I had been living in finally righted itself. I was doing the same thing whether I was awake or asleep, now: creating and perfecting a negative form. Crafting a template for something beautiful. Isn’t that what dreaming is? A mold was the physical form of a dream. I liked making negatives; I had been doing it in my head for years.
When I think of a mold, I think of something carefully crafted, something intricate and big and heavy. A mold is something you put a lot of effort into creating, sure. But a mold is not your final piece; it’s just a stepping stone. By itself, it’s completely useless.
The desires I had-- the ones that appeared over and over in my dreams-- were exactly the same way. Useless on their own. Both consciously and unconsciously, I was fixating on everything I didn’t have, and that resulted in me checking out of my own life. I was so, so stuck-- on Matt, on my loneliness, in my friend group, inside my own head-- and I realized I had to let go. I had to break the mold I had been in for so long.
I had to release Matt. The role he had in my life, the possibility we could reconcile, the forgiveness I wanted from him, the hurt that I still held. I had to let go of it all, and in releasing him, I released myself. I gave myself permission to step into the present, out of the worn, weathered version of my life that I had outgrown, to shake off the dust from the plaster tomb I’d been trapped in. I slowly came back to the world. I let myself love other people and I let them love me. I let myself ask for things I wanted. I began to say no, to choose who I wanted to be around, to slowly become an active role in my life. I began to participate more, in a way I hadn’t in a long time. I was euphoric with the ability to even make a choice. Sometimes the choices I made were stupid and hurt me, but sometimes they lead me to the people I dreamt about who desired me and cared about me and loved me, and who made me so happy I almost ached with it. Whether the wrong choice or the right choice, it hardly mattered. The choice was mine. It was enough to have made it.
The world is a scary place right now. Even with the privilege of my situation-- being safe with my family, financially stable, and not an essential worker-- I am still scared. The worst part for me is knowing how fragile everything is. It’s hard to watch the world grind to a halt because of an uncontrollable force, and it’s hard to watch everyone scramble to find a solution. Life can feel so arbitrary, so callous, and this extends beyond the COVID situation. Bad shit happens and will continue to happen, to you and to everyone.
The most important choice I made, the most important permission I gave myself-- it was to try. To try to live. Even though it’s scary, you try anyway. You try because playing the game is better than not. You try because there’s no way to be safe, not really. Not by checking out, not by retreating into dreams or the past. There’s no over or under or around. Only through. It terrified me to look at my life and see the potential in it. To see how big and bright it could be, if only I would step into it.
I am stepping into my life now, inch by inch. Day by day.
So, let the world scare me. Let it be cruel and beautiful and soft and bright. Let it hurt my eyes to look at.
I want to be a part of it.