Liminal space dreaming

I wish my recurring dream places were fun and cool adventure zones, but they're often anything but.

I’m in that scary dream building again.

“Sleep when the baby sleeps.” How many times was I told that advice?

It’s kind of a cliché, a thing people tell parents-to-be that’s meant to be some kind of life saving tip. I’m sure some parents are able to take advantage of baby’s downtime and get some rest for themselves, but it’s not something I’m really able to do for whatever reason.

When I first brought her home I thought I would try to nap during some of her daytime sleeps, but sleeping when the sun is up has never been that easy for me. Even the times I’ve been super jetlagged after a long flight when I’m super jetlagged or coming home after working at an event site for several days, being out in the hot sun and staying up late every night, when I lie in bed and try to rest I cannot fall asleep. For the most part, I'd rather be tired for the rest of the day than be in bed doing nothing and feeling impatient.

How can I sleep when I know there’s something I could be doing around the house? Only twice have I managed to actually take a nap during the day: the first time was maybe during her second month when I was so dead on my feet tired I thought I would fall over and Adrian took over for so I could pass out, and the second time was shortly before Thanksgiving when I was super sick and my mom was over to bring me soup and insisted I go to bed. These naps didn’t last more than an hour and I haven’t had another yet.

When the baby sleeps, I have other stuff to do. Like clean up. Or write a newsletter.

As I type this, I am extremely tired and have spent the last few nights waking up every 90 minutes to tend to my little one. She is napping right now and I’m sitting on the couch with my laptop.

On particularly lucky evenings, she'll sleep four hours uninterrupted, but those cushier nights with longer chunks of sleep have not happened very often at all. A regular night consists of waking up every two hours for feedings, or soothings now if I can convince her to go back to sleep just by rubbing her forehead and shushing her. We’re working on sleep training, but it’s going to take some time. (If you have any sleep training tips, I’m all ears, though I have no interest in the “cry it out” method.)

It amazes me how her tiniest sounds can jolt me from what feels like a deep dream: a small cry, the beginnings of a whimper, or even the rustle of her body twisting in her swaddle as if trying to startle herself awake from her own weird dreams. The nights she is particularly restless I’m up every 45 minutes with her. Fortunately those nights are infrequent, but when they do happen the next day is always a bit more challenging.

An unexpected side effect of all this interrupted sleep is having multiple blocks of extremely vivid dreams, and being able to remember them, every single night. When I awaken to feed or soothe my daughter, I wake up from a dream. Some I’ve written down, but they’re almost always extraordinary enough for me to recollect them the next day. Recently I’ve been dreaming a lot of San Francisco, but not a real San Francisco, a dream version I’ve been to plenty of times while slumbering.

My dreams have the tendency to be mundanely nightmarish, full of sprawling and strange landscapes I wander through with some hidden purpose: long hallways in empty buildings with cement walls, rolling astroturf hills surrounding a corporate campus, an underground train station with a conveyor belt system suspended from the ceiling that takes you to the wrong platform so you inevitably always miss your train. I’ve been visiting these dreamscapes for years. The dreams are not always the same, but the places that make up the setting of the dream are often hauntingly familiar. Sure, it’s a hallway, or a stairwell, or a subway, but there’s something wrong and off-kilter about it. If dreams are movies, then my subconscious set director has taken some aesthetic cues from Tim Burton.

One of the benefits when I was still smoking weed regularly was I didn’t dream, or if I did dream I did not wake up remembering my dreams. Staying blazed 24/7 meant that I didn’t have to climb those stairs or wander around those empty hallways when I conked out. When I quit smoking weed, I was initially amazed by the variety of dreams I could have. Some were funny, some were like movies and starred real life movie stars like Leonardo DiCaprio and Julia Garner, some have made excellent prompts for short stories and writing exercises. I still have dreams that feel worthy of sharing with others (like the one I had the other night where I met Elon Musk while interviewing for a job at Tesla and tried filling out paperwork with a pen that was filled with disappearing ink), but every now and then one of these disturbing dreamscapes will pop up and I’m forced to navigate my way through it. I wish my recurring dream places were fun and cool adventure zones, but they more closely resemble what creepypasta fans and gamer lore Youtubers would describe as unsettling liminal spaces.

I don’t know if I ever thought recurring dreamscapes were unique to me, but maybe I haven’t heard too many other people talk about them. The idea of designing cities and buildings and homes that you return to in dreams is one of the themes in that Leonardo DiCaprio movie, Inception. So I felt compelled to reply and share when I saw this tweet from @ctrlaltcassie that asked: “Does anyone else have recurring places in their dreams? Not recurring dreams themselves, but like actual places you revisit? I've been having dreams in what I've called The Other Place for almost 20 years & I've never met anyone else who has this issue.”

The tweet has a ton of replies from other people sharing their recurring dream places, so this seems to be a kind of common phenomenon. It’s funny though, how the imagination works, how the mind can construct these places where I’ve never been and probably do not exist in reality and take me there time and again when I sleep.

The dreams I have that are based on movies I’ve seen or moments from my real life make sense, but the worldbuilding my subconscious mind has undertaken and created for me and then recreated on so many evenings, which may have some similarities to places I’ve been but are also very much whimsically their own thing, it’s just amazing to me. Like, my subconscious mind knows what scares me, it knows what creeps me out, and it knows what frustrates me, and it mashes up these concepts and fragments of experiences and images and regurgitates them into something completely new, and somehow these dream places become a memory that gets saved in me so I can be taken there on any random night when I’m asleep. Maybe my brain is doing some kind of problem solving by revisiting these dreamscapes. Maybe my subconscious just likes to terrify me.

What about you? Are there places you go in your dreams that you’ve visited on multiple occasions? Are they fun and cool or odd and chilling?