Fri, 7 Feb 2025
When I was about seven or so, I had a dream that was particularly memorable to me. In this dream, I possessed the ability to fly. Better than that, even: in this dream, I was lucid, an active agent in the world of my subconscious, not merely an observational passenger. I participated beyond the somnolent voyeurism of a dreamer monitoring the actions of some Jungian automata. As I dreamt, I could take to the skies or return to the earth at will, and this delighted me to no end.
Usually, then as now, when I become contemporaneously aware of my unconscious status, any ongoing dream instantly destabilizes and collapses under the devastating weight of the nonsensical illogic that belies any formerly perceived coherence. In other words, once I'm aware I'm dreaming, the dream irrevocably falls apart.
Not so in this case. In defiant spite of both my ordinary incapacity for lucid dreaming as well as the wakeful laws of observable physics, I somehow remained asleep, and aloft. And as I flew around in my dream, I recall at one point a downpour as gross as it was absurd. This downpour coated the world of the dream under a blanket of what looked like snow, but that was actually bird shit delivered by a gargantuan flock of seagulls, unfathomably numerous seagulls. Because I could fly, I was the only person—indeed, the only object at all—to remain unscathed by the cartoonish scourge from above.
Not long after this, I awoke. It was not yet morning. I tried, and failed, to return to the dream—the plague of avian scatological violence notwithstanding, such a small price to pay for the ability to fly.
As a child of seven, I found this dream wildly entertaining. And because it followed a series of generally comprehensible and mostly linear events—more so than other dreams anyway—I communicated the dream to others that they might share in my prepubescent mirth. Gradually, though, both over time and beginning as early as that first oration, I changed or omitted a few minor and unimportant details about the events in the dream, primarily for the purposes of making it easier to follow for someone who was not there with me in the dream. The hope was to make the dream more engaging as a narrative (at exactly the level of nuance, skill, and sophistication you might expect from a seven-year-old boy who found a punch line primarily comprised of bird shit to be peak comedy).
Years later, I know that the dream I remember is not the dream I had. It is, instead, simply the dream I shared with people. And even those retellings probably do not much resemble the above description of that dream, even if I were to add in the sum total of all the details I do still recall to a more complete degree.
But wait! It's even less accurate than that. When I’m recounting a childhood memory, I will often guess my age to be approximately seven, as I did above. A disproportionate number of my recalled childhood anecdotes place me at around the age of seven, so much so that I’m certain many of them can’t possibly have actually happened at age seven. Seven is simply the earliest age where I can definitively place a specific date on a single core memory to any degree of temporal accuracy, verifiable outside of my own recollection.
Thus, these days, anything I recall from between the ages of four and eleven is liable to get lumped into a story beginning with some variant of “When I was about seven or so…” I do this more because the exact age at which most such stories took place is typically immaterial to the key points or elements I aim to convey, and because I struggle to chronologically place most of childhood memories before the age of around twelve or thirteen, at least with any reasonable level of confidence.
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A few years ago, I had an acute breakdown in the mortal stability of my mental health, a psychic crisis that put me into a protracted state of suicidality, the likes of which I had never before experienced to such an omnipresent degree. But for as excruciating as that devastating period of my life was, in many ways, I was more afraid of feeling better than I was of the presence of that suffering.
I knew that as I started feeling better, I wouldn’t actually be better, but that the amelioration of that initial intensity would tempt me toward gaslighting myself, thinking, Oh, I was just overreacting. And I knew that would happen because it had happened before, on many occasions. I also knew that, if it happened again this time, I was vulnerable to a self-inflicted inability to survive another such episode.
To combat that eventuality, I took to pen and paper and wrote everything down. I committed all of my suicidal fantasies to explicit words on a page, without censorship or embellishment, simply so I could go back and read them at a later date to remind myself of the dire nature of my predicament, to remember the urgency of the task ahead of me. It was an effort to future-proof my faulty memory once I was feeling better.
Sure enough, as the passage of time diminished the intensity of the episode, the imposter syndrome started its internal whisper campaign, spreading accusations that I was either overreacting (if that inner critic was feeling generous) or faking it (if that inner critic was feeling malicious). This was far from a novel phenomenon, but this time, I was armed with something I'd never had before: a qualitative historical record comprised of my contemporaneous notes and observations.
So I cracked my journal open, flipped through the pages to the entry where I outlined my graphic death reverie and parsed the chaotic scrawl of an utterly broken mind (replete with disconcerting uncharacteristic mistakes in both spelling and diction).
As I read, I grounded myself in the reality of my predicament. Comforted in the somber knowledge that I at least had an accurate understanding of the situation, I was able to tap into the energy and urgency necessary to take active steps towards healing. That journey is yet ongoing, but would likely have ended in my self-annihilation years ago had I not foreseen the need to be reminded of my history. Without a reliable source urging me to recall the stakes, I would almost certainly have delayed my recovery to my own mortal peril.
Because I have an accurate record of where I've been, I have significantly better opportunity to improve where I'm going.
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We currently face a dire political moment, a humanitarian crisis where the misanthropic powers that be have a vested interest in exploiting the fallibility of our collective and individual human memories. They are already telling us not to believe our lying eyes. We look around and we see a maelstrom of chaotic cruelty perpetuating harm to everyone it touches. Sociopathic power mongers run amok and tell us nothing untoward is happening; or if it is happening, it's not that bad; or if it is that bad, the victims deserved it; or if the victims didn't deserve it, it's just the price we pay for the greater good; or if that greater good isn't being served, it's because the scapegoated Other is getting in the way, and must be eliminated; and so on.
History is agnostic as to the moral fabric of its authors. It will only ever be written by the pragmatic victors of whatever historical strife gives cause for it to be written, never from a position of objectivity—or even a position of justice, or decency. The sadistic would-be authors of our present history will not wait for some future time to begin their unreliable narrative; they will rewrite history as it unfolds in real time.
We will be made to wonder, “Did that really happen how I remember?” and the answer will of course be both yes and no. You will not remember things exactly as they happened because that’s not how human memory works, but you will remember how things impacted you, as well as the noteworthy portions of the fact pattern that were relevant to your experience.
It is this malaise of cognitive ambiguity—this malleable lack of concreteness, this mutability of recalled factual reality—that authoritarians will exploit. If they repeat their lies often enough, and if they manage the suppression of facts from public access effectively, we will forget. We will become ever easier to control. They will control the past, and thus the present, and by extension the future as well.
In the absence of substantive information to the contrary, who's to say we haven't always been at war with Eurasia? Maybe we have. I can't recall a time when we weren’t, and no one else can either. It must be the case that we have always been at war with Eurasia. In fact, I'm sure of it.
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Most of us don’t have a significant bullhorn with which to control the mainstream narrative. Precious few of us own powerful media conglomerates, or run giant publishing houses, or hold sway over archival positions within governmental bureaucracies (and those who do have little to gain and much to lose in telling the truth). In the macro sense then, there is little the majority of us can do to preserve an accurate retelling of history right now.
Hopefully international historians abroad, untouched by the influence of our current wannabe totalitarian regime, will faithfully record events as they unfold, preserving the historical record as it happened rather than as it is written by those now in our seats of power. Even if they do, though, you and I—here and now—should expect that our own collective autobiography will rapidly become wildly unreliable, and it will do so, upsettingly, in real time.
But while we may not have much in the way of macro-level recourse, that is not to say we lack any power at all. Small as it might seem, we still have power over our own individual stories, our individual autobiographies. And what is history but a collective autobiographical story a society tells itself to make sense of who it is, where it came from, and where it's going?
So write things down. Write down everything that feels noteworthy to you. Write it contemporaneously, in as close to the moment as you can. Preserve your own otherwise fallible memory in amber so that fascists and tyrants can only ever fail in igniting the gaslights. Write it on paper when you can, but if you can’t, ensure you have backups controlled by disparate entities so that if one disappears the others will not. Become your own archivist, your own historian.
Imagine a future where enough of us have engaged in the preservation of our individual experiences and retained as complete a collective picture of our passage through this gate of history as is possible. Imagine possible worlds in which we the people—irrespective of the capricious whims of wannabe tyrants—have left posterity a chance to reasonably know how things happened, with the ultimate hope that they might succeed in learning what we failed to learn. Perhaps they might restore a future we now feel may be lost. Imagine that future built on the foundational lessons of the past—of our insufferable present.
We didn’t read Anne Frank's story in official archives, but in the posthumous publication of her personal diary. We may or may not one day face as dire an existential situation as she did (although far too many of us already do, and far too many more will), but one thing is certain: for the next four years, at a minimum, I will sooner trust one of your journal entries for its accuracy and fidelity to the truth of an event as you experienced it than I will any official statement from any federal entity that now exists, or that will exist during this despotic oligarchy's tenure, however brief or interminable it may be.
In this brave new world where most legacy media has already sacrificed journalistic integrity on the altar of post-truth relevancy, the retention of our individual voices is of vital importance.
Do not obey in advance. Do not surrender the facts of your experience to the pen of others. Write things down so that we may know what really happened. When we begin to second-guess our own recollections as to the temporal dimensions of our war with Eurasia, maybe we can look back at your writing and recall a time of peace, or at least of a different enemy.
And maybe the future will thank you for it.