Reconstructing Dark Dreams as Visions of Hope for Asylum Seekers
Guest blogger: Kirkman Ridd, law student, University of San Francisco:
The dream comes in fragments: invasive, stark emotions riveting a dark landscape of altered references; confusing in sense, deafening in silence, isolated transmissions across a wary mind. Wake up! Tell me what happened. What happened? What?
Asylum seekers who have experienced extreme trauma often recall that trauma in fragments, often out of sequence, often incomplete. A person who has experienced severe trauma often exhibits symptoms reminiscent of PTSD: invasive thoughts, trouble concentrating, chronological confusion, emotional avoidance. Such symptoms displayed to those empowered by the immigration system to pass judgment on the accuracy of memories or the credibility of inner fear often lead to skepticism and unjust results, thus adding to the dark dream, deepening the nightmare. But perhaps we can look at this phenomenon a different way: a nightmare is search of redemption, a bad dream in search of hope.
Constructing a narrative from fragmented emotional memory is not unlike recalling a dream after waking: dreams are almost entirely sub-logical—pieces of emotions strung together as a collage of images and sounds—and dreams are not time-based experiences. Dreams are a basket of emotions unrelated to waking space-time logic, and stored as memory fragments that are often recalled out of sequence (even within the dream’s own fluid chronological terms). That’s why when we “wake up” we nearly always can’t recall the dream in its entirety (at least at first). We recall pieces of our dreams, and typically out of sequence. How many times have you tried to explain to someone a dream you had, and you say, “Wait, before that thing I just told you happened, this other thing happened… or maybe it happened later… but anyway…”
We often tell the stories of our dreams in fragments that make sense only to us. This is what inspired Joseph Conrad to write in his novella Heart of Darkness (as the character Kurtz), “We live as we dream, alone.” For someone suffering a nightmare, that dark sentiment has some pull. But I would argue that Conrad’s novella is a dark dream reconstructed, and even Conrad would acknowledge that the act of writing down the dream universalizes it, because we all dream in the same ether as we all live on the same earth, and a remembered dream written and read is a tether to all of humanity.
If we put our dream to paper, and organize the pieces as best we can into a timeline, we might be able to relate our dream to someone and have them feel it as we did, understand it as we did, and believe it as we did. Traumatic experiences impress us as dreams do, and we must unravel the labyrinth of emotions and place them in a logical and visceral sequence of events in order to translate that experience to others. How many times have you heard someone say, “When the accident happened it was like a dream… it was like everything happened in slow motion…” That person is remembering a traumatic event in a dreamlike fashion. We’ve all been there. We can all understand it. So, in the case of an asylum proceeding, perhaps we can encourage the asylum seeker—the dreamer—to write their dream on a timeline in advance of the hearing, emotions intact, chronology satisfied, and impress the judge to believe it. In that belief lies hope.
The emotional act of writing down a dream can be therapeutic. Memories can be brought forth in sacred solitude and poured onto paper as my great writing mentor Lew Hunter said, “Without the world looking over your shoulder.” In this solitude, truth prevails when intent is pure, and the fragments of memories can be reorganized at will until the dreamer is satisfied that the translation is accurate. Afterwards, the writing itself can help the dreamer maintain a critical distance and look back on the documented experiences with a degree of detachment, having expelled a high degree of emotion onto the page. Language is irrelevant in the endeavor. The lasting impact of Conrad’s reconstructed dream is all the more impressive when one considers that Conrad’s famous novella was written in English when his native language was Polish. Words on the page invite the reader’s imagination, and a thoughtful narrative in any language invites immersion. Dreams are universal, and universally powerful.
Henry David Thoreau wrote, “Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.” Did he mean that a conscious knowledge that one is dreaming as one is dreaming is our deepest exposure to truth? Or did he mean that if we experience a dreamlike quality in our waking life—fully marveling in a transcendent blue sky or a Mozart symphony—then this is our deepest exposure to truth? I believe it is both. And so, for the asylum seeker writing down the dream, the last scene is the truth of survival and a vision of hope, experienced in the moment of writing as a dream awake, and bringing with it the full weight of the dreamer’s truest life.
I believe that a dark dream can be reconstructed from its fragments to arrive at a deeper truth that illuminates all of us and keeps us from succumbing to Kurtz’s perilous prophecy. We do not live alone. We do not dream alone. And we are not, even in suffering, what Viktor Frankl called “a plaything of circumstance.” We transcend, we shine, we unify. We live as we dream, together. And all it takes to tether us and awaken us to the universal emotions that bind us all and lead us to a redemption of past horrors is to reconstruct our dark dreams as visions of hope.
Do we believe in dreams? I believe we all do. Do we believe in hope?
bh