Dreams

I wonder what provides people with the possibility to dream. Abstraction, self-actualization, freedom from certain kinds of mind-numbing oppression or disability: certainly these must be preconditions. Temperament plays a role. At the end of a lecture series I organized many years ago, I remember proposing to my coorganizer that our final question to panels be: “What do you dream of?” They agreed, but wanted me to ask the question. There was something bothersome in that question for them that I only partially understood, if that.

Another person I once met, when we talked about plans we had for the future, understood that plans for the future are really dreams instead of plans. You could do or not do: the proposing was the real fun part, and then whatever turned out to happen would be good enough.

Fritz got me up at 4am this morning. We went on his first hike yesterday and he lasted a total of 16 minutes before the smells overstimulated him to the point of becoming a raging lunatic. Taiga was thrilled, once she realized we were only driving past the vet. Both dogs came home satisfied and calm. When they dream, they run with their paws while laying on their side and make muffled sounds that resemble barking under water. I think it’s the closest they come to fantasy: canine cognition research suggests they are deeply presentist, and while Taiga’s reaction to the drive yesterday suggests a kind of memory and recognition, the suddenness of her escalation did not suggest that she had dreamed of this park, but rather that she knew it when we turned on the trailhead and was excited for the experience.

Someone once asked me why all of my hobbies seemed to align with being alone. I had to explain that this isn’t the case. Gardening, dogs, builders theory classes, projects: all of these pursuits are ways of using planning activities that happen alone in order to build community with other people. There are people I see in person once a year at a seedling sale. There are other people who have signed up for all six builders theory classes and who I will meet and share space with repetitively over a certain period.

These chains are often random: I have a neighbor who I first spoke with when I planted flowers on the median that runs down the center of my street. I later saw her at a park where I walk my dogs. I invited her to my yearly pancake party. She came. Several months later, the lawn guy let her three dogs out by leaving the gate open. I was waiting for a Lyft to take me to the car place. I ran inside, grabbed a bag of treats, chased one into the backyard, threw several on the ground, knocked on her door, thrust more treats into her hand, and jumped into a rideshare only to wait at the car place holding a 25 oz bag of frozen liver treats. At Christmas, she brought over cookies. Yesterday, we went over to fix some tiny but important things in her home, like a handrail. Turns out she hired us because she has a gay son. You don’t just luck into these kinds of webs; they take effort - although for me the effort is not as great, perhaps, as for other people. That temperamental quality is something that should be acknowledged.

There’s a certain dream of society behind this type of behavior, and then also a kind of factual framing: the vast majority of people are not violent, they’re not psychopathic, they’re just hanging out on the surface of the earth. I think there’s too much emphasis these days on “finding your people”: you don’t need to deeply understand each person, and the intensity with which people are forced to work together or push intimate friendships when the chemistry isn’t there produces this counterreaction. Mutual surface-level relationships - there is scientific evidence behind this - is actually a balm to social relationships. People who have a lot of these low-level contacts are happier; people who participate in small talk are also happier with the experience (studies of people chatting up strangers on subways are the test case for this).

This kind of relationship cannot happen when the proportions are local : federal. You can certainly connect across levels, but a lack of distance is a precondition for this type of broad social weaving.