Every day, I write an entry in my handwritten journal, and often, because it’s one of the first things I do every day, I record the dreams I was having when I got up. At the time, those dreams seem portentous, but soon they’re not.

For instance, “I woke from a dream that I was trying to buy an illustrated calendar and two fish paperweights from a vendor in a seaside shopping festival.” I do, in waking life, own one fish paperweight, but I have no desire for an illustrated calendar (though I do have a facsimile copy of a Book of Hours that I dip into from time to time.) I read that entry this morning, and shook my head.

Right now, I’m re-reading my handwritten journal with an eye to pulling out significant memories, as I always do when I fill one notebook up and start another, and I notice how often I neither remember my dreams even if I wrote them down, nor understand why they were important to me.

Many of those dreams are about my life, of course. I dream of being back in the little ramshackle house where I lived off and on much of my life (from the age of 8 to the age of 12, from 19 to 21, and from 34 to 55, it’s a long story). In my dream, I’m dealing with the neighbors, or with a shifting landscape where every building is both closer and farther away than in real life. Sometimes the world outside that house has transformed into a bleak hellscape. Other times it is full of gardens, and someone is building a high-rise next door.

That setting makes sense; I read somewhere that a house represents the self, and I spent decades in that tumbledown cottage in the suburbs.

Sometimes I also dream of the house down the street from it where my family spent a few years before my parents divorced, and in those dreams, my brain adds extra rooms to an already enormous home. That makes sense too, because it was one weird house, immense and outworn, and my mother called it her dream home, though she had to leave it and move back into the little ramshackle house when she became abruptly poor and single, with three children.

Or I dream of a workplace from over twenty years ago, clearing out all my science supplies from my old science classroom, glassware mostly. That, as a matter of fact, is not precisely counterfactual. One of my biggest problems with that room (in a basement in a building that has since been torn down and replaced) was that my predecessors in a job teaching 4th and 5th grade science had had an almost limitless budget, and a department chair who urged them to spend it. I had jars upon jars of pickled invertebrates, and containers with faded labels that read, for instance, “nitric acid,” and my cabinets were both overstuffed and actively dangerous. (I was also in a constant state of anxiety, because I have no science background and it was my first teaching job.)

But sometimes the dream setting is staged in a fabricated and hypothetical place, such as when I dreamed I was curating a bookcase of deaccessioned used books in the library. People kept stealing the books and marking them up, which was fine, but I needed to keep track of the changes.

Why was that meaningful enough for me to write it down so I wouldn’t forget it? Why did I forget it anyway?

I can look at it and understand it from the outside; one of my lifelong habits is an epic obsession with putting materials into order, and I can spend days and weeks on tasks like that. It’s the flip side of my mythic disorganization, that obsession; it’s how I managed to finish a Ph.D. dissertation based on research, but it’s also why that task took me years longer than it should have. Something in my soul is convinced that if I can just get things organized properly, the world will make sense.

There are the normal dreams, of course; dreams about catastrophic failure and about blank incomprehension, of being a student who is failing an exam, and later of being a teacher giving an exam to students who never actually came to class, or to whom I taught the incorrect material. I suddenly realize, at the end of the semester, that one of my four sections of sixth graders never came to class at all. Or I arrive with plenty of time for a speaking engagement, but I get lost looking for a functioning bathroom and I don’t check the information for the meeting where I am speaking, realizing when I did that I am already too late.

Those dreams, with their panic and loss, are truly terrible until I have been awake for a while. Sometimes I wake just enough to realize I can rewrite the dream, whereupon I fall into another dream that I, for instance, “got into an elevator that was taking all the time in the world to go from the top floor to the second.” That one was nicer than my usual elevator dreams, in which the elevator abruptly goes sideways and the elevator shaft branches until I am zipping around a universe filled with girders and night.

The terror, the loss, the preoccupations, and the confusion of those dreams, that is, the feelings they convey, are why I want to write them down, of course. When I look back a month later at the sparse sentences describing their fairly routine contents, I realize that, but I don’t understand them because they aren’t actually memories and they aren’t actually significant.

I mean, “I had a roommate, a little brother, who was suddenly turning into a cartoon monster,” that’s not particularly weird, but at the time it felt deeply significant. I do have a little brother. I don’t have a roommate. I am not at all afraid of cartoon monsters, except in dreams.

After I fill a journal, as part of my archival obsession, I mark the bits in my handwritten journals that I really want to keep, and then I go back and type them into a document on my computer, rarely keeping the bits about dreams. Then I tear up the journal and recycle it.

That’s because at one point ten years ago or more I realized I had over forty composition books filled with handwriting, and they were taking up too much space and falling apart. I would never actually re-read them, especially since so much of their contents was stuff I didn’t want to know. It’s much easier to have the good bits in my computer where I can search and browse, and it’s also awfully nice to get rid of the pages and pages where I wrote about my obsession with organization or about some horribly painful event that, in retrospect, was kind of dumb.

(That digital searching capacity was how I analyzed my ethnographic notes on my research; I was an early computer user. After I completed my dissertation, my husband deleted all my research notes by accident, and I wept for three days off and on, which is why my documents are all backed up to the cloud now.)

Last year, I wrote a memoir based on my archive of journal entries, so that was nice. And they come in handy when I’m trying to remember when I adopted my latest cat (2023), or which year it was that I had a cataract operation (2013). But I never bother to keep my record of dreams, because unlike the true events of my life, they never seem to evoke the powerful meaning they once had for me.

The truly interesting thing to me about my dreams is that all the places I go in my dreams are interconnected. You can reach the zoo from the beach, and or catch the train from the waterfront to the city where the elevated trains rumble underneath the vast department store, and beyond that, you can hike into the rambling outskirts with the winding streets, where all the houses I have ever lived are set. I even drew a map, because it’s a surprisingly stable country, the dream country, and every place holds meaning.

Except for that huge theater that opens up its stage to the ocean, and where if you stand on the lip of the stage, you can look down at the roaring waves and the distant horizon, and where it is always overcast. I’m never sure what that place is supposed to mean, and I don’t want to know, either.

I tried once to write a novel set in my dream country. It’s drafted and somewhere on my computer. Sometimes I wonder whether if I die, and when all my files disappear, I will go into the dream country, where everything has meaning except of course for that dark stage set. And except for the dreams I decided not to remember.