February | In Your Dreams

A DREAM COLUMN

It’s February, a month that drags out every one of its twenty-eight days before delivering us to the promise of spring. Dreams this time of year can be moody, impatient, and unsettling, so it’s only fitting that we pay tribute to the master of such things, David Lynch. We lost the director last month, and if you’ve ever seen his work onscreen, like Twin Peaks or Mulholland Drive, you know the man loved to use the uncanniness of dreams to tell a story. He believed there was something essential, often beyond language, to be gleaned from unconscious messages, and he leaned into their strangeness. His style is so singular, anything that’s come since that’s even vaguely dreamlike is usually described as lynchian.

We’ll carry the dream torch in his honor. Let’s see what strangeness our dreamer has in store for us this February…

I dreamed that I’m working in a call center, and the most popular girl from my junior high calls in. Let’s call her Tori. I say hello when I realize who she is, and remind her that we went to school together. The line goes quiet for a long time, and I feel embarrassed. Eventually she denies knowing me, and hangs up, which makes my coworkers mad because dropped calls count against us as a team. Everyone tells me to leave work to look for her, because that will fix things in this dream logic. She’s not at home, but there’s a large envelope taped to the front door addressed to me. There’s a note inside from Tori that says she lied, and she does remember me, but she’s gone to the store and won’t be back for several days. I bring the note back to work, but they all think I wrote it myself, so we still get in trouble, and the dream ends with everyone upset with me.

We lean millennial here at In Your Dreams, so trust us when we say we’ve seen a teen movie or two. The “most popular girl” trope shows up in basically every one of those films, and skews one of two ways: untouchable perfection or emotional terror. (See: The Breakfast Club, Mean Girls, Euphoria, to cherry pick just a few.) It’s not clear from your letter how Tori treated you in your waking life, but she’s certainly your tormentor in the unconscious realm. 

We’ve written before about how dreams might be like a kind of fire drill for the mind, where your brain takes advantage of your rest time to run hellish hypothetical drills to keep you in emotional fighting shape, should any of this ever come up irl. If you stay ready, you don’t have to get ready, as they say. And it might come up. Probably not this exact situation, unless you really do work in a call center that has a face-to-face component. But the feeling of being slighted, publicly, by someone you feel has more social capital—has that come up lately? Popularity dynamics aren’t totally left behind in junior high, and something might be stirring up these familiar feelings of preteen unworthiness.

Also, another thing that might come up: going to great, suffering lengths to prove yourself, only to still feel misunderstood. It’s frustrating and demoralizing when the truth doesn’t come out like it should. The note vindicates you, but in the end you have that knowledge in solitude. We learn over and over again in this life that we can’t control anyone other than ourselves. All you can do is your best, and we think the dream version of you did your best here. What else could you have done? Don’t ruminate too much if you can help it. Be proud and keep it moving.

If you’ve ever woken up from a dream like, what the hell was that?, and would like to be featured in the next In Your Dreams, contact us at dreams@lunya.co with a detailed description of the inner workings of your unconscious mind. We're dreaming of hearing from you.