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An Open Letter to the Man I Was While I Slept
My dream journal was meant to record and observe, but it’s not that simple
You’ve been lost to me for so long. Where are you and where are you going? Lately, I’ve become obsessed with the space between us, with our profound unfamiliarity. A life together, and yet I hardly know you. Who are you? What do you think about in the dark when I’m not around?
I want to set things right. Unless I seek you out, track you, hunt you, observe, record, and document, your existence will pass into oblivion. It will be as though you never were. Lately, the prospect of you vanishing frightens me for reasons I can’t explain. If I’ve lived half my life, you are already half gone, half buried. Forever. And so I started the dream journal two weeks ago. I felt I owed you this much.
Since I began, you have become both more familiar and more strange. It didn’t take me long to notice how often you are alone, moving through empty stores, empty warehouses, empty homes, and vast tundras. You are often anxious and hurrying — late for something or searching frantically. Sometimes you are threatened by violence. There was the home intruder with the large knife, and one morning all I recorded — the only thing I remembered from an entire night of your wanderings — is that someone had a gun trained on…
