Claud City Gestalt

had a dream last month, intense and vivid, and a fascinating echo of depression, isolation, and denial under scrutiny of interpretation.

I realized this week that we had since been revisiting this dream, and even referencing it to articulate this feeling of empty unbelonging and hopeless rumination.

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the dream, someplace I used to know

the dream began as a search for a distantly familiar place I wished to revisit for reasons that were not made clear in the dream, but felt as reminiscence of nostalgia, or sentimentality. after visiting another promising location, and the disappointment in finding that this was not my intended destination, I traveled alone through a caricature of a memory crossing lush green fields of a lawn and winding roads of a walking path through an old neighborhood we lived in grade 6, and eventually I did arrive at the place I meant to return.

this place turned out to be a large underground stadium with a high concrete ceiling and spectators seating like caves seemingly carved of concrete. this place was hosting an event both reminiscent and different from that of my dream self's nostalgia memory, but the event itself was not my purpose for returning here, and so we waded through the small crowd.

our dream stadium is known for a very strange and unique display during breaks in which a parade of incorporeal entities like ghosts of a marching band march through the isles between spectators. they have no physicality in our corporeal realm, and they clip through parts of the stadium as if bugged out NPC's replaying a scripted sequence for another area of the game.

we had to pass through the march of ghosts in the isles to get to where we were going, and it felt like swimming upstream through a digital river, their incorporeal presence phasing through our realm exerting a pressure that demanded we should join the flow or exit its path. in this dream, we had rationalized this feeling to our unidentified traveling companion as our "natural human error checking code" inducing an interference, it felt almost electric, like an out-of-phase conflict of spatial coexistence, that even though they are ghosts seemingly uninhibited by our presence in their predetermined path, we struggle to pass through them as the space they have inhabited and path they repeatedly marched for so long gives them a spatial priority.

a few weeks ago, we rewatched The Matrix and recognized this same feeling when Morpheus takes Neo into the simulation of 1999 city to swim upstream against the pedestrians inhabiting The Matrix as it defends itself against the perceived threat of awakened humans intruding upon the system.

after persevering through this encounter, we had stepped away from whomever we had come here with and climbed to an area like a ceiling space above the stadium and observed a single lone ghost like an echo of our dream self's previous experience in this place. there in this hollowed out ceiling, a business man is receiving a phone call, having stepped away in private, and there he relives a moment of personal horror like an actor in a play stuck forever in this space.

we rejoined our little Scooby gang after sharing this moment alone with a man that does not exist, and we explore the backrooms of this stadium further. this is around the point part of me realizes in hindsight that our little party had been increasing all the while, gaining an unidentifiable member that I had not noticed during the dream proper.

surrender to melancholy

the exploring part of this dream is lost to me now, but we reach an exit like a short bridge of diamond plate steel and steel handrails over a void chasm.

I know I cannot leave this place though, and I had known this from the start that the memories I sought here bind me to this place where I belong.

I tell our friends that they should move on without me if anything would happen to me here as they are crossing over, and when it is my turn to pass over the bridge back to a side of reality where ghosts cannot exist, I make it ¾ to the other side where I am frozen stepping in place before I rubber-band snap back to this side of the bridge.

I am here where I have always belonged, as I too am a ghost, unable to move forward or leave this place.

my Orpheus, do not look away

the next scene I can recall was after a time-skip, my friends have returned and as they go through the front gate the guards advise “we can’t give tours today, you will have to come back another day” but they disregard the warnings and bypass anyway.

they move through the facility passing along their way many ghosts that had not been visible before during a waning phase of activity, but are now active threat to their safety. they had done their research however, and as they pass each one they recite a mantra specific to the particular peculiarities of each ghost:

I do not see The Crying Doll.
I do not acknowledge what does not exist.
I do not see The Girl Who Recites Pi.
I do not see The Dog Who Screams Goodbye.
I do not acknowledge what does not exist.

and every ghost they pass at first is piqued to interest, but then is identified and denied existence, and so they avert attention back to reliving their respective personal moments of horror.

eventually they reach me, alone in this place and reliving my own moment, and the first (friend?) acknowledges me, grabs my hand, and pulls me out from the incorporeal space.
the other ghosts take notice and clamor to be acknowledged and seen and interact, but she is maintaining vigilant eye contact to me granting me some corporeality and disregarding their presence as she chants the mantras un-acknowledging the ghosts that surround us.

we reach stairs with steel handrails leading to door along the wall, and I accidentally looked back to the Girl Who Recites Pi, and as I tell this to my friend, I inadvertently acknowledge her from my ephemeral position of corporeality, and she takes this opportunity I had given to her and grabs me at the sides.

I woke up startled to short quick breaths and begin replaying the dream into long term memory as best I can and unpack its themes and possible meanings to me.

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echoes of a reflection

we had a rough weekend in the brain, and it's hard to describe but the doc tells me the headache it caused fit the description of a migraine, and we've been feeling strange after-effects from it in the sensory memory and depression since.

this week I am feeling again like we had already given up and joined the ghosts, and we have been reduced to an almost incorporeal presence that inspires aversion and fear of mortality to confront the awareness of us.

our brother had reflected this last night in chat:

In most of society if you don’t thrive in the face of depression you’re being ostracized from your peers.

we used to live more of a functional depression before the pandemic, fulfilling obligations of living and doing our best to find some joy in the days while maintain momentum on a career partly as a distraction and partly to afford the luxury of a lifetime paid subscription to Gender™, but we also slept on the literal floor at night in a nest of disintegrating foam and a Hello Kitty comforter, we had no furniture, we were constantly sick from what some kind stranger in line at the pharmacy advised sounded like black mold exposure.

I once found the wrong word in mind and said to a friend that we used to thrive before the pandemic, and he laughed at the absurdity of this statement. I hadn't meant then to confront the position we were in, but what I had meant then was that I felt like I had energy and motivation to finally climb out of this hole then in the beginning.

in 2017 we had left the contract job where we were "severely underpaid" to move up into a full-time position with health benefits, by 2018 we had bought a real bed and a small furniture and a desk, by 2019 we had just moved out of the apartment (with significant help from this same friend), we got laundry machines in the home, and those first few months of 2020 we had hope. not thriving yet, but looking forward to it.

today we wallow in stagnation and loneliness, feeling forgotten, stuck, and unbelonging.
we wake, we work, we begrudgingly eat, we sleep, we repeat.
every day is the same, and time has lost its meaning.

What Dreams May Come

I feel sometimes like Annie in the 1998 film What Dreams May Come¹ after she had committed suicide and relives a literal manifestation of a dilapidated melancholic grief in this hell called Denial, unable to confront the awareness of what she had done, or the reality she sought to escape, unable to recognize her husband and soulmate, and unable to forgive herself.

Annie's hell in the film has always been for me a strangely relatable depiction of how it feels to live with depression, in which our awareness of the world around us slowly withers until we can no longer notice or care about clutter and detritus strewn through our home, and so many little shames like stepping over the growing laundry pile every morning or the gradual yellowing of a once white pillowcase no longer has the bite to be acknowledged or noticed at all.

but I am not dead. we are a living as a ghost confined by our own denial to relive our grief awaiting our Orpheus or Christy to arrive at acknowledging this grief—and unacknowledging the contagion of denial that clings to us like envious ghosts demanding attention—and drag us out of this hell we have made for ourself.
or join us here where we belong, and build with us a safe little bubble within it.

we had never loved or let ourself be loved out fear that our presence in this state of depression could only place undue burden on someone we should like to care about, that we would drag them down into our hell and denial to suffer and drown in the empty grief with us. that is lamentations for another post someday. maybe.

the thing about depression is that it feels so intimidating to merely want to care enough to drag ourself out of this. it feels like it will cost so much more stability than we have to spend just to confront the accumulated grief of a life unlived and move forward from the pervasive denial that narrows our awareness and warps our perspective until it is only vaguely visible in periphery, and every passing day and week and year counts off more hours thrown away to be grieved on some future day as a promise to ourself that we would rather never fulfill.

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1. I have lots of feelings about this beautifully upsetting film from 26 years ago that just happened to stick the landing into long-term memory.

   🌈✨ Fun fact: the VFX crew responsible for the painted world sequence of What Dreams May Come, Manex Visual Effects (MVFX), was the same as was responsible for the bullet time effect from The Matrix!