(ESSAY) 'Of dreams and pomegranates' by Roya Reese

Allergies, jokes, emoji. In our latest from Digital Dreamland, Roya Reese muses on the semiotics of dream-systems and their metabolic underbellies.

I have a dream that V is allergic to bananas. I call to tell her this. Don’t even joke about that, she says. Her favorite flavor of ice cream is Ben and Jerry’s Chunky Monkey, composed of banana ice cream with chocolate and walnut bits.

In my dream, my horror was that I’d forgotten this allergy and erroneously fed her a banana. In real life she is allergic to carrots.

~

I feel that there are some basic rules to dream-sharing — namely, that it bores people; it is at least important for the dream-sharer to know this, even if they choose to share anyway. But the rule doesn’t really apply to best friends; they can still be bored by our dreams, but in the terms of best friendship, they’ve signed onto listening.

In high school, V and I had a rule: if I had to hear it, you have to hear about it. This mainly applied to explicit details from our friends of their sexual escapades, which I never wanted to hear but then would force V to listen to as well. Now I feel the same about dreams: if I had to live it, you at least have to hear about it. We put up with these things.

~

In a letter, I tell Em about the girl from last semester, the one I never think about in waking hours but who appears in all my dreams. Em says, some people never really leave your dream-system. It is a poetic way of talking about Freud, the subconscious, the unconscious.

Last night I woke my roommate with a shout, yelling in my sleep. I’d been dreaming about Em: my father had snapped at her, and I was chewing him out for it. Are you ok? My roommate asked. You just yelled, “that was really fucking rude.”

In the dream, Em had come over for dinner, to borrow a dress. I was mad at my father for making her upset. I think I just wanted her to stay a little longer.

~

In Farsi, my name looks like this: روﯾﺎ. In English, it reads: Roya. I find that the actual meaning of the Persian word is hard to explain; we don’t really have a word for it in English. It’s a vision, a mirage, something that sits between the imagination and reality. It isn’t quite real, but it isn’t quite fabricated either. When people ask what it means, I just tell them dream.

~

The orange emoji is tilted slightly to the left. It found its way into my frequently-used collection because Em sent it tome, in thanks for a letter. We call them letters, I think, to give them a sense of formality; really they are poetic emails, but somehow email feels deeply unserious, almost disrespectful to the art form. She wrote: THANK YOU (white heart, orange, smiley face).

After she sent me this orange I thought about using fruit emojis. There is also a blueberry (or rather, a blueberry cluster) in my collection. Em is the blueprint in many ways. The epistolary form, Maggie Nelson, fruit emojis.

Em texts in lower case. Yesterday on the phone K recounted a text she got from her ex-best friend: with capital letters, no punctuation, no emojis. K said, this is not the way we speak to each other. I’m a lowercase, two exclamation-point at least type of bitch.

~

The other day, my roommate knocked on my door to hang out. She doesn’t usually do this. We sat on my bed. Shetalked about her not-girlfriend back home. It’s hard, I say, to rest any of your happiness on others. I know, she says. My not-girlfriend says her day changes based on whether or not I text her back. But like, that’s terrible. We talked about attention.

I used to feel this way with V. If she didn’t text me back I’d be sick with worry, and then furious. Normally I think about relationships and hate the idea of speaking to anyone constantly. But then I think, sometimes you really just do want someone’s attention.

K texts me, I keep looking around the room and wondering where you are. This makes me smile: that she is thinking of me.

~

Days take on a strange color here. Few things can jerk me out of the grayness: a cigarette, a particularly ripe raspberry. Watching movies also helps.

We watch Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in the kitchen, projected onto a white sheet hanging on the wall. The movie disorients me. It is a dream-sequence, not entirely grounded in reality. I need my media to be grounded these days. I am much too dreamy as it is.

~

You can tell someone if they were in your dream, of course, if you’re okay with them knowing they bear any sort of psychological weight on you at all (when I’m trying to play it cool, I don’t tell people).

Sometimes dreams are of things we want. The recipients of these dreams are also our friends, if we’re lucky. Over fall break I had to get my wisdom teeth out and I had also been struck down fatally with a crush on a straight girl. My sweet friends came over and sat with me, fed me ice cream, listened to me talk about this girl who would never and could never like me back. That was a dream, in a way, wasn’t it?

~

Em sends me pomegranates. I don’t know how we decided on pomegranates, but she screenshots them from a mutual friend’s story, sends me posts that say: I would pluck out all the seeds for you. I tell her how my grandfather does it — goes to the Whole Foods that’s twenty minutes away, instead of the one just down the road, because their fruit is better. Picks the one that’s perfectly ripe, cuts it open, taps the seeds out with a wooden spoon. Brings me the plate.

I saw a pomegranate rotting on the street the other day. Just half. I didn’t send it to her.

~

Text: Roya Reese

Published: 26/8/25