(ESSAY) ‘The Death of the Dreamer(s)’ by eveline

In ‘The Death of the Dreamer(s)’, eveline examines the quiet violence of digital erasure, mourning a love subcontracted to the cloud.

“And someday there will be a great awakening

when we know that this is all a great dream.

Yet the stupid believe they are awake,

busily and brightly assuming they understand things”

Zhuang Zhou

God is dead, and so are my dreams.

It started when we shared a house in a hostile city. Each other’s bay is what we were. For a few weeks, we navigated the sterile streets, full of life. For a moment, when I looked up at the skyscrapers and then immediately after to the right to find you by my side —  my beautiful, strange soul! — I knew, undisputedly, unequivocally, that I could call that place home. And that, for once (the first time?), I wouldn’t have crumbled under the weight of that word. Only a few weeks. Then you moved, and all your life became to me was an ordered wall of square images of cold buildings, and the hearts strangers left below them.

I found you again, a little less than half a decade later, this time in the gloom of another city. In a world that had closed its doors, we used to hang out on benches, drinking pints from plastic cups and freezing to life in winter evenings, in summer days. Each other’s haven, as long as our fingers didn’t touch. Our bodies so different, their union a reality too scary to conjure up. So it stayed only a dream.

Until one day the paradoxicality of us being one collapsed onto itself and called forth the possibility of a love we were both too scared to dream. Home being the unformed idea it had always been, I moved to a damp town a plane away from you. You didn’t follow me. But your texts did. It was then that things solidified into a confusing mess.

From the gloom of your lonely days, your love was compressed and digitalised, losing all of its anxieties and fears in transit. We constructed a dream where the reality of our intrinsic lovelessness felt unbearable, so we stored our naïve hopes in wee data packets who dreamt for us, day and night. In our digital dreamscape, the prospect of being lovable felt real and the fear of being assailable tiny beings dissipated. As reality and dream inhabited the same ethereal space, the illusion of immutability crept up, and we started to believe nothing could ever erode us as long as our love thoughts were stored in the cloud.

This was until I bought a one-way ticket to crashing into your sad. We were in the same room every day now, and so our texts became more sparse, projecting pale shadows of what it (we?) used to be. The dream started to fade, until it finally died. In the cemetery of our conversations, I could scroll through hundreds of days I was now not so sure we’d actually spent together. Alone in our rooms with our phones —  just like so many years earlier —  everything felt so real.

The first day of a new year finds me in an unfamiliar bed in a familiar country, I relive the memories of the new year’s party: board games, waffles, laughs, Mortal Kombat and hugs. I open our conversation and reach for the three dots: ‘block contact?’ ‘yes’ ‘delete conversation?’. I don’t even finish reading the pop-up message, my finger knows what to press. And so I consent to erasing the dream. 

Panic ensues almost immediately. If I can’t scroll through it, did it happen? If I want to look for a word in the language we so carefully crafted just the two of us, or for a joke only we could understand that I can’t quite remember, and all I’m faced with is a black background, does it mean I woke up? Just like when you wake up from a dream and you can’t anchor the uneasy feeling that something majestic/scary/unspeakable has happened, I can’t quite place your face and I’m not really sure anymore of what you were doing in my life. A faded memory, you lived on my screen, and now you’re dead.

We wrote our dream into existence, each of us author and reader, giving and taking meaning. But now that the words don’t exist anymore, it’s the death of the author, the reader, and the dreamer. A new dimension of being dead. And it’s ghosts at every corner in the hyperreality of a faked intimacy: hypolove. The cloud a cemetery I can’t visit, like the ruins of our dreamy denial. An internet-mediated neurosis is what you get when you don’t believe you deserve love, so you go out and subcontract it to another layer of reality, until you can’t ‘distinguish being awake from being asleep’. Did a part of me die IRL too or was I spared by a failure of backup technology?

Like for many who were sixteen in the early 2000s, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind burned a hole in our hearts. Twenty years on, I never fail to remember the verses:

How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!

The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!

Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd.

But the poem continues…

Far other dreams my erring soul employ,

Far other raptures, of unholy joy:

When at the close of each sad, sorrowing day,

Fancy restores what vengeance snatch'd away,

Then conscience sleeps, and leaving nature free,

All my loose soul unbounded springs to thee.

Oh curs'd, dear horrors of all-conscious night!

How glowing guilt exalts the keen delight!

And so you become once again a series of perfectly arranged squares on my screen, likes of strangers below photos of brutalist buildings. The dream is dead, and yet it lives on. Ephemeral, the digital dream is erased, but the fantasy comes back as vivid as ever – vengeful, merciless – as long as I can refresh the page.

Death by chat erasure is but an illusion, the persecution continues. Memories that are not stored in our phones resurface, like when you were tired of pretending and put your head on my thigh and I ran my fingers through your hair for the first time. Nobody can convince me that wasn’t real.

And still, all I’m left with is the end, and the deluded certainty that, in dream or reality, we'll find each other again.

~

Text: eveline

Image: Hanna Barakat  & Cambridge Diversity Fund / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Published: 13/1/26