every night i dream of the gift shop
you can never walk the same beach twice
I’ve been away so long that Substack logged me out and I feel like a bad parent. Even so, my weedy blog has grown wildly. A few weeks ago, I got my 100th subscriber. A few weeks before that, I got notice that the first poem I ever published on this blog was chosen for a digital magazine.
But I’m back now, and that counts. Thank you all for being here.
Almost every night, I dream a specific dream. My parents took my siblings and me on vacation a few times to a mountain resort in New Paltz called Mohonk. The several long weekends I’ve spent with my family at Mohonk are beautiful, peaceful, inspiring.
Yet almost every night, I dream that I am at Mohonk, either cognizantly or knowing innately, and I dream that I am trying to get to the gift shop. There are always similarities to the dream: it is the last day of vacation or some other hourglass is nearing its end and it’s all I can think of. But there are differences to the dream every now and again; once I started telling my sister Natalia about them in real life, I would start telling her in the dream as well — “This is the dream. I just have to get to the gift shop.”; there were sometimes different obstacles I had to cross to get where I needed to — I was on the wrong side of the lake, or at the top of a waterslide that doesn’t actually exist, or couldn’t walk without pulling myself by my fingertips along the walls, that’s a common one; and probably the worst ones, when I do arrive and it’s not the same. Last week I got the closest I’ve ever been to the gift shop, but it was one of the latter. Instead I stood on the soft carpeting staring at a dark storefront full of shiny automatons.
I don’t know what I seek in these dreams. I haven’t been back to Mohonk since they started, and I wonder if I did, would the dream stop? What is in the gift shop that my mind cannot reach?
I did some research into the science of recurring dreams on my quest to better understand why I return night after night to the gift shop. It is widely accepted that recurring dreams typically appear during times of stress. In the world’s most popular recurring dreams, we are being chased; walking around without clothes; falling into a deep dark abyss; taking an exam unprepared; arriving late somewhere; and trying over and over again to do something we cannot.
What stumps me is the lack of danger. Why do I need to get to the gift shop so much that it appears day after day, reminding my subconscious of…what? Of all the situations I have weathered in my life, Mohonk remains a bastion of peace and happiness and family security in my mind. Which makes the dream all the more terrifying every time I have it.
There was one year that we went to Mohonk a few days after I had been broken up with suddenly by someone that in hindsight I really didn’t like that much, but the idea of being left was devastating to me. My heartbreak was painful and severe and seeped into every thought I had for weeks. I have memories of staring into the deep lake, reciting the morbid last verses of “The Lovesong of J Alfred Prufrock,” trying to find the beauty in the sunset, and feeling only pain in my heart even so. This is not the overwhelming memory I have when I go to Mohonk, but it’s something that even in my last visits I remembered. Why, in all the beautiful moments of the world, with life teeming everywhere I look, is my sadness still insurmountable? Why do the beautiful things seem to make it worse?
Tonight may be the night I reach what has eluded me all these years. In a way, I wish I wouldn’t. At least in my sleep I know where I am.
the sense I make of it
you can never read the same poem twice almost like you can never walk the same beach after two twilights through the frosted window of tomorrow i twist the corkscrew from yesterday’s sorrow turn over that empty page i was 17 once and heading for humility the long way but if i were a man would i’ve ever found myself wrong weigh the route against my power and in every hour find rooted in me someone I’d have always believed
