Lo people!
Spring has sprung! Winter wunt (went?). Which means it’s time for more of our monthly jibber-jabber. I hope you’re spending your coming bank holiday celebrating the true miracle of Easter - a bunny that lays eggs made of cocoa and cow’s milk. Nature truly is wonderful, isn’t she?
As ever, if you’re enjoying these missives, feel free to recommend it, post about it, tweet about it, forward it to the elderly, download it and print copies to paper your walls, or wrap presents, shout about it from the rooftops, shout about it from the mezzanine (you got a mezzanine? sick bro!), release a cage of doves trained to spell your opinions of it in the air (NB: train the doves pre-release), or just wing us a message to say it’s hitting the spot. We love feedback. Particularly, hell I’ll say it, glowing praise :) Enjoy!
A friend told me recently that there’s nothing more boring than hearing about other people’s dreams. ‘Urgh,’ he urghed, ‘I don’t want to hear about how you rode a bloody unicorn to the cinema, whoop-de-fucking-doo.’ This is a line of thinking I’ve heard several times from several different people and it absolutely baffles me. Partly because I rarely have dreams about unicorns (I am, despite my behaviour, demeanour, interests, diet and hotmail account name, still legally an adult), but mostly because I think dreams are absolutely fascinating.
You got to sleep every night, and you could see anything. Dreams could be anything. They are absolute wildcard brain Netflix. Sometimes they can be a beautiful escape from life - so you’ve had a hard day? Well, sit back and relax into a live-in VR experience in which Mark Ruffalo gives you a massage! In space! Or sometimes it’s a fun remix of the best parts of your life. You win an award at school for handwriting and get married on a yacht and meet Tilda Swinton in the same three minutes - in fact, Tilda’s officiating, and all your exes are quietly stewing and weeping in a leaky kayak moored to the hull. Sorry gals!
When I was a teenager, I once had an epic saga of a dream in which I rode a giant red turtle to work, joined an ice-skating musical with a cast of priests and solved a murder mystery in a spooky mansion with Flight of the Conchords. In the same dream. This sounds made up but I absolutely promise you it is 100% 24-carat true. I woke up out of breath, with the same relief and melancholy you have coming off an airplane after trekking the Andes. I was exhausted and refreshed. Dreams could be this. Dreams have this potential.
Which is why I am completely galled to report that my dreams recently have fallen into two categories: seethingly anxious and ball-retractingly dull. The latter is a well-documented symptom of being an adult - the pressures of being busy (yuk) and responsible (yuk2) impinge on your night-mind and curdle your previously filmic escapades involving mystical sex-demons and baguettes that voice opinions into not-anecdotes about finishing your tax return just in time. In fact, these bland, vanilla dreams yield such low interest that I can’t even detail them much here in case I chloroform you to sleep with just the power of their insipid, sapless milquetoastery. A quick example: one whole dream in which I ordered a ‘medium latte please’. That’s one whole dream, start to finish.
The anxious ones are much more annoying. Given the option of infinite brain-cartoons, my mind has insisted on dredging up my problems and fears and writing bad plays about them, casting me as the wretched main character. Last week, I was a member of the heist team pulling off a bank job, but just at the moment I was called on to pick the lock to open the vault, I became so overwhelmed with fear that my hands repeatedly shook the paperclip from my hand. (We won’t dwell on the weird inaccuracy of a commercial bank vault having a keyhole, much less one you could jimmy open with a paperclip). I wept openly in front of the team, crying out that I didn’t want to go to prison. And then I woke up. That is, I think we can all agree, not a dream. That is a hypothetical situation in which I’m a worm. The phrase ‘in your dreams’ is meant to mean the best possible scenario in your wildest imagination. It is not meant to mean ‘here’s the film Ocean’s Eleven but you’re in it and you suck’. Looking young hot Brad Pitt in the eyes with my wet snivelling eyes whining ‘but I’m scared!’ in an embarrassing approximation of an American accent. Honestly, I go to sleep and I essentially get heckled by my subconscious for eight straight hours.
However, the worst of these angst-dreams by some margin are the ones that utilise my nemeses. These have been the regular series villains in my nightmares since about the age of 13 and they simply will not go away. They are zombies, and I have been unable to watch movies that feature them for my entire adult life, purely because my brain has been pitting them against me at night for decades.
I think the reason they cameo so regularly is that they perfectly represent my anxieties. All of my shortcomings map perfectly onto failings that would ruin you in a zombie apocalypse. I don’t like running for starters, a crucial end-of-the-world skill. Running just poses too many questions. Where do you look when you run? You can’t gaze around you because you look clinically insane, your head bobbing side to side like a marionette fitted with happy, panting CCTV. If you really wanted to look around at the scenery you wouldn’t be running past it, like a tourist with the attention span of a pudding. But looking intensely forward? Like I’m about to terminate the air in front of me through the power of my churning, industrial limbs? Well, that’s way too intense. I’m wearing a dirty purple T-shirt I bought on holiday in Massachusetts and novelty socks that say Jingle Bells, let’s not pretend I have a Nike sponsorship. And what do you do with your hands? What an existential problem! I’ve come out to exercise my legs but, what, my just hands just still exist?! Fingers and all?! They just dangle, uninvited, out in front of me, human tassels, all of a sudden completely evolutionarily useless. They feel somehow vestigial, like the process of running has somehow gifted me a beak or a couple of spare moustaches. And crucially, they make me look stupid to all the actual athletes in the park, like I’m a dehydrated T-Rex, roaming the plains of Burgess Park on the hunt for validation or a burger I’ve misplaced. Running makes you fully aware of every part of you that everyone can see. Everyone can see my gait? Should I be anxious about my gait? What is my gait? Gait? Am I saying gait right?
So I don’t like running and, in fact, none of my survival skills bear scrutiny. I can’t ration food (if I open a packet of biscuits in front of you, that’s a promise to you that I’m about to eat a whole packet of biscuits), I forget to lock doors (or on more than one occasion absent-mindedly try to open them with a debit card), and I am really very lazy, such that in an actual zombie apocalypse I would have to fight not just zombies, but also my own capacity for diligence. I would obviously be the only person who died not at the hand of the undead, but from losing track of how many ibuprofen I’d taken.
And thus my brain has chosen a zombie-flavoured apocalypse as my go-to anxiety dream. The zombies themselves are quite indistinct, emotional and fuzzy like most villains in dreams, not the severed, rotting, moaning corpses of the films. What is really distinct though is the feeling of being chased, of everywhere you go being safe at first but then slowly invaded by something dangerous, of people you know and love being bitten and gradually becoming an enemy, of split-second decisions made about where to go or what to do next, and of, in the final moment, when I am about to lose, horrific indecision as I decide whether to just surrender myself to the mob or fight for survival.
This is what makes these dreams truly dreadful - not the gross zombies themselves, but the panic they induce in me, forced in the middle of the night to think about locking doors and saving biscuits for later. I’ve often thought that actually this dimension makes these dreams way worse than an actual zombie apocalypse. My dream-zombies are scary but they also represent fears and worries that I actually have - they’re zombies and they’re metaphors. In no zombie movie you’ve ever watched have the heroes run from the bloody, gory horde screaming ‘BUT WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?! WE MUST PEEL BACK THE LAYERS!’ It means nothing, for them. But my zombies advance toward me, with the inevitable erosive strength of master chessmen, groaning ‘BRAIINSSS!’ when what they really mean is ‘No one likes you and you’re bad at opening jars in front of women’.
Anyway, sleep well ;) xx
Good huh!? Well, then…
Wanna see more of Will’s cartoons?
Gouge and roll your eyes along to Will’s website here!
Wanna peruse more of Jack’s work?
Machete through the undergrowth to Jack’s website here!
Wanna tolerate more of Ben’s nonsense?
Glimpse the ghost of Ben’s website out of the corner of your eye here!
Feeling generous?
If you’ve got spare honk, why not consider giving to one of these amazing charities?
Refugee Action - Priti Patel’s been trying to push through legislation reducing the freedoms of people arriving in the UK claiming asylum, so now is as good a time as any to check out Refugee Action who do tons of good work lobbying in this area - so sling them any funds you can and sign any petition they throw your way!
Parkinson’s UK - Parkies provides care and support across the UK for people with Parkinson’s, and fund research into a cure. They do incredible work! People with Parkinson’s tend to be 50+ and depend on regular contact with others, so have been hit really hard this year. Please consider donating!
If you have a charity close to your heart, however big or small, and want to include it here {or you wanna get in touch for whatever reason!} - just send us an email benpope86@gmail.com or Tweet at us @LoAnEmail