In My Dreams

When I was 20 years old, I started to sense a hole inside me. The feeling was utterly concrete, though the result of no medical condition that any of the various doctors I saw could identify. The hole felt like a viscous emptiness—a paradox, admittedly, as any real emptiness should have felt like nothing. This was a nothing, but its nothingness very much felt like something—and something that was growing.

Accompanying this feeling of an expanding hole at the center of me was a sense that I was losing more and more of myself to it, like shoreline eroded by rising waters. To lose myself felt less like oblivion than instability. I observed in myself a new susceptibility to the opinions of others, and a new recklessness, as if some dark, decisive action might either quiet my doubts about my fundamental worth or end my longing once and for all. I recall one particularly dangerous, drunken night that had me well over the legal limit, both aware that I was getting into a car that could kill me and others, and also not believing that any of it mattered.

The onset of my devolving well-being was strange and sudden, and seemed connected to childhood in some way I couldn’t understand. I hadn’t been a tortured child but rather placid, if introverted. My parents always said that I had been easy to keep happy. It sometimes seemed to me as if the hole I was experiencing was one where some piece of my childhood had once resided.

My friends found my behavior disturbing. I was missing class in college, showing up to theater rehearsals drunk. A caring young woman I was dating could take no more of my savage, ranting mood swings and persistent despair. She broke up with me over tea at the student union and implored me to seek help. I knew she was right. Even sleep was now fraught with violent, terrifying dreams—of rocket ships out of control, conflagrations and invasions, and, yes, holes into which I would disappear. But exactly what sort of help I might need, I didn’t know.

I confided my woes to a friend who’d grown up on a farm in Kentucky. He never missed Sunday Mass, and when I told him about the hole inside me, he pulled a copy of The Seven Storey Mountain from his bag and handed it to me. Thomas Merton, he said, had written about something similar. It was what had led him to leave the world and become a monk.

I found deep resonance in the book’s harrowing account of Merton’s time at Cambridge and Columbia—the intense restlessness and emptiness, the disgust and torpor and despair. But Merton’s solution was theistic: a turn to God that I could only read as naive and distorting. I didn’t have any interest in God. Even the passages that approached the specificity of my own experience were charged with personification that read as anachronistic at best:

I knew this experience: a central chill, a lightlessness connected to the doomed feeling of some ultimate end. But I resisted any characterization that departed from the fundamental sensation itself—of a growing hole inside me. For no reason I knew, I was convinced that remaining honest with myself about this basic fact was the only thing I could do to help myself.

My parents were worried. They flew out to visit me at school and figure out what was wrong. Over a meal they prepared for me in a hotel room with a kitchen, I confided in them. There was a hole inside me that I needed to address, I said. They were understandably perplexed. My mother found me a psychiatrist, an avuncular Brit who was more interested in my sex life than my interior void, which I insisted was more real than he seemed willing to allow. But something important endured from the handful of sessions I had with him. A volume on the shelf over his left ear drew my fascination, and would soon fill weeks of my life: Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams.

That book began a process in me, what I’ve often called “curiosity” when I’ve told this story, but which is probably better described as a form of relationship. The nightly tumult of disturbing dreams persisted, and even if I couldn’t be sure whether Freud was right about how to make sense of them, simply attempting to do so seemed to help. Paying attention made it easier to remember my dreams, and to remember more of them. In one, I was carefully drawing an empty circle on a page of the Quran that my grandparents had given me as a boy, a circle through which—impossibly—I could reach and touch cool water. I awoke with the feeling that the hole inside me might be leading to something better, however unknown.

Even so, it wasn’t until I mentioned that I was interested in dreams to a teacher I admired that I started to keep a detailed nightly log. This teacher had done a great deal of dream-work, and suggested that I tie a pencil to my finger to remind me, in those brief moments of stirring between sleep cycles, to write down whatever fragments were stirring in hypnagogic consciousness. So I did. What resulted was a daily haul of interior riches. The vividness of my unadulterated hopes and sorrows, the unusual expansiveness and wonder I experienced by night, lived on in the often-paradoxical images I would recall throughout the day.

My study of Freud led to a similar scouring of the work of other psychoanalysts—and, later, mystics such as Emanuel Swedenborg, Ibn Arabi, and Rabbi Nachman—for clues about what kind of sense to be making of my dreams. In my final year of college, I encountered, in a late work of Carl Jung’s, the advice to treat dreams as meaningful psychic events, a technique to facilitate what Jung called their “compensatory” function—balancing the biases and limitations of one’s conscious attitudes. I took this to mean treating a dream’s images as real in their own right. Whether doing so had any such balancing effect on me, I can’t be sure. But my persistent despair seemed to be dimming; the hole inside me felt different the more I was able to gaze patiently into it for whatever was coming through. The dream-work was paying dividends, though what exactly was paying them out, I had no clue.

I know how what I’m about to share is likely to come off; it isn’t the first time I’ve spoken it aloud. I started to dream of things that hadn’t happened yet, to “see” things at night that then appeared in my life during the day. One of the earliest and most startling of these uncanny doublings took place in my first year after college. I was living and working in a small town in the Tuscan countryside, without a phone, before the internet. I dreamed that a friend I knew in Paris showed up on my doorstep with skis on his back. Two days later, I awoke to the sound of my name being called from down in the piazza, outside my front window. I opened the worn balcony doors to find the very friend I’d dreamed of; he’d gotten my Italian address from a mutual friend and seen that the town I was living in wasn’t too far out of the way as he made the trip from Rome up to the city in the Alps where he planned to spend a few days skiing. I resisted speaking of what had happened, lest I be impelled to name whatever in me had seized my bewildered attention.

The Tuscan episode was not the last time dream and day seemed to cross wires. Years later, I would dream of a terrorist attack on Manhattan two days before 9/11, and of a malign, cough-inducing fog slowly engulfing the world several weeks before the eruption of the coronavirus into my (and the world’s) awareness—improbable coincidences I struggled to accept as such. And yet, these visions became the occasion to doubt any picture of the universe that failed to make room for what could only be experienced as a kind of magic.

If the prognosticating mode had been the only benefit to accrue from my attention to my dreams, I might not have been so diligent in my recordkeeping. After all, I wasn’t seeing stock prices or lottery numbers, the only rationale many might have accepted for my habit of destroying every good night’s rest. For at that point, I was waking up every 45 minutes to reach for the bedside pad on which I made notes about whatever was moving around inside me. But my night work was opening up creative vistas. One mentor, well-versed in working with the unconscious, suggested that it was enlarging the space of what she kept calling—despite my confusion about what she really meant by it—my psyche.

Read: McNeal, a play by Ayad Akhtar

Indeed, a growing spaciousness was now my sense of the interior core where the hole had opened up. The hole itself wasn’t gone, but it had changed character, less a wound now than an opening, though I couldn’t always tell the difference. And yet, the trajectory seemed to be shifting. That pliant, receptive brightness bearing the imprint of something more than just my name, the self, began to feel heightened, enlarged. I had learned that some cultures conceived of the self as containing two parts: a smaller, individual, daily self, and a larger, multiple, primordial one. This greater self, it was believed, was the one that dreamed. Something about this way of thinking felt more useful—and more reflective of my experience—than any of the latest studies in neuroscience I read about the physiological functions of dreams.

Psyche : Greek for “soul.” Which felt like a more appropriate frame of reference—despite my continued resistance to the language of theism—for experiences that so evidently defied the materialist doctrines of my late-20th-century education. To privilege the Newtonian model of classical mechanics—one object pushing or pulling another, all the way down to the molecules that formed consciousness—over the actual data of my experience felt like intellectual laziness. I understood that others would see my willingness to abide more patiently in the mystery as irrational. My usage of the Greek term started to give way to its English corollary. The word soul seemed to make better sense of whatever was expanding inside me, a rising that was also a deepening, married to the uncanny knowing of what seemed like prognostication, and, more valuably, to a natural empathy for others. And in case this comes off as more altruistic than seems reasonable: Less blinded by myself, more porous to others, I found, too, that I was becoming a better writer.

From the November 2024 issue: Jeffrey Goldberg, Ayad Akhtar, Robert Downey Jr., and Bartlett Sher on writing in the age of AI

Soul was, for me then, a mode of being mostly experienced in images by night that shaped my understanding by day—for example, that a close friend was like the abandoned dog I dreamed he was, long neglected by his family, never allowed into the house; an image that helped me navigate his touchiness, providing readier access to the wellspring of loving loyalty that coursed beneath his habitual choler. I found in the use of soul a capaciousness that not only accounted for this richer relationship to others and the world—and to myself—but served as a bridge to deeper mystery, and to a new patience that allowed me to acclimate to it.

There were other benefits, too. Just as the vital, vivid stuff of my brain’s nightlife enriched my being—to use a word that joined soul in the lexicon of descriptive terms of dubious provenance—so did my immersion in dream dross seem to feed my capacities with language. There was a stronger tether now between word and thing, a tether, paradoxically, that operated simultaneously in many directions and layers. The webbed, protean mode of associative thinking—one thing reaching for another, in opposing vectors at once—was less an effort than a reflex, more instinctive than the ordinal fixity of my usual habits of mind. Shakespeare, whom I’d long struggled to apprehend, now made easier sense, even as the experience of reading him felt like perpetual entry into undiscovered country, the phonetic expatiations, the dense semantic clusters, the sounds and images opening up more and more effortlessly into a particular state of absorptive flow, a pleasing emotional and intellectual static that I took to calling “linguistic space.”

I started taking a yoga class on the Upper West Side. Our becalming teacher spent the better part of our weekly hour teaching us to meditate. Setting aside my irritation with her hushed and holy tones, I found myself growing more susceptible to her instructions. I could catch a gap between thoughts that felt curiously similar to a rich blankness that resulted from hours spent in linguistic space. The fixed point of focus on the breath sharpened my mind and filled it with something closer to light than thought. On my own, I began to sit—sometimes for hours—in this pregnant blankness, exhibiting a facility for what the yoga teacher called “practice” that I couldn’t explain.

My weekly hour with that yoga teacher sparked an interest in meditation that led to weeks, and years, of working with other instructors of inner techniques. I learned to visualize and hold in memory shapes derived from Gnostic practices and colors derived from Sufi ones. Intoning Abulafia’s list of Hebrew names for God at the proper pitch and volume shook the bones in my ear and nerves along my neck. Calm was promised, and often followed, though I wondered whether this said more about my susceptibility to suggestion than the practices themselves. Sometimes what followed was stranger. Once, as I sat in a darkened room at dusk, observing the breath going in and out of me, I felt that breath begin to breathe itself. In the half shadows, with my eyes closed, a startling brightness waxed and waned with the movement of air. What was this light? I wondered. Was this just the room’s faint light filtering through my eyelids, brightening and dimming as my pupils dilated and contracted with each breath? If so, was this suggestion too? I would come to no definitive answer. The inner light continued to strobe.

If it was all suggestion, I didn’t mind. It was getting me further than faith had. From Meister Eckhart I learned to recognize in my meditative blankness a silence clean of longing, one that, if I could remain in it, would release an astonishing vitality. Others I studied with found it strange that my interest in meditation would be piqued by dream-work and quickened by pentameter. They sometimes remarked that what I was up to resembled anthropology more than devotion. They were only partly right. To me, it was all a study in being, or soul, or spirit (the latest addition to my lexicon)—which is to say, an inquiry into the substance and nature of the interior life.

My reading, too, reflected the scavenging of a magpie in search of material from which to build its nest: the Phaedrus and Patanjali and Mulla Sadra; Being and Time one month, Mathnawi the next. What exactly I thought I was doing was not a matter of concern as long as I kept to myself about it. What I’m compressing into paragraphs here took so much longer, of course, and was hardly as sequential as telling makes it sound. I kept at it for the reward of the work itself. I had experiences of rapture (and sorrow) so deep, of pleasures so unprecedented, it was sometimes hard to return to the dishes and the rent. But I had studied with a remarkable Vedic teacher who warned me about seeking states rather than the truth. “What is the truth?” I once asked him as we sauntered along a Tennessee creek. He pulled his orange robe tighter against a rising spring wind. He was too smart to oblige. “The truth is not like knowledge about that tree,” he said, pointing to a blooming magnolia. “Only the tree knows its truth.” I didn’t want to pretend I understood him. “You write stories,” he said. “Inside the story is a meaning that is the reason for it. Not words that carry it, but the wordless substance of its truth you take away.”

Despite my customary reticence about such things, I had occasions to compare notes with fellow travelers. One evening, at a fundraising function downtown, I found myself sharing martinis with a physician whose lived-in eloquence about his Zen practice felt like an opening. I was not expecting the lesson in brain science he proceeded to impart: I’d become addicted, he said, to activating certain parts of my cerebral cortex. Like an addict—I flinched at that word—I was pulling on neurological switches, training my brain to release its own pleasure chemicals through a growing grab bag of inner tricks. Clearly he didn’t approve. I was too embarrassed to ask why, even as I recalled my teacher’s warning not to chase states, but rather to seek the wordless substance of truth. I resisted the physician’s account even as I couldn’t ignore the unease it stirred in me.

My fellow traveler was right, at least as far as neuroscience went. Studies were beginning to show that meditation—a loose term for the various practices of inner focus I was involved with—activated and deactivated specific parts of the human brain. In the 1990s, the neuroscientist Andrew Newberg studied advanced Tibetan monks and Franciscan nuns as they entered deep meditative states. The results were strikingly similar. In both groups, areas of the brain believed to be responsible for orienting us in space and time showed markedly decreased activity, as if the neural basis for the boundary between self and other had gone quiet. They were using very different techniques, but the results, neurologically speaking, were nearly indistinguishable. Each group, however, described the experience differently: the nuns as a feeling of union with Christ, the monks as a state of emptiness.

I knew enough about Buddhism to recognize in that word, emptiness, something very different from the hole that had opened up inside me during early adulthood. For the Buddhist, perception of the nature of reality discloses the identity of emptiness with form, and form with emptiness. It’s a perception described in other traditions by other means, and sometimes, in Christianity, as an annihilation of the individual personality in the presence of God. The maps and words and techniques were different; somehow, the underlying experience itself, beyond words or ideas, was the same.

Not quite in the words of my Vedic teacher: The brain scans were a story containing a truth known only to the one inside them.

For a long time, all of this felt like little more than a motley, life-enhancing assortment, which is not to downplay the valuable place it had in my life. Rightly or wrongly, I attributed the return of my fundamental stability after the harrowing years of early adulthood—and the return of the placid, placable self I’d known much earlier in life—to my commitment to daily practice. I would come to think of inner work as an adult corollary to the joyous absorption of childhood play. I’d found a way to play again, I concluded, and somehow this had seemed to “fill” the hole again.

But the life of the spirit was not what I took my real life to be. I was a writer. I wanted to know the broken world that was, not the healed one that could be. I had no fundamental interest in escaping the human condition. To the extent that spirit—or soulfulness—anchored my curiosity, quickened my perceptions, deepened my empathy, I rationalized its creative and analytical utility. In truth, something less tangible than optimization bound me to practice. It kept me in the company of more eternal conundrums, questions of consciousness and origin and meaning for which, of course, I expected no answer. But proximity to the unknown—living contact with it, if you will—seemed like a worthy form of knowledge.

In this, I was like many friends who took psychedelics; I wanted to recover the awe and mystery I recognized in their accounts when they shared them. For the most part, though, I was still doing what my teacher had warned me against—chasing states. In part, this was a function of resisting meaning. I had been too respectful of my teacher back then to tell him I wasn’t sure that a story’s meaning mattered to me the way he assumed it would. But I felt the slow accretion of a wordless substance inside me, not well-being or certainty or the rapture of some fugitive sublime, but something I might call intimacy: intimacy with an inwardness spied only indirectly, whose purer acquaintance I seemed to be making very slowly indeed.

With the hindsight of decades, I can track a tectonic shift away from the visible to something more diffuse and sustaining, an interior through line that has both warned me against the tyranny of acquisition—of things, of states—and provided the means of finding sustenance in absence. Whatever this is, whatever name I might give it, I can’t deny that it all seems to have proceeded from that perception of a hole I felt or imagined when I was younger. William James might have called it a “sick soul”; I still don’t feel entirely confident about what word to use for the continuity that I’ve found or constructed, though some word has always been necessary. I had spent years resisting every vocabulary that exceeded the raw data of sensation, only to find that this austerity, too, had to be exceeded.

Too much of what mattered most in my own life had remained unspoken not because it was unreal, but because I did not know how to bring it into language without betraying it. For decades, I steered conversations away from these inner experiences, obedient to the rule that such things could not be talked about without sounding foolish or deranged. But my reticence began to feel like capitulation to falseness. It took me years to understand that my silence was not only protective but deforming—for without others to hear it, the still, small voice within was so much harder to discern. And yet, the silence was not my own to break. With so little room in our common life for such things, we have no common language for them either.

Ralph Waldo Emerson knew the problem. In “The Over-Soul,” he wrote that language could not paint this “subtile” order of our experience in its own colors; but he knew how important it was to keep trying. The great Russian novelists knew it too, treating soul not as a word reserved for Sundays, but as the moral substance of life. I’ve found myself mourning not their metaphysics but their seriousness, their acceptance of the inscrutable boundlessness of the inner life—unruly, morally consequent—as a subject for public speech.

What matters to me now is less the defense of any particular term than the search for a language in which such things can be spoken of seriously, in fiction and elsewhere, without piety or diagnosis. Without a language for speaking openly together about the inner life, what often matters most to us remains locked away, inaccessible to the inquiry and challenge vital to all knowledge.

As I finished a draft of this essay, I had a dream. In it, I stood at the edge of a well—another hole, I realized as I made note the following morning—where there was no bucket to draw water. Around it moved countless people in a flurried hubbub, shepherds and masons and architects, all of us trying to figure out how to draw the water whose surface we could see in the faint shimmering at the bottom.

It was going to take time, I thought, before we figured it out—just as I awoke.