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Essay: My Life, Approximately by Peter Smith I. It is strange how much of one’s life is spent asleep, insensate to experience. Much of my life, when I should have been separated from my mind and its numerous anxieties, has been spent in a landscape of dreams. In a state between waking and sleeping, or perhaps in a different state altogether, I am subjected to a series of images that I take to be real, despite their absurdity. Some would have it (the Freuds and Jungs of the world) that these images are the visages of hidden desire, pregnant with significance. Many others would say that these images are simply random, the result of a glitch in the brain, and are therefore incoherent and meaningless. But most, I think, regard dreams as a mystery, the object of superstition and shared incredulity. The only significance dreams have for me are their frequency. Two, three, four times a night I dream, and when I awake I’m left sporadic recollections of them, their substance already dissipating into incoherent, bizarre thickets of thought. Some say dreams are a hallmark of creativity, but that hasn’t been proven yet, and it’s just as well. I wish the infernal things would leave me alone. One of my earliest memories is of a werewolf chasing me through an abandoned house (a mansion, no doubt), each room’s decor popping up as I enter, like a pop-up book. The terror I’m sure I felt at the time has distilled to a healthy curiosity. Why the pop-up style images? Why a werewolf? Are they endemic to old mansions? (My subsequent survey of horror movies featuring werewolves would suggest otherwise.) I’ve had many oddly rendered dreams. Once I dreamed I was a fish, and my companion fish were drawn in the typical children’s book fashion: thin black outlines, the colors solid and pure. This made the dream rather fun, until one of my fellow fish (my best friend, by his own testimony) and his older brother were reduced to tangled swirls of maroon by a shark. Scenes out of books I had read weaseled their way into my dreams, too: the beginning of the bloody contest in The Hunger Games, the reveal of several monsters from Goosebumps, the appearance of the shape-shifting clown of It. As I grew older, my dreams lost their cartoonish tinge and became more erratic, vaguer, and more violent. I remember one dream that marked this transition, and I doubt I’ll ever forget it. My father and I had Page 37

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