In this edition: the detritus of history, writer’s remorse, dream settings, and weird little girls
“The theme for today’s excursion,” Nele announced as we pulled out of the train station’s carpark, “is Hunting and Power.”
Here’s a tip: get yourself the kind of friends who organise themed excursions. I genuinely can’t recommend it enough. Did I know there was going to be a theme for our Sunday hike in the woods before I got in that car? No I did not. Was it the best news I’d heard all week? Yes, yes it was.
The phrase “Joseph Goebbels’ lakeside villa” isn’t necessarily one you conjure up in the search for nice little walking spots, but it was pretty popular last weekend. Nele told me it’s usually empty, kind of a secret spot, and she and her family have been coming to the Bogensee to wander around the lake for years. Feels like a weird moment for Berliners to suddenly start crowding a crumbling fascist artefact en masse, but hey. Someone’s recently knocked the heads off a statue of an embracing couple outside the front door. It checks out. I also really appreciated this tree, which looks like it has spent its entire life attempting to escape the spectre of Nazism haunting the building:
Agreed, tree.
The estate was reappropriated by the GDR’s youth organisation following the war, and there’s also a high school campus set further back from the lake. The school’s purpose was to educate young people in the tenets of communism, and they came from all over the socialist/communist bloc. Nele – who was providing a wonderfully detailed guided tour, again, really, having good friends who know stuff is just the best – looked around the school grounds wistfully as she told me it’s been basically abandoned for years, it was used as a hostel for a while, and occasionally Nazis tried to buy the whole estate (including Goebbels’ villa) for Nazi reasons, and basically the city of Berlin is in a pickle about what to do with it all. “They could at least do something with one of the school buildings,” she said. “You know, choirs could use it to practice or something nice like that.” Well, what can any of us do with the detritus that history leaves us?
We walked around the lake, navigating swamplands and passing the recently demolished burnt remnants of a (yikes, one million screaming yikes) literal love shack old Joe used to sneak out to with various artists until he got told off for violating the contract that says as propaganda minister he was supposed to present the Ideal German Happy Family so could he, like, stop doing that? Thanks!
Despite all that, it truly was a beautiful spot. Nele and I started talking about this newsletter – how nervous I’d been sending out the first edition, how I was trying to use it as a way to practice my writing. “It’s so annoying,” I told her. “I re-read it, and re-read it, and edited it, and tweaked it, and sent it out, and then immediately found something in it I just hated and wished I could have changed. Which, well, I guess gives me somewhere to improve from.”
“What was it?”
I sighed. “The last story. The one about my nanny, when I was a really little kid. I put some direct speech in it, just to give it a bit of movement, but I don’t remember what she said at all. I was like, three or whatever. I don’t even remember enough of the way she used to talk to really replicate her voice. So I just put some words in that meant more or less what I wanted to get across, and then I just left them like that.” I looked over at the reeds lining the lake. Nele had told me that they were known as Schmackeduzie, which is an extremely fun word to say. “And when I read that bit now it sounds wrong and weird and I don’t like it. It doesn’t properly capture who she was, and it makes me so uncomfortable.”
“I think it’s a good sign that you want to get it right, though,” Nele replied. “Sometimes I feel like that, trying to describe dreams. I want to be able to hold on to the feeling they gave me but I can’t find the right words for it, and it’s frustrating.”
I’ve been thinking about that conversation in the days since, particularly since I’ve had a week where my days and dreams are kind of bleeding into one another, trying very hard to finish a paper I’ve been putting off for 18 months now, conscientiously closing tab after tab of news (where are they coming from, who’s even opening them??), attempting to be gentle with myself. This weird dreamlike state isn’t depression, although sometimes it acts like it (and fortunately responds to the tools I have for managing depression); where depression is flat and tired and indistinguishable, this is more like noisy static that I’m lucid to, but having trouble siphoning off into differentiated experiences. I don’t have the language to properly describe the differences of one day to the next – to others, to myself – even though I kind of feel like they’re there. But without the ability to carve these differences out with words, every chunk of hours starts spilling into the next one. In normal times I’d be able to pull my days apart from each other by the things that happened in them, the things that happened to me, and the emotions would cling to those things and take on some shape. But nothing happens to me anymore; I have to make all the things happen if I want things to happen, and generally I do want things to happen, ah things! How I miss them, or perhaps just the distant memory of them. I’m not alone in this, obviously, but I think sometimes this narrative we’re all telling each other of “time is meaningless lol it’s a flat empty circle and full of nightmares” tickles the part of my brain that was warped by the humour of early 2010s internet, but it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy if there’s nothing to interrupt it. If I can’t pull at the fabric of this experience with my fingertips, tease out the threads until they start feeling like words I can string together, it’s hard to tell the story properly.
Rob Walker’s latest newsletter has a bunch of links about feelings and words with no names, if you want to think more about this topic.
Anyway despite the nerves, I like having a place I can chuck some words around and see how they land. Eventually they’ll fall in a way that doesn’t make me feel like a slightly burnt pancake – like, fine, I guess, but I could have done better. In the meantime we can all wander around together in the overgrown rubble hunting for treasures. Here’s a statue from the grounds of the high school that I was very taken by:
Dreamscapes
Speaking of dreams, do you guys have like, a standard set of dream-backdrops? There are certain places that show up again and again as the settings for my dreams, although they often have absolutely nothing to do with the content of the dream itself. Sometimes they’ll even pop up if I’m just reading a book and I need to imagine a setting for the action taking place. Here is an incomplete list of my default dream settings:
The steeply-sloped street that runs alongside the basketball court at my school
The backyard of my dad’s ex-partner’s house, twenty years ago
My grandparents’ living room, just before dinnertime
The empty demountable classrooms of my brother and sister’s school
The lawn where the Spring Fair used to take place, except it’s snowing, which does not happen in my hometown
The garage of the house I grew up in
An event space above a café where someone threw a party in year 11 or 12
This one river I once waded along with some friends, like not beside the river but actually in it, until we reached a fence and decided to go back
The restaurant I worked in between the ages of 18 and 21 (nightmares only!!)
The tiny outdoor food court near the Young People’s Theatre that sold burgers and a pizza-like thing called “beaver tails”, which had the unfortunate slogan “It’s like an orgasm in your mouth!”, which, don’t think about that for too long, or you’ll think about it for the next 15 years, speaking from experience
The shed where we kept the tractor and cattle feed on the farm
A fish and chip shop I went to exactly once but it comes up in dreams like six or seven times a year
A stretch of road that is so so familiar but honestly I have no idea where its real world counterpart is
Nanna Shirley’s front garden gate
The back room of Camille’s house – she was my best friend when I was six – and there’s usually a game of Mah Jong set up even though I have no idea how to play Mah Jong
The decks and hallways of a ship we travelled in from Stockholm to Riga and back again
The ferry wharves on both sides of Newcastle Harbour, except often I’m going somewhere scary and sometimes somewhere interesting, and never the five-minute journey directly back and forth that the ferries actually take
I guess this has something to do with my brain just having stored these places as some kind of default image associated with broad-ish concepts, like “meeting place” or “suburban house” or “departure point” or “traumatic environment” or whatever, and it just calls them up to fill in whichever blank spaces don’t require too much attention.
Tell me if you have default dream settings too! I want to hear about them!
Night-time Daytime Television
About a year ago my Tumblr dashboard started flinging some of these very excellent posts about Weird Little Girls into my face on the regular and can I just say, thank you Tumblr user homeworkforpigeons, we as a culture are overdue for a moment in which we collectively talk about this aspect of our childhoods!!
So my family moved cities when I was about ten, and I found the whole process of changing schools deeply bewildering. My new Anglican school taught a class called “Divinity”, which I had a very serious talk with the principal about because I thought he needed to be aware that I would be behind in this class, since I was an atheist and had abstained from the voluntary religious education classes at my old public school (he assured me that I’d be fine, nobody paid much attention in the class anyway, and he should know, since he taught it). There was also a more pronounced social division between boys and girls than at my old school, so I went from having a mixed group of friends to one that was Just Girls, basically until high school.
And we were, above all else, gloriously weird. I can’t help but feel that the added exposure to Religion really ramped up our pivot towards weirdness. One of the first friends I made was Edwina, who was more obsessed with offbeat movies than anyone I’d ever met (still true). Edwina used to host sleepovers with about six of us at her place in which we would overdose on sugar and horror stories and get scared when her Jack Russell terriers raced up the stairs. One of these nights, I took a nap still fairly early in the evening while everyone else was talking, and woke up with the edges of the dream I’d been having still fluttering around in my head.
“So weird,” I told the others. “It was about Jim and Alissa” (not their real names). This was immediately of great interest to everyone assembled. Edwina had had a crush on Jim all year, and Alissa was his girlfriend, which, we weren’t really sold on the whole idea of girlfriends or boyfriends at that point but we all agreed that this was a Suboptimal Arrangement given that there was a Crush involved, and like, you know? Never one to waste an audience, I turned to Edwina solemnly. “They were getting married.” Collective gasps. Outrageous, but also, of course, very plausible. We were ELEVEN, after all. You could probably end up married by entering into a relationship at this point, it was a real commitment. “But you disrupted the wedding, and fought with Alissa, and went rolling down a hill.”
This was met with uniform hilarity. We used the mattress-covered floor as a perfect opportunity to re-enact the hill rolling fight, at least eight or nine times, as well as the thwarted wedding, adding embellishments and flourishes. The pure enjoyment of the dream’s story carried over into the next day, when – entirely drunk on attention – I said over breakfast, “Oh yeah, I dreamed more of it later on.”
“Yeah? What happened?”
“Oh, there was… like, Edwina had a motorbike, and she rode it back up the hill to find Jim…” I tried to throw in some suitably bizarre details, to give the dream-ness some authenticity, “… and he started tap dancing…” Had I dreamed more of the story? Maybe, for half a second, but I was definitely, entirely lying by this point. “So they drove away together, and…”
I am absolutely sure that not one of them fully believed me. But equally, we all wanted the story to continue. At school the next week, each lunchtime would begin with the question: “Did you have The Dream again last night? What happened?” And I’d come up with a new instalment, trying to find some plot points to please my audience (this was around the point in time where “random” became the highest quality one could aspire to). It evolved into something like a very PG-rated soap opera, except with more Pokémon references. Occasionally someone else in the group would say “Oh, I had The Dream last night too!” and they’d move the story forwards, or we’d have diverging storylines that needed to be reconciled the next night.
In total, it couldn’t have lasted more than two weeks, but we all committed very seriously to the notion that a serialised and cohesive narrative was playing out in our dreams, full of intrigue and passion and betrayal. For a hot minute we began asking aloud whether we were in fact tapping into some prophetic vision, and began hypothesising about our untapped clairvoyant powers with increasing conviction. If any aspect of the “dream” – which, again, I must emphasise, was entirely fabricated – was suspected to have “come true”, it was a sign that our powers were growing.
This all lasted right up until Edwina’s crush on Jim dissolved, and the narrative kind of tapered off, and we all got much more interested in casting spells and started chanting weather-altering incantations on the school’s balcony and were VERY convinced we’d made it rain AT LEAST twice until my mother’s friend who was deeply into Wicca lore heard about it and gave me a stern lecture on interfering with natural forces.
Anyway I deeply miss our Weird Little Girl days, but according to this chart it looks like a renaissance is due, so.
Thanks for stopping by. If there are particular kinds of stories you’d like to read, why not drop me a line and let me know? I’m probably going to keep this newsletter on a pretty irregular schedule, but I plan on grouping each edition around a theme – we’ll see how it goes.
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This was a wonderful read, thank you! I'm always amazed by people who regularly remember their dreams!
I have had dreams in a lot of real-life places, but sadly, I don't think there were any repeat customers.
Also, I can fully relate to that time in your life were random was the highest quality of fiction one could aspire to. Been there, done that. Anyway, much love, looking forward to the next issue!
Caitlin! This was such a joy to read on an early sunday! I laughed out loud with the little tibid of your principal.
I seldom dream about places I know, but often have nightmares in entirely new/constructed environments. You have a whole list of places to visit in them! The brain is funny little thing.
Also, when brazil decides that we need a vaccine, can I join those thematic walks?
Im sad I lost the first newsletter, subscribing now! Looking forward to the next one.