an old entry in my journal / dreaming again
The weirdest thing I've noticed about quitting social media is that I am dreaming again. I've been having very vivid, almost lucid dreams since deleting my instagram.
Last night, I dreamt Pennycup was having another event that I drove down for. Everyone was there, and the roaster was business as usual, except the space kept fusing with Lea's denim shop. There was a weird power surge that happened during the event, at Pennycup, and then all Lea's sewing machines began going haywire. I was running around helping to turn them off, when we got to the overlocker, and it wouldn't turn off, it only went faster. Lea came over and said that happens all the time, you have to turn this disc at the bottom–, and she proceeded to turn this gigantic steel disc very slowly, and the machine gradually began to slow down.
Then we were back at Pennycup, and Bill goes oh it happens all the time and then walks away. I never knew what happened. It just seemed really busy, the place was packed, though I didn't recognize anyone there. The faces were all a blur, like a gaussian blur that was applied in post processing. All the voices were static, no language bled through.
This was a dream I had about an old workplace, a coffee roaster in Asheville, and my friend's denim shop, where she makes clothing. I love how bizarre dreams can get, while still maintaining some semblance of normalcy, like as weird as shit gets it still makes sense in your head as it's happening and as you recall it.
I used to be better at recalling my dreams, and spent many years keeping dream journals, lately, not so much. I'm not sure if that is why I thought I stopped dreaming while being so engrossed in social media, and doomscrolling, or if there is a real kernel of truth to my hypothesis.
I imagine that much of my lack of dreaming simply comes from falling out of practice with the art of recalling dreams (and it is an art). I do wonder though, about how viewing carefully curated content that may or may not be real all day on an instagram feed affects dreams, and our ability to recall dreams.
Before social media, and the instagram of today (vs pre-meta instagram/pre-ai instagram), I wrote more, I talked to strangers more, and I think just in general took more risks. Instagram became this place where everything was so curated that discovering anything at all was simply predictable, and that doesn't lend itself well to becoming dream-fodder.
I'm going to try and keep a dream journal again, and as I decipher my dreams, I'll share my thoughts here. I still don't remember every dream, but my recall is improving greatly.