Are We Awake Enough To Dream?
Self-destruction, TE Lawrence, Mbuti, dreams, and hard times.
Thinker. SEAL. Dispatches on meaning and hardship. Also figs and dogs.
Welcome to What then? These essays are not dogma no matter how strongly worded. They are essays in the ancient sense of the word, meaning an “attempt”.
Those looking for artificially neat answers will not find value here. Rather this is a forward operating base for those who savor the hunt for the ideas, paradoxes, and postures that lead to vibrant aliveness and deeper understanding of the human situation in our rapidly changing modern world.
Let’s get to it…
A TE Lawrence quote has had an immense influence on my life since I first read it as a kid. “All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act out their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.”
Some may see Dreamers of the Day as dangerous because their dreams can be dangerous to others. This has certainly been true—but it is only part of the story. My experience is the Dreamers of the Day are dangerous not because they pose harm to others, but because they expose themselves to the pains and failures of life. They do so out of immense passion for life itself. Strangely enough, it is the Dreamers of the Night who are actually more dangerous. Not only to themselves, but to others.
The Dreamers of the Night see images of happiness, striving victoriously against impossible odds, and glorious futures of fame and wealth. They see these dreams while staring into glowing screens in the evening or lying half-awake in bed. But the images die on the vine in the sunrise… and then the residue of the dream hooks in the brain like an unpleasant reminder of what life might have been. What takes its place? Maybe a creeping sense of depression in which every effort seems futile. Maybe a defeatism in which there is no point in even trying since the game is rigged. Maybe a desperate search for a guru, strong man, or some toxic tribe to tell us how to live, to remove the terrible burden of choice and free will from our shoulders. And what follows if not a slow atrophy of the self, or a violent outburst against others? The murder of one’s own future, or the murder of civilization’s future?
Two axioms of our modern world are undeniable: It is easier to deny ourselves than it is to realize ourselves. From another angle, it is easier to burn civilization to ashes than to quietly own our own individual existence.
So much for the Dreamers of the Night.
What then is it to be a Dreamer of the Day? What is it to own our existence?
The Mbuti pre-state peoples live in the Ituri Forest of the Congo. They bathe in silty brown rivers, silently stalk in soft soil of red ochre, and whittle wooden spears to hunt wild pigs and fight off wild humans. Trees soar seventeen stories like the pillars of cathedrals. Atop these pillars sits a canopy of leaves so thick only a few golden rays of sun penetrate the blackness of the forest floor. At night, the rainforest is blacker than the black singularity of a black hole.
The Mbuti believe “There is darkness all around us; but if darkness is, and the darkness is of the forest, then the darkness must be good.”1 The important fact is this is no mere academic logic—it is savage logic. It has become a highly profitable industry to write about evolutionary psychology or how to be primal once again. But even if we choose to restrict calories, sit in lotus position in a cold plunge, or moralize endlessly about changing norms, this will never hold a candle to the reality of the ancestral world. It completely misses the point. It ignores what motivated every human endeavor until the modern world buried the ancient under asphalt: a threat. An enemy. And the threats, as we learn from the Mbuti perspective, need not be viewed as originating in hell, a punishment by a creator, a consequence of a malicious universe, bad luck, an oppressor, or anything else.
Actually, threats can be seen as good.
The human situation is unique in that the darkness does not actually exist in the forest—it exists within us. It is the unworded feeling of “Oh-my-God-what-am-I-doing-here? Why do people act the way they do? Why do I act the way I do? What is the point of my life and why was I put on this earth?” So speak the Dreamers of the Night, and we are all Dreamers of the Night by nature. The self-inflicted coup de grâce, however, is not when we ask these questions, but when we stop there. Drowning the voices of the skull in doom scrolls, blaring music, television shows, seething political news, not daring to slow down long enough to soak in the silence—this is to terminate the mind before the real work, the ancient human work begins.
The Dreamers of the Day, on the other hand, sit quietly with these questions. They look at them for what they are. They want to feel them as intensely as humanly possible, and then—they reveal the good in the darkness. They stoke it, ruck it, sprint it, lift it, grow it, write it, read it, riff it, talk it, or scream it with that satisfyingly savage scream we feel we must do when we stand in wide open valleys under immense black storm clouds and we feel utterly alive.
The significant point is Dreamers of the Night expect meaning to magically appear outside of themselves like an Amazon delivery, whereas Dreamers of the Day reveal the meaning in their interaction with the world. They engage with each ink covered page, crescent moon, striking thought, fellow featherless biped, and faithful furry quadruped as if each moment were their last—or their first.
This is not to say the dreams of night are useless. Far from it. It is striking how useful the dreams of our sleep can be for the dreams of our day. This was an axiom of my life in the military while preparing for a training event or an actual mission. I was hit by an excellent example last week.
In a dream I was climbing a white-snowed mountain interspersed with boulders beneath black clouds and the echoing roars of thunder. For a reason I do not know, I had to climb down the mountain and leave the group I was with near the pinnacle crowned with a ring of lightning bolts. Halfway down, I turned and saw an avalanche. In dream-like fashion, it was biblical in size and power. I ran to my right where I saw a rectangular cutting in a cliff face. I ran to its innermost corner, squatted down, pulled my hood over my head to create a pocket of air for my inevitable burial, and waited. The shockwave of the avalanche shattered the space of my sanctuary before the snow and stone even arrived. The concussion shook my entire body and knocked the wind out of my lungs. And then the snow whipped and piled into my cutting.
I remember thinking, while still dreaming and being buried alive, how quickly and calmly we often rise to the occasion in matters of life-and-death. Things become simple: panic and die, or remain calm and maybe live. It is as if the ancient programming of five million years of hardship is operative whether we are hunter-gatherers a millennia ago or hammering smart phones with our thumbs in the present day.
I wrote the dream down and forgot about it. That same morning I did a training session with four hundred meter sprints and cleans. By the fifth interval and nearing my maximum heart rate, it hit me how wretched it was. At that moment my mind suddenly entered the reality I had just endured in my dream. The clouds had cleared within my skull even as I tried to see through the tunnel my vision had been reduced to.
Our dreams at night prime us for the worst that can happen during our day, whether an avalanche or a mere training session—they are a form of training for the calamities of our future. Our dreams are an ancient alarm clock, a gift from millions of years of waking and sleeping dreams slowly merging into a single flowing whole amid extraordinary hardship. Our dreams, in the modern world, are reduced to a language we have forgotten to speak. But once we begin to tap them, they allow us to see the storm clouds from the mountaintop and spread our arms to them with wide open eyes—and then choose how we will meet that storm.
The dreams of our night can walk us to the absolute edge of existence with none of the danger of reality. But it is only the dreams of our day that can take the lessons seriously and do fucking something with them.
My sense is there are two types of problems humans have faced in all our history. Those that are faced for the first time, such as surviving an ice age or landing a space ship on the moon. And those faced again and again, day after day: the mundane everyday tasks, which over time can come to feel like a pervasive sense of apathy, or like an inevitable slide into meaninglessness. The delta between how the first are met with bright-eyed excellence and the latter are unthinkingly endured is remarkable.
It would be too simplistic to finish this essay by saying the Dreamers of the Day tackle the momentous events and the Dreamers of the Night wallow in the everyday. The crucial point is the Dreamers of the Day both tackle the momentous tasks and reveal the momentous in the everyday tasks.
There is something momentous in a hazel iris striated with azure, the black-soiled taste of raw Filipino cacao, stopping for five minutes to wrestle a mutt, sprint a hill, or savor a single good sentence pulled from a bit of reading. There is something extraordinary in leaving footmarks on the moon, or in watching the yellow lights of fireflies flit in front of the ancient white lights of the stars trillions of miles away.
These too are Dreams of the Day.
A potentially useless, but poetic thought: volcanoes can produce lightning around their rims when they erupt. This is not a bad analogy for those who are awake enough to dream.
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Εἰς μελέτην
For meditation
Turnbull, Colin M. The Forest People. Simon and Schuster, 1968
I like the distinction you're making here because it isn't simply about dreaming; it's about whether we're willing to let our dreams become obligations. It's easy to imagine another life; it's much harder to let that imagination reshape the one we're actually living. The Mbuti perspective adds something important too. Modern culture spends enormous energy trying to eliminate discomfort, while your essay suggests darkness can be the very place where meaning is forged rather than avoided. That feels like a far more demanding, and ultimately more hopeful, way of looking at hardship.
Really enjoyed this one.
Felt pretty crappy for the past two days but I realized it's cause I flew for a long distance and lied in bed doing fuck-all to recover. Time to get moving again, and your words are the right push, Sam!