Quarandreams Diary #1: The Peaches of Immortality
AKA “Persian Apples”:
In the past weeks, I’ve been reading about a surge in what have now been dubbed “quarandreams”, meaning dreams occurring during quarantine that have been particularly strange and more vivid than usual. There’s even been an entire twitter account dedicated to the phenomenon, @quarandreams, featuring some wonderfully strange dreams. For instance, one woman reports a dream she had where everything had to be “socially distancing”, not just humans. This meant that nothing, including inanimate objects, could touch and she therefore spent the whole dream anxiously trying to keep her steaks apart in the pan and her laundry two meters separate on the laundry line. Someone else had a dream that the world was plagued with the return of dinosaurs and that’s why we all had to stay home and the world took social distancing so far as to build houses in the sky and hold an annual CORONA pageant…
In the spirit of quarandreams, therefore, I thought I would share the dream I had last night about a magical peach orchard that existed in a perpetual golden hour. Though it’s not covid-related per se, it was an unusually striking dream:
I was running through a city with some dream friends (I don’t know these people in real life), when we happened to find ourselves in an enchanted golden peach orchard. I suddenly had dream deja vu, and dream me remembered that I had been to this peach orchard before and had spent many years trying to find it again but hadn’t been able to. I realised it was because this orchard was “Narnia-esque” in its properties, meaning that you could only enter it if the orchard decided to reveal itself to you, and then leave without ever knowing how to find it again or whether you would be able to return. Everything was painted in a golden hue, seemingly in a state of perpetual golden hour dusk. There was a river next to the orchard emanating a mist that also glowed golden in the light. I grabbed one of the peaches (also golden) and bit into it; it was the most succulent, delicious thing I had ever eaten. Dream me remembered her dream childhood and how she had tried these peaches once before in her youth. We then left the garden and found ourselves back in the city, but I looked down and saw I was still holding the bitten peach in my hand, and knew that the garden was real.
In “Strangeness”, Lyn Hejinian writes that the process of recalling a dream is similar to the process of writing:
The figuring that occurs in moving through the mobility of the dream, and the literal refiguring of figures in the dream, take place also in the course of writing. In this sense, the process of writing, like the process of dreaming, is a primary thinking process. Thinking explores, rather than records, prior knowledge or an expression of it.
I often find this to be true, that in inventing a written piece, as in recalling a dream, the processes of “refiguring” and exploring rather than “recording” or “telling” take precedence. They are a volatile terra incognita of shapeshifting symbols and reappropriated signs (my dreams have gone so far as to illumine me to the existence of words I had never heard of…), and I often approach reading a dream as I would a poem - as a terrain of unruly and flighty metonymies.
My peach dream sparked my curiosity (safe to say I’d never really given much thought to peaches before) and led me to discover various peach-related mythologies such as that of the Golden Peaches of immortality that take 3000 years to blossom, Ximangwu’s magical peach garden, home to youth and longevity, and the enchanted peach orchard of the jade pool, providing a feast for the gods every couple of millennia… :)
I am taken by exploring dreams for the same reason I am taken by literature; namely, they both lend themselves to the process of unearthing impossibly contained symbols. I am glad to say that literature tends to make more sense than dreams (though not always!), but am even more glad to have both in rich supply to keep me entertained during quarantine!
What are your quarandreams? List them in the comments below!
Thought of the Day
I often find that in writing, as in dreaming, the processes of “refiguring” and exploring take precedence. They are a volatile terra incognita of shapeshifting symbols and reappropriated signs, and I often approach reading a dream as I would a poem - as a terrain of unruly and flighty metonymies.
-Gabriela Milkova
Stay inspired.
