Dream tweets

In a recent moment of boredom I decided to collate my dream tweets, which stretch back to 2011. I’ve sometimes used Twitter as a kind of dream diary. The form means that it’s more like the kind of diary in which you write dental appointments than the kind in which you record your innermost feelings. The compressed form of the tweet reduces manifest content to something far smaller than an iceberg tip. More like an ice cube on top of the tip. Almost everything is excluded. The bulk of the manifest is pushed down to join the latent. If Twitter dies then I doubt I’ll continue to record my dreams, at least not in such a compressed form.

I suppose these dream tweets are self-consciously aestheticised but perhaps that’s true of all written dreams. It’s probably true of diaries too. I recently found a diary I kept when I was 23 and was struck that even when I was writing just for myself I described everything with a kind of cold detachment, as if I were applying nail polish to my own life. It was the innermost feelings kind of diary but I wrote about mine not quite like dental appointments but more like scenes from a movie in which even drab dentists’ waiting rooms look strangely chic. Synthetic flowers and lipstick and glass. Almost everything was excluded. I wasn’t trying to work anything out or through. I just wanted to pluck some sparkly little details out of the gravelly mess. Perhaps these dream fragments arise from a similar impulse. They record details without the vulnerability of revelation.

It was strange going back through dream-time not only because it involved re-encountering personal preoccupations from the past but because some of the political or cultural figures who showed up already seem to belong to history. Like the Twitter timeline - though unlike the temporality of dreams – these dreams are ordered in reverse chronological order.

Of course, other people’s dreams are boring so I cut a lot but Walter Benjamin said somewhere that ‘boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience’ so I didn’t cut them all.

had a dream someone I knew was writing a theory book called The Orcan Imaginary on a series of long train journeys - the book was not about literal or metaphorical whales and they were extremely scathing when I assumed it was

had a dream I was sent to interview Elizabeth Holmes and I turned up in the Steve Jobs style black polo neck but we just ended up eating Maltesers and I didn't really ask her anything

had a really wild dream where I worked in a very creaky US embassy somewhere in Eastern Europe and started simulating Havana Syndrome but eventually got real symptoms and I didn't know if I was a spy or not

had a dream I went to an unfamiliar British city full of branches of a pay day loan company called 'LEVELLERS' and started talking frantically at someone in the queue in a Pret about 17th century history but I couldn't remember any of the details

had a dream I got denounced for selling large quantities of vitamin d tablets to union leaders that I'd bought from boots and repackaged

last night I had a dream I was editing a word document and that was it

had a dream I went to visit my parents and my mum had stuck newspaper articles about Zoe Ball and Fatboy Slim all around the living room

I had a dream that ended with someone shouting 'being an only child is not a class position!' at me

just remembered I had a dream I was giving a lecture on 'the history of skinny jeans' and felt a shudder of embarrassment

I had a dream I lived in a big flat with my two childhood cats and it was all fine but then someone visited and was like 'wait, aren't these the oldest cats in the world? like, impossibly old?' and I was very defensive about it

had a dream I went to London and got off at Euston and walked down Tottenham Court Road and everyone was wearing 'EGG STARMER' t-shirts

had a dream I found out someone I went to primary school with was the founder of airbnb and I felt compelled to tweet about a time I went to her house to watch The Karen Carpenter Story

just remembered I had a dream last night that I announced on social media that I'd signed a contract to write a book called 'Tankies I have known' but I was panicking because I didn't know if the book would be parodic or sincere

in my dream I was reading Adele's Wikipedia page and there was a really strange section on it analysing the repeal of the corn laws that I kept trying to show people on my phone

I spent the entire dream picking grated carrot out of choux pastry dough feeling angry at a man for commissioning me to make profiteroles so he could write about them

in my dream I had guests who kept demanding milk but all the milk was in baby bottles which they didn’t approve of and all the fridge drawers were full of dildos ‘they’re not mine’ I assured the guests who remained reproachful

I had a dream I was in a log cabin having an intense discussion with a friend about the capacity to love but at some point the friend turned into Tom Cruise in belted jeans and he stopped listening and went off to chop some wood

in my dream I was hanging out with a friend and I glanced over and could see that every email in her inbox had the subject line 'Marcuse' and I noticed her replying to them all with nothing but long lines of kisses 'xxxxxxxxx'

just had a dream I was dating a banker who lived in a tiny cottage overlooking Canary Wharf full of exercise balls who dumped me because after two years together I couldn't remember that his name was Graeme and not Graham

I just had a dream I saw some old crush on tinder and their profile was an unmade bed full of colourful striped pants mingled with Dziga Vertov Group era Godard films on VHS and then a photo of them in desert boots on wet grass by some kind of potting shed

I had a dream I was hanging out with Rosie and Jim on the canal near Victoria Park but it wasn’t remotely twee – we were having a serious discussion about Article 50 and drinking white wine out of non-twee jam jars

half-remembered dream image has been following me around all day like something you can see out of the corner of your eye but when you turn around to look at it there's nothing there

in my dream I was hanging out in the Bay Area with a teenage Francis Fukuyama who had long hair and a Crass T-shirt and was smoking cigarettes and complaining about there being a Haight-Ashbury Starbucks

in my dream I bumped into an academic I admire in a cafe. To my surprise I could see she was reading something I’d written. She hastily tried to push the papers under a newspaper but I could see she’d scrawled ‘TOO SUBJECTIVE TOO SUBJECTIVE’ over every page in big red letters.

all week I’ve had terrifying dreams full of blood and anxiety and unrequited love but last night I dreamt I had a doting pet hedgehog called egg and everything was fine

I had a dream I wrote a long meandering essay about silver which began with a really long paragraph describing wandering through a room of diaphanous fabrics

at one point in my dream I stopped suddenly and wrote a new year’s resolution in very small letters on a very big piece of paper: ‘BE LESS BRITTLE’

dream in which I was expected to deliver a lecture on Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism to a room of Arendt experts who had mistaken me for an expert because I’m also called Hannah

in my dream we went to the cemetery but all the gravestones and sepulchres were made out of sugar and were wearing away in the rain

In my dream someone invited me to a reading group and I thought 'this is definitely a date' but no it was just a reading group.

just remembered I had a dream about an old stage door keeper I used to work with in the West End who told endless salacious possibly apocryphal stories about renowned thespians, smoked clove cigarettes and wore giant jewel-encrusted rings

someone I used to dream about an embarrassing amount but who eventually went away just returned to my dreams after a long absence like some implausibly resurrected character in a soap opera

I had a dream I was in Lyon working to help get a cable car built - it involved a lot of fancy hotel buffet breakfasts and a significant subplot about local council corruption

had a dream I was asked to be the lead singer for a band called Hurt People supporting Killing Joke on tour but we hadn't rehearsed and the only lyrics I could think of were numbers

in my dream I was given a frog in a snow globe and told to keep him with me in my bag but when noone was watching I let him run away

had a very romantic dream that just involved wandering around a big Tesco with someone trying to find crumpets

I had a dream I was trying to buy the pill on the dark web because I couldn’t find a sexual health clinic and then sang Backstreet Boys at karaoke but felt disappointed in my performance

I had a very stressful dream that involved gossiping uproariously about Lauren Berlant and then feeling bad for being indiscreet

in my dream I went on a date to a burger bar, sat on stools & I tried to claim Prairie Home Companion is Robert Altman's greatest film.

I just had a dream about trying to find a roll of duct tape. nothing else happened. I looked for some duct tape and then found some near a radiator.

in my dream a confusion arose between two women named Vivian and Veridian who both left their umbrellas in a restaurant - one large umbrella, one small but they both claimed the large one

lol in the shower I remembered a bit of dream in which my mum reprimanded me for buying a new moisturizer before my old one had run out and I was so so sorry

thankfully my phase of extremely chaste hand-holdy romance dreams seems to be over

periodically remember the distressing dream I had years ago in which China Miéville's upper arms were screaming babies‘ heads

complex and emotional dream running through rubble with viktor tsoi it was unclear if it was the end of the world

had a sex dream about cassandra from wayne's world set a concrete maze where we were hiding from bees

in the same dream i was trying to send a text message but kept spelling rupture as rapture and couldn't figure out how to type an @ sign

had a dream about 'cervical unrest'

vivid dreams on the megabus

Watched Harlan County USA and then had a dream I was making a documentary about workers in Magnitogorsk in the 1930s. It was muddy.

in my dream I had a cat called sad keanu but all my friends refused to call it that

valium, schubert and dreams about leaves. 7am. raining at the 'u r blessed car center'.

my dreams populated by empty packets of salt and vinegar crisps being trampled on in a mud puddle by someone I went to primary school with

in my dream we got stuck in a bog. someone kept shouting 'the comrades are in abeyance' while I secretly worried about ruining my shoes.

I had a dream involving the man in my home town who wore dark glasses and cuban heels and looked like a miniature Christian Slater

in my dream the boulder-strewn beaches transformed into the marble metro tunnels of prague

had a weird dream that involved getting a whatsapp message full of little mushroom cloud emojis

in my dream you were eating strawberries, wearing yellow knee socks & talking about baseball scores & primitive accumulation