Angsttraum

 One of the classic dream-types is the anxiety dream (I have no idea if Angsttraum is something they talk about in psychoanalysis, but it should be)—often intruding during that half hour or so of fitful light sleep that one catches after waking up slightly earlier than one's first scheduled obligation of the day, and drifting off again while knowing that an alarm is about to summon you to renewed effort and that there is not time left to fall back into a really deep sleep. 

For years, the most common setting for my anxiety dreams was the temporary stage that would be set up each year in my high school gymnasium for the all-school musical. No matter how old I got—how much chronological and physical distance I placed between myself and my teenage years—in a moment of high-anxiety snoozing I am always transported back to that gym; it's the night before the play; and I realize that I have procrastinated for too long the one key task of actually learning my lines. 

Last night, however, something odd happened. I had an anxiety dream, but it didn't take place on stage. Rather, and for the first time, it unfolded in my digital life. More specifically: on Twitter. 

At first this seemed surprising; but I suppose it makes perfect sense. Most anxiety dreams relate to performing in front of an audience that expects you to meet a certain standard. The fear is that one is bound to fall short, the audience will turn on you, and you will lose your community as a result. Maintaining a social media presence is, in effect, a performance of just this sort; and it is fraught with the same kind of perils, even (or perhaps especially) if one never actually sees anyone's faces. 

In my dream I had posted something well-intentioned but ultimately offensive to the sensibilities of my readers. I forget what the dream-tweet said. It's more than possible whatever the good-natured intention behind it was, or the particular way in which the comment failed to land and ended up being objectionable, both obeyed a dream logic that would be impossible to translate into our waking-life terms, even if I remembered what it conveyed. 

But I knew even after posting that it was just edgy enough to risk trouble. Yet I thought: "people will see the sense in which I mean this; they will appreciate the satire [or whatever it was] I was going for." And I let the tweet sit out there for a whole day (which in dream time must have been a few seconds—since all this occurred in my head between approximately 8:00 and 8:30 this morning); then, when there had been no obvious response to it, I began to get cold feet. 

I logged onto dream-Twitter to once again check my notifications. Still not a single like on my post. This could mean one of two things: either few people had seen it; it had vanished from the timelines as quickly as it appeared, and I could therefore safely delete it now and it would be like it had never occurred; or, it could mean that everyone had seen it, and they had all known by the collective instinct of the righteous that it was awful and unforgivable and should never be liked or promoted. 

But on the other hand, I reasoned, if the tweet was so terrible, surely not everyone would have just silently ignored it in disgust and shame. The usual way to tell if a tweet has gone over poorly is to see if anyone is arguing with it or condemning it. Since there had been no such responses visible in my notifications—not a comment or quote-tweet to be found—this seemed to bode well. 

But of course, this is not the only way to tell whether one has alienated one's readers. There is another method and I turned to it next: "let's see if I lost any followers." 

That's when the nightmare began. 

I checked my profile. The number of followers had catastrophically plummeted: as I recall, it was now about a fifth of what it had been before. So it was true! My fears were confirmed! Whatever I had said was so offensive that the people were turning away from me in droves. But surely not all of them, right? Not the most loyal, the longest-standing followers, the ones who most reliably re-shared my content. I looked them up one by one. Every profile I checked showed that the person was no longer following me. 

Had they all seen the original Tweet on their timelines and been so completely alienated that they didn't even want to argue with me or let me know; they just unanimously and silently agreed that the penalty of such a tweet was instant shunning? That such a tweet was so dreadful it shouldn't even be dunked on and ratio-ed via quote tweet, lest it reach more eyes, but must rather be consigned to oblivion via a united effort to ignore its (and now mine, as its author's) existence. 

Or, even worse, had it been immediately perceived to be offensive in such a flagrant way that people feared I would delete it, and yet also in such a salient and instructive and emblematic way that people felt it should be preserved for posterity as a warning to others, that people had screen-capped it and were now sharing it with one another as an image, such that it would not show up in my re-tweets and I would not even know if this scornful conversation were taking place unless I searched for it... 

I therefore dug into Twitter's woefully-imperfect internal search engine, hunting for anything that might indicate a conversation happening about my tweet. My eyes started to twitch open from their dreaming state. No,  I thought, don't wake up, this is important; I have to know. Consciousness slowly came back to me. Oh, that part about losing followers was a dream; I thought, in my state of half-wakefulness. I still don't know whether people hate me because of that tweet; I need to go back and check Twitter and see whether anyone has liked it or retweeted it yet.

Then I thought: Wait a minute... dare I hope... could it be possible... that there was never an offensive tweet in the first place?... that the tweet had been part of the dream as well? 

Yes! I gradually realized. Yes, it's true! There was no tweet! None of it happened!

"Oh, life!, Oh, sun!" I thought—summoning Siegfried Sassoon's ejaculation to Robert Graves, upon returning to dear old England from the horrors of trench warfare in France. I thought of the passage in Dostoevsky's The Idiot, about a man facing execution by firing squad who, after being marched out to face his doom, is given an unexpected reprieve. Contemplating the lifetime suddenly handed back to him: "what infinity!" he cries (Volkhonsky/Pevear trans.)

I was instantly a man reformed. I was Scrooge waking up on Christmas morning. "It is still Christmas Day! I haven't missed it." I checked my Twitter profile. Lo and behold: the same number of followers as before. There had been no tweet, no offense, no collective shunning, no terrible swift punishment. "Bless you spirits; bless you! I will learn the lessons of the past, the present, and the future," I cried; "on my knees I swear it, Jacob Marley; on my knees!"

It would help, though, if I could remember what the offending dream-tweet had been in the first place. Since I've forgotten it, how will I know to avoid writing it in future?