When I woke up without an alarm at five o’clock, I decided to stay in bed. The day before, I woke up at 4:30, and by 5:00 I had decided to get out of bed, go downstairs, and wash some dishes rather than stay lying in bed, excessively ruminating on work stress and the state of the world. This time, I just put in my earbuds, tuned in to a low-stress, conversational podcast, and closed my eyes again, figuring that at least, even if I didn’t sleep, I’d be able to stay horizontal while being distracted from the noise of my own mind.
I need to learn to not do this. It’s okay if the podcast in question is a fictional story, but the ones where people are engaging in banter always confuse my dream consciousness just enough to make her think that she can participate in the conversation. The substance of the podcast doesn’t matter to this dream pattern. I’m never listening to anything serious when I use a conversational podcast to go to sleep; the goal is to reduce the stress preventing me from sleeping, not fuel it with the aural equivalent of doom scrolling. I listen to analysis of fictional narratives, podcast extras for stuff I subscribe to, cooking podcasts—basically anything unrelated to the news that I can access without ads.
But the gentleness of the banter doesn’t matter, somehow. The point is that the people in the podcast are delivering a steady stream of immovably real speech, and my dream brain can’t force them to converse with me.
My dream avatar—she’s generally me, ambiguously aged as dream personas often are, but most often what feels like my late teens or early twenties—is out there swimming through the dream waves, trying to track the conversation. She’s following people around, trying to get a word in edgewise, and failing over and over again. The podcast hosts will continue talking. To my dream self, their personas sometimes shift. They don’t remain in any stable identity as their real-life, podcasting counterparts. The landscape around us is all over the place: there are generally school buildings, rehearsal halls (in exhausting subconscious homage to my real-life past as a classical flutist), hiking trails, stretches of Main Street in my childhood home town.
In this particular instance, dream me was trailing behind some real-life friends on an uphill hike. None of them would acknowledge me, because they were conversing insistently, relentlessly, and none of my attempts to contribute or offer insight were met with even the slightest recognition. I felt utterly abandoned, intellectually disregarded, behind, betrayed. The scenery changed; now we were in lounges in various college campus buildings, a library, a student center, simultaneously like and unlike the ones at my real-life alma mater. The other students (somehow I know I was a student this time, not a teacher) were speaking animatedly, ignoring me. Eventually I started wandering around campus, trying to remember if I had a dorm room to escape to, their unconcerned voices still reverberating in my dream, my real-life earbuds still affixed to my ears.
At one point, I found myself in a kitchen, with my mom. She, unlike the other people in my dream, was not adhering to the external script of unstoppable speech that aggressively excluded me. I was trying to explain my situation, trying to make her understand why I felt so hurt by what was happening. She responded, “But I don’t understand! All these people you’re telling me about, they all think highly of you! They all think you’re great!” And dream me broke down, crying, “No they don’t! I could scream at the top of my lungs, and none of them would hear me!”
And then I woke up. And the podcast was still playing, and I realized what had happened, again, but with less subtlety than ever.
There should be metaphysical laws against having dreams like this after a certain age.
I didn’t know how to deal with teasing when I was a kid. It’s probably because I didn’t have siblings, and was raised by earnest people. My peers would besiege me with taunting, and I simply had no ability to let it roll off, or to return in kind, with any humor whatsoever. It crossed the line into bullying sometimes, but not all of it was bullying. Some of it was just kids with siblings encountering the social bafflement of an introverted only child who spent about half of her waking life with her nose in a book.
When I responded to teasing, I responded with rage, because anger has forever been my default setting. (Does it help to know that I’m a Taurus, rising sign Scorpio with a Sagittarius moon? It doesn’t help me, but I’m sure someone could make something of it.) I was an extremely small, slight child, always with huge dark circles under my eyes. I used to look at my childhood pictures with frustration and judgment for my scowly, defensive, owlish little self, but now, I can look back at her with genuine love. She was kind of lonely and weird. She was protective of herself, even as she perpetually longed to be heard. I was in high school before my teachers stopped telling my parents in every parent-teacher conferences that I was shy, that I needed to talk more.
I do talk, I always wanted to say. It’s just that I’m so small that no one thinks I talk, so no one hears me. I genuinely don’t know how closely that perception aligned with reality, but I vividly remember the feeling of being labeled as “shy” by people too disinterested in me to notice when I was trying to say something.
In my dreams, I’m still hacking my way through the brambles of frustration and self-disdain that grew inside of me as a result of that feeling, trying to find my way back to the self-compassion that makes so much more sense in my waking hours.
My junior year of college, I was an exchange student in France, studying flute at a regional conservatory. I went via a very small organization; there were only six Americans placed in that city through this program, and I chose it for the sake of the near-total French immersion. I didn’t want to go abroad just to live in a dorm full of native English speakers. Every night, in the apartment owned by my fairly horrible French host family, I collapsed into bed in total fatigue and slept hard, devoid of insomnia for the first time in my life due to the daily exhaustion of navigating a foreign city in a foreign language. Some of my fellow exchange students spoke with pride about dreaming in French. I don’t remember dreaming at all. I wasn’t used to sleeping so deeply.
One evening, the director of my exchange program, an obnoxious expatriate American who only spoke to us in French, gave the six of us what felt like a glorious treat—an invitation to his apartment to have a full, multi-course French meal with permission to speak English the whole time. We were giddy. If you navigate regular life in a language that isn’t native to you, you probably have some idea what I’m talking about. I spoke French well enough to go to school, take public transportation, buy groceries, converse at the dinner table, make exceedingly shallow friendships, and generally get by. What I couldn’t do was speak French well enough to feel like myself, or have anything resembling a sense of humor.
I was relishing an evening of hanging out with people who felt like lifelines, even if I didn’t have much in common with any of them. We were all so eager to talk, to bask in the feeling of being heard and understood. We probably sounded like a posse of baby goats in a weed patch.
If I say I was the lone Midwesterner in a group of people from the Northeast, does that invoke anything for you in terms of conversational norms? I could not get a word in edgewise. At some point it became a joke: no one let Stephanie finish a sentence! They weren’t trying to be mean. They just weren’t used to people like me.
If this happened now, I could recalibrate to the social vibe around me, assuming I wanted to. I still don’t love being part of conversations where I’m forced to interrupt in order to contribute, but I will if I must. I can also decide to be inconspicuously quiet until escape is possible, and usually, that’s fine. Getting older is the best thing in the world, for those of us lucky enough to experience it.
But I don’t remember how I responded that evening. I just remember feeling devastated in a way that felt like childhood.
Several of my friends survived such intensive trauma as children that their dissociative skills evolved into conditions and abilities that clinicians label as disorders. They navigate the world as multiple selves sharing one body, and some of those selves are children.
I’ve learned from them that being an inside child sharing a grownup body with a grownup consciousness can be really hard and lonely. I have distinct relationships with some of my friends’ inside kids (the boundaries and containers of those relationships are things I work out with my friends as adults, in a quasi-parental fashion). Sometimes we do a Zoom call, sometimes we text.
My friends’ inside kiddos are hilarious, and wildly, extravagantly creative. I try not to ever make the assumption that I’m talking to a younger version of my adult friend, because that isn’t really fair to the experience that they’re having right now, sharing corporeal real estate with other people, without the embodied experience of being a kid in the outside world.
Nonetheless, hanging out with an inside kid can feel a bit like time travel. Our conversations exist in a plane of perpetual temporal negotiation—the things that happened to them are simultaneously long over and still happening, and I’m always trying to catch up to where they are right now. It’s never far from my mind that extreme adult violence against children is part of their ongoing lived reality, that my adult friends whose bodies they inhabit did, in fact, experience that violence at fixed points in time and space, many years ago.
The inside kids talk to me because I listen. I don’t freak out when they show up. We just talk, and often, it’s like talking to any other kid. I wish more people understood that we can do this, that many people who live with dissociative conditions are managing the reality that their inside people are lonely, and might want the normalcy of regular conversation with people on the outside.
It doesn’t take a clinical degree or any other rarified knowledge base to converse with an inside person. Here’s what my friends with dissociative conditions have taught me: Build trust, and be trustworthy. Be patient; let your adult friends’ inside kids be kids. Be interested in their reality. Don’t try to fix hard things, but do be reassuring if you’re talking to someone who needs to hear an adult be reassuring. Be kind and treat all the people, inside and outside, with basic human dignity. That’s it, really.
I had the privilege of growing up in a safe, loving home, with healthy attachments. Nothing happened to me that forced me to fracture myself in order to survive. But I learned from people who didn’t have that privilege to value compassion towards my child self, something that has never come easily to me.
These days, it feels like an insult to children in general to think of the child I once was with anything but kindness. And that’s never clearer to me than when I’m listening to an inside kid speaking, while looking into the adult face of a friend.