On being dreamed about

One of the presents I most love to be given is an account of a dream I am in, as if my own life were that dream that I think most people as well as me sometimes have in which you climb some stairs in your house and discover a whole additional room, or a whole series of rooms, a vast additional space you didn’t know was there.  In the same way, to be dreamed about by someone else gives your own life a room you didn’t know it had, a whole new resonant space you are being you in, without even knowing it.  This could be a new kind of biography, a biography of the dreams people have had about someone, which might tell you as much as anything else they would say about them, as much as their waking judgements of the person’s character or their memory of how the person behaved at a party once.  It would be more true, in a way, being unfiltered through conscious thought, which is always a narrativising and a rationalising, an interpretation which says as much about the person talking as the person talked about.  I haven’t always found the consideration of my non-existence before I was born very reassuring as a way of reconciling myself to my non-existence after my death, given that as far as time goes I am only travelling in one direction, but I sometimes find I can be reassured by my non-existence elsewhere in the world, in the lives I am not living in other countries, where I am not seeing the milk that spilt on the tiles or feeling that gust of wind blow by, or listening to what someone would have been leaning over, intently, to say to me, if I existed in their life.  If you say to that, yes but you are still somewhere, I say yes, and I am equally some when.  But now, if I allow for other people’s dreams about me, suddenly I have a whole other way of thinking about no longer having a consciousness, the way I have no consciousness of the self I am living in dreams, my symbolic, resonant self that is probably most often forgotten about before the dreamer even wakes up, but when remembered, is remembered with that strange sort of glow of significance dreams can cast. ​