Zohran Mamdani came over to my place the other night. Technically, we met down in my neighbor Jeff’s apartment — that’s where the mayor informed me there was a vacant New York congressional seat, and he was looking for someone to fill it. (Governor Kathy Hochul would do the appointment, he said, but he was the one vetting candidates.) Was I interested? I was. He flashed his signature smile. We shook hands. I was going to become a congressman! I took him upstairs to my apartment, where I introduced him to my family, including my parents and my sister, who just happened to be visiting. Everyone was thrilled.

Then I woke up.

So, let me apologize. I know how annoying it is to hear about other people’s dreams. They’re usually boring, opaque, overlong, poorly plotted, meaningful only to the dreamers themselves. When someone tells me about the crazy dream they had last night, I nod politely and murmur vague words of agreement. (Unless, of course, it’s my wife or children telling me their dreams, in which case I am RAPT.) I’m not annoyed by dreams, exactly, so much as skeptical: Dreams are so strange, so vividly illogical, that they can be interpreted almost any way the dreamer likes.

The psychoanalytical among you — and I know there are several reading this — will argue. Dreams, you’ll say, reveal surprising truths about the unconscious mind, insights we can’t readily access in our waking lives. By making the effort to interpret our dreams, we are investigating the mysterious mechanisms of our souls.

Okay, sure? I guess? For me, the problem is interpretation — it can go in any direction. What do we make of Zohran Mamdani? Does he have meaning specific to me, or is he a stand-in, a symbol of something else? What do we make of this job offer? Does this signify some desire for change — career or otherwise — on my part? What does it mean that I would be up for a very public, political role? What about the obvious error in the dream — that in New York, open congressional seats are filled not by appointment but by special election? Did my brain insert that mistake intentionally or by accident? Why am I in my neighbor’s apartment? Why are my mother and my sister in the dream?

There are a dozen possible answers to each of these questions, each as valid as the next. If I were seeing a psychoanalyst or any kind of therapist, I suppose we could narrow the interpretations down to those most meaningful to me, and I could derive some psychological psatisfaction from that. But that feels totally arbitrary, a blur of cherry-picking and confirmation bias.

But this one, I felt, was compact enough — and zeitgeist-y enough — to be worth relating.

Dreams do not belong in fiction, either novels or movies. Too often they’re used to telegraph the emotional state of a character when the writer or director is unable to do so through more elegant strategies. Can’t figure out how to show fear and anxiety through, like, plot? Give the character a scary, anxious dream!

I get it. We have dreams, and they often seem to pinpoint our fears and anxieties. But the reality of this doesn’t make for good storytelling. Fictional dreams are too easy. They cast off all the rules of world-building the book or movie or TV show has established in order to depict calamitous or surreal moments, then shrug them off. It was just a dream! A meaningful dream! In which there’s a nearly one-to-one correspondence between the dream’s expression of anxiety and the actual anxiety of the character’s waking life. This is pure laziness.

Lazier still is when dreams reveal important plot points. This is just unacceptable, especially when a character has to struggle to remember or make sense of those “clues,” or has to look forward to the next REM cycle for further “insight.” How desperate does a writer have to be to resort to this orpheus ex machina?

Of course, lots of great movies, TV shows, and novels have dream sequences. The Sopranos was full of them, with Tony encountering the late Big Pussy or mounting Dr. Melfi in dreamland. And while they served their purpose in establishing the series’ tone, and its psychoanalytical obsessions, these scenes could’ve been cut entirely. It’s true: You never would’ve missed them.

The only auteur I’ll give a pass to here is David Lynch, because he alone understood that dreams don’t cohere. They drag on longer than anyone likes, they introduce plot points that go nowhere, they do everything in their power to resist interpretation. It’s why his dream sequences are so hypnotic, because they contain all of the excess of our imaginations, the ideas and images and desires and fancies that go nowhere because they don’t need to go anywhere. They’re stray synapses firing at the quantum level that just happen to look like funny little dwarves in tuxedoes and top hats.

And despite all of that — despite my disdain for individual dreams and fictional dreams alike — I still find myself fascinated by one aspect of our dreaming: the collective dream. That is, what does it say when we all start dreaming the same variations on a theme?

The example that comes readiest to my mind is the New York City real estate dream. I’ve had a ton of these: I discover an overlooked door in one room of my apartment that leads to a whole new set of rooms. Or I remember that a few years ago I rented another whole apartment, in a cool building on the Lower East Side, got it real cheap, rent stabilized and unrenovated, and now I get to pay a visit. I’ve dreamed gardens and new neighbors and parties on rooftops. And I know I’m not alone. You’ve probably had these dreams, too! At one point, when I was working for Realtor.com, I was looking into finding an animator to bring reader’s real-estate dreams to life. It never came to pass, but it’s still a series I’d love to watch.

To me, the interesting thing is not the interpretation of the New York City real estate dream. That’s simple enough: We live in places that are too small for us, so we fantasize about what we can never possess. You could go deeper, I guess, but why bother? What I love to hear about these mass-collective dreams is the details. How many rooms do you find? What neighborhood? Was there a dishwasher? A garbage disposal? A doorman? A doormonster? In one of mine, a next-door neighbor invited me over to examine a dining table they were giving away, but then I discovered that their apartment extended all the way to the back of the building, overlooking an atrium filled with a museum’s worth of sculptures and paintings. I didn’t take the dining table. Quirks like these are the most precious parts of dreams, the accidental inventions that bear little psychological (or narrative) weight but serve to remind us that our own brains remain fundamentally bizarre, unpredictable realms we should never hope to explain away.

And so now I wonder, too: Am I the only one dreaming of Mayor Mamdani? I can’t be, can I? What is he doing in other people’s heads? Is he a figure or mirth or of threat? Does he smile at them like he did at me? And did he offer anyone else a congressional seat? 🪨🪨🪨