Exclusive Extract: Against the Death of Dream by Annie Zaidi

This exclusive extract from our autumn issue, Wasafiri 119: Futurisms, is an exploration of the synergy between writers and dreamers, and a deep dive into our dreams — both our ‘sleep-dreams’, and those that provide our vision for the future.

You can read and download the full piece for free until the end of September, or read it in the print issue of Wasafiri 119: Futurisms, our 40th Anniversary Issue, which is available to purchase now. 

In his iconic poem, ‘Sab Ton Khatarnaak’ (translated into English by Alok Bhalla and published by The Beacon), Punjabi poet Pash (Avtar Singh Sandhu; 1950–1988) wrote: ‘the most dangerous thing in the world is the death of our dreams’ (np). It is unlikely that the poet was referring to ‘sleep-dreams’ — those could be nightmares (most of mine are). Even if they were, as Freud described them in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), a form of wish-fulfilment, ‘sleep-dreams’ tend to be little more than befuddling sequences of images, fragments of fiction, quickly forgotten. What Pash likely meant by ‘our dreams’, however, was our vision for the future: an idealistic, unrealistic vision, perhaps one that we are tempted to set aside in favour of grim reality.

We all know people who do just that: pragmatists who would rather not spend a night in police custody, and who, therefore, dismiss our collective vision of a future where nobody is arrested for protesting injustice. Filled with the ‘dead peace’ that Pash warns against in his poem, they rail against dreamers. Pash was, of course, precisely that sort of dreamer himself. Pash had been arrested multiple times for his activism and his solidarity with protesting workers. His poetry is filled with violent and disconcerting images — universities bombed, student hostels demolished, huts set on fire, the moon rising over sites of massacre, a dirge sung by goons outside your door … There isn’t much a poet can do to fend off goons or police violence. However, as this poet reminds us, one can refuse to forget, and one can persist in dreaming, regardless of what is done to people who dare to speak, write, or protest against the status quo. In another poem, ‘Grass’, likely inspired from Carl Sandberg’s poem of the same title, Pash wrote: ‘I am grass … I will do my work/I will always grow … ’

Often described as a ‘radical’ poet, Pash was also a vocal critic of religious fundamentalism, and the demand for a separate Sikh nation, which led to his assassination in 1988. Just like grass, however, his fame has grown over the years. His poems have been widely translated and it is telling that some powerful right-leaning politicians in India continue to object to the teaching of poems such as ‘The Most Dangerous Thing’.

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One of the most dangerous things, Pash warned, is the clock that moves on your wrist, but not in your eyes. For years, I wondered at this image of a stopped clock in the reader’s eye, and the way the poet juxtaposes frozen time against water frozen inside eyes (Sabse khatarnaak vo aankh hoti hai/jo sab dekhti hui bhi jami barf hoti hai). If to dream is to have a vision for the future, then the death of dreams is to accept that the present moment is all of time, and that we must lose all hope for a safer, more loving, more leisurely time. Read in this light, I would even argue that the danger is not restricted only to the loss of hopeful dreams; it is just as dangerous to lose our nightmares.

In his book, Radical Hope (2006), philosopher-psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear writes that anxiety can be a realistic response to the world, which suggests that anxiety-induced dreams serve to alert us to individual and collective threats. If we know how to ‘read’ our nightmares, we may find that they serve as timely warnings. In my own experience, I find nightmares to be a useful aid in reconnecting with my instinctive ‘self’. Last year, I had woken up from a miserable dream wherein one of my cousins was pregnant and married to a man who had rejected me. Now the man was telling me that he was fed up. Sadly, he pointed to a desk covered with excrement. This was my grandfather’s old writing desk — the one space he’d tried to protect from the devilment of his grandchildren. The rest of the dream was like an episode from a soap opera — a family drama featuring diapers and accusatory fingers. Who was responsible for this mess, which nobody was willing to clean up?

Once I had written down the dream, I also recognised some of the characters as fairytale archetypes: misguided prince, pregnant princess, slothful sisters. Among all literary genres, fairytales and myths most closely resemble dreams. They reflect both wish-fulfilment (poor, yet deserving, character attains wealth, sexual rivals eliminated, families reunited), and common anxieties (beastly husband, unkind/helpless parent, husband-stealing sister, exile, and hunger)—not to mention a mad range of possibility (flying carpets, talking animals, inter-species sex). Like dreams, fairytales are replete with meaningful symbols or motifs that may appear supernatural or bizarre on the surface. Literary analysis requires us to root these motifs in the cultural experience of the tellers and listeners of the story. However, in dreaming, we are simultaneously storyteller and audience, and we alone can guess at the significance of what is arguably an intensely personal fiction.

When I googled what it means to dream of faeces, a bunch of pop psychology websites suggested that it signifies loss of control, or a need for growth. Perhaps I had to let go of negativity? But I didn’t have to be a psychoanalyst to know that my feelings inside the dream – validation, disgust, shame, resentment – came from a sense of betrayal, and of being held responsible for a mess of other people’s making. Literally and metaphorically, that wasn’t my shit. However, there was more to the story than that. Grandpa’s desk was a key object I’d conjured up for myself. Faeces on a writing desk meant that someone was interfering with my self-definition. That desk encapsulated the boundaries my grandfather set to protect his time and his identity as a writer. On that desk, I first learnt to use a typewriter. It stood for my emotional and ideological inheritance. Perhaps my sleeping brain was warning me that my ‘selfhood’ was under assault.

Did the dream save me in some way? I cannot say for sure. It did show me, however, that I must choose between two courses of action: either I could reinforce my personal boundaries by putting up more walls around myself and refusing to take responsibility for other people’s emotional baggage, or I could allow my current self to be knocked down, and wait to see who I might become ...

Continue reading the full piece online, free to download for the month of September, or in Wasafiri 119.

Photo by Ahmad Ossayli on Unsplash