I tweet (and skeet) my dreams

"Had my commonest dream/nightmare last night (articulated brilliantly by Julian Cope in 1992): I'm driving and I can't even drive" 15 October 2009

Since 15 October 2009 (see above) I have tweeted on twitter (more recently skeeted on Bluesky) my dreams.

These postings, almost always, are made first thing in the morning during those precious few moments in which the previous nights’ dreams (or at least the most recent of them) linger in the mind. It’s a way of recording, encapsulating and sharing what may or may not be my current subconscious preoccupations. There is always a pervasive feeling, a wave of emotion (often, as in the case of this first recorded dream, anxiety) sweeping through strange events and interactions with amorphous objects and characters. Not much sense of events, characters here. This first dream-tweet lacks detail but it taps into a history of similar “I’m driving and I can’t even drive” dreams. I hit the ground driving.

My dream tweets and skeets clearly must pass through several filters: consciousness, language, self-consciousness, technology, before I send them out into the world. Sometimes I censor myself, sometimes I regret posting them (they are oddly exposing but you possibly have to be me to realise that) but I never make anything up. They are dreams, not jokes or political statements. But they are statements of something. They do mean something. But the meanings, like the dreams themselves, evaporate swiftly.

The Julian Cope reference here is to his excellent song “No Hard Shoulder to Cry On” from his 1992 album “Jehovahkill”. The opening lyrics are “I’m driving and I can’t even drive. I’m driving uninsured and my father says that it’s wrong”. Brilliant! Often, when I am driving and slip into the wrong gear or clip a kerb, this song will come into my head. Driving and not being able to drive is the commonest of my recurring dreams. It manifests usually in my dream-self pushing down on the brake pedal and there being absolutely no resistance in it; also of trying things with sticks and pedals, wheels and door handles, and nothing working. The car is driving itself and badly.

When Elon Musk acquired the wheels of Twitter and seemed to be driving and couldn’t even drive, I requested the archive of my tweets and I have them open here and am now working my way back through my dream tweets in particular. The plan I have for this Substack is to revisit those dream tweets and use them as prompts to other discussions about who knows what. The great thing about dreams is that they are (besides the driving and not even being able to drive one) unpredictable. I intend to be led by these previous summary iterations of my historic subconscious hinterlands to new and sunny conscious uplands (and maybe the odd swamp).

I don’t know why I started tweeting my dreams back in October 2009, but I’m still doing it now regularly on Bluesky (see @craignbaxter.bsky.social) so the process continues to have value for me. There is not much evidence it has value for anyone else. The tweet quoted above received 0 likes and 0 retweets.