No one really knows what she ate. Today, the menu boasts a Kahlua-infused chocolate cake, but 50 years ago patrons didn’t dine at El Coyote Café on Beverly Boulevard for the promise of dessert—not even a beautiful blonde two weeks from her due date.

I grew up in a household of beautiful women who never ate dessert, or much of anything at all. The grapefruit diet. The scrambled egg diet. The one Granny Smith every other day so my sisters could squeeze their long, lean, baby-powdered legs into hot pants before catching the drumstick at a Molly Hatchet concert diet. In my home, thin ruled like a sovereign dictator who continually frightened away flour, sugar and fat. No one actually took diet pills, because no ate enough to need Dexadrine to rev up their metabolism, but The Valley of the Dolls still lounged its worn, light pink cover on the coffee table next to the lukewarm, half-empty cans of Tab.

In my home, thin ruled like a sovereign dictator who continually frightened away flour, sugar and fat.
Click To Tweet

The Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann. I felt almost glamorous, holding the book in my chubby six-year-old hands. So much pink, three cut-out silhouettes of barbiturates, “dolls,”—Seconal, Nembutal—with two brunettes and one blonde filling out each hollow pill. The two brunettes didn’t do much for me, but who was that blonde in the middle, curvy enough to fixate on her chest, thin enough to wear a gold bracelet halfway up her upper arm? I could only manipulate one of the two bracelets I owned barely up my forearm, and even then only with the clumsy force of a desperate girl.

The murder of Sharon Tate is synonymous with L.A. A few summers ago when I drove past El Coyote on a very hot, late June afternoon, invited to Los Angeles to audition for the third round of a reality baking show, I recognized the red awning with the white font from true crime websites. In the minutia of morbidity surrounding the Tate murders by members of the Manson Family, no one remembers what Sharon ordered for her last meal. Rumor has it when tourists, fresh off the bus in search of lunch, ask what Sharon Tate ate, they are steered towards the most expensive menu item. Shrimp fajitas, $18.95 before tax.

1990 in a Central Oregon study hall we took turns memorizing the names Susan, Patricia, Leslie—boring good-girl names—in my Goth group, which included my boyfriend, Sky. Sky brought the book Helter Skelter to school, about the Tate/LaBianca murders. Sky and Sharon Tate shared a similar, cool alien-like beauty and a penchant for black eyeliner and hairspray.

By senior year we ruled the Gothic posse at Bend High, dubbed The Curitans by semi-freak outsiders. One thing Sky, with his rail-thin body and his architecturally arranged, dyed black hair, hated more than anything were outsiders. He taught me to shun these “posers,” who he said were trying to “starfuck” him. Me, too embarrassed to ask what he meant, wrote down the word starfucker in my notebook and spent an entire afternoon searching through the public library’s microfiche.

In a 1969 interview for Eye Magazine, Sharon Tate said, “Everything that’s realistic has some sort of ugliness to it. I’m sensitive to ugly situations.” I too, am sensitive—especially to boys like Sky who move away to art school because I don’t know if I want to get married. Back then, barely twenty, I didn’t want to get married. I just wanted to harness the power to collect men who wanted to marry me the way my grandmother collected all those plates not meant for food. Sharon Tate also said, “My whole life has been decided by fate.” She designed her own pale yellow micro-mini wedding dress. I wore a pale yellow wedding dress for my first wedding, too.

Being married for the first time, at 33, to me meant teaching myself how to do things like bake. In my late teen laziness, I had scanned the Betty Crocker Cooky Book with the thought to bake something for Sky, or for the boyfriends that followed, its red cover stained and taped back together after years of my mother or grandmother flipping open the book to wedge in random recipes clipped from magazines, recipes they never actually baked that came to represent forbidden delicacies just barely out of reach. Stained Glass Window Fruitcake. My Pink Heaven. During my first married years, I did teach myself how to bake, one cookie and cake and pie at a time. There were many kitchen disasters before each bake turned out almost edible, then actually good.

Everything that’s realistic has some sort of ugliness to it. I’m sensitive to ugly situations.
Click To Tweet

Through all my baking experiments I was still unaware that baking—the celebrity cookbook, being a judge on a baking reality show kind—can be synonymous with starfucking. Maybe Top Chef started the trend, then Top Chef Desserts, or even cable television devoting an entire channel to food. Starting a few years ago, the media began selling the preparation of food as competition. All this competition seemed to require was a little skill in the kitchen and a few, or a lot of, tattoos. I have a few tattoos and I do love to bake. This even led me to compete, and win, Best of Show baking competition ribbons in my county fair and the next county over. My first little taste of fame.

Sharon Tate first tasted fame at the age of six months when she won the Miss Tiny Tot of Dallas pageant. It would take 16 more years for her to win the title of Miss Richland before her Army father’s transfer to Italy curtailed her goal of becoming Miss Washington, then Miss America. The psychology of beautiful women who compete against other beautiful women for prizes mirrors the psychology of wanting to be famous. Rank-ism abounds in our culture, the somebodies vs. the nobodies, the overwhelming desire to crawl up from the ordinary sludge of everybodies to the upper echelon of somebodies. Doesn’t everyone secretly want to be famous, at least in their field, whether that means becoming the next beautiful extra in a movie to subsequently launch a film career, or the best folk singer in L.A., a thwarted dream of Charles Manson that would end Sharon Tate’s dreams, too?

When I received an email encouraging me to try out for a reality baking show, I filled out the application, attached a headshot, and didn’t think I’d hear back. On a cold March morning a call from a New York area code woke me three hours early. The woman at the other end of the phone bombarded me with questions. How does one make meringue? What are the three ingredients in a basic piecrust? What is ganache? Would I be able to attend an audition in my nearest audition city in June? I slogged through the interview, second-guessing each answer. An over-achiever since kindergarten, in my sleepy haze I tried to count my wrong answers, the most glaring mistake being my inability, at 8am, to recall how to make choux pastry. Then I remembered I’ve never made the dough, most commonly recognized as the golden puff of an éclair.

On my first visit to L.A. four years earlier, I never made it to a French bakery for an éclair. I never made it to any bakery. Staying with a couple whose newfound religion of choice, veganism, and their church of choice, the farmer’s market, put a crimp in my ardor for baked goods. A tour of the Tate murder house at 10050 Cielo Drive, or at least the property where the house stood before being razed in 1994, was out of the question as the couple spent my vacation searching for the best organic grapes.

Rank-ism abounds in our culture, the somebodies vs. the nobodies, the overwhelming desire to crawl up from the ordinary sludge of everybodies to the upper echelon of somebodies.
Click To Tweet

The couple, an aspiring journalist and an aspiring filmmaker, didn’t attempt to hide their propensity to starfuck. The aspiring filmmaker insisted on trying to meet anyone famous within his reach, from the person who did the lights at The Largo after a comedy show to a shock comic who performed a weekly gig at the clothing store Vlad the Retailer.

For a central Oregon girl with no experience interacting with famous people, I am fascinated with famous people and the people who love them. The shock comic singled me out during his show for my “pillow lips.” It’s what shock comics do, the expected sexual innuendo. But afterwards, the comic said how gracious I was to go along with his act. He asked me out to coffee the following afternoon. With my first husband by my side coffee didn’t seem like a very good idea, but what struck me was the kick in the guts delight to be acknowledged by celebrity.

At a diner after the show, the aspiring journalist of the starfucking couple told me, “He just wants to sleep with you in the back of his limo. I certainly hope you don’t think you’re special.”

Special? Los Angeles seemed nothing but special to me. That first time around the city I questioned why the entire world didn’t want to become famous. Where else but L.A. could Sharon Tate, starring in the beach comedy Don’t Make Waves, supposedly inspire Malibu Barbie?

I selected my audition outfit. Black dress, tasteful rabbit and deer forest print, a sort of Kawaii version of William von Aelst’s still-life hunting trophy paintings, and a Betsey Johnson purse shaped like an oven in my aim to be cast as “The Quirky One.” Before my invitation to audition I’d often wondered if every reality show hired the same casting director. How else could one explain the same nearly identical tropes tapping into the American zeitgeist? Strong Single Mom, Openly Gay Man, Angry Black Woman, Republican Redneck, Quirky One.

As I packed my outfit for the long car ride to L.A., I had wondered how many other quirky girls I’d have to compete against. After months of baking practice I determined an airplane ride, and the TSA, were nothing to risk passing my signature chocolate pumpkin cake past. We decided to drive the 820 miles, a portable plug-in cooler transporting my baked goods south in a heat wave, 116 degrees at a gas station stop near Stockton.

By the time we reached L.A., temperatures cooled to 112, my treats frozen for the trip unthawing in the cooler we carried to the bungalow where I could prep before the audition the way an actor preps for a movie scene.

Sharon Tate and Patty Duke became friends while filming The Valley of the Dolls. Sharon even moved into Patty Duke’s vacant Beverly Hills home. Though Sharon called 10055 Cielo Drive, where she met her demise, the “Love House,” some say Sharon preferred the Summit Ridge address but had to find another residence when Patty took the property off the market. A drive through L.A. is a drive through every imaginable twist of fate.

Would being invited to this city end in opportunity or disappointment? Did I really want to become one of those reality show “personalities,” half rooted for, half despised? Then, even if I won the show, forgotten in a day or two?

Beyond teaching myself how to bake bread my pre-audition packet included a prompt to identify my style or “brand.” Much the way Sharon Tate was destined to become the tragic blonde for eternity, my branding idea seemed obvious. The bookish woman who knew the recipe for Sylvia Plath’s tomato soup cake. But the thing was, did I actually love to bake and really want to star on competition TV?

A drive through L.A. is a drive through every imaginable twist of fate.
Click To Tweet

Traveling over 800 miles with a cooler full of cake to a bungalow steps away from the Hollywood Walk of Fame felt like an obvious next destination. The bungalow, a renovated crack house, sat on a street lined in lemon and lime trees. Any direction I looked, I saw palm trees leaning into the sun and helicopters hovering above, the glamour and brutality of the city magnified by the sex worker applying make-up steps away from our door in a broken piece of mirror while the Primetime Emmys billboards blocked the rest of our view.

Our landlord, host of a home renovation show, greeted us in front of the hedge with an ingratiating television intimacy, a single-serving “friend” who spoke like we’ve known each other for years. His intoxicating confidence matched his tan skin, ice blue eyes, dark, slicked-back mop of hair, an honorary Baldwin brother before the bloat. He knew ahead of my check-in why I was staying at one of his four attached bungalows, knew that I’d be using the art deco, period correct kitchen for the first time since he began renting the little light pink houses to a rotation of aspiring starlets.

He and I discussed the network I’d be auditioning for while he recommended the hottest food trucks and took intermittent texts from his agent about upcoming parts. How exciting to be in the orbit of someone actively participating in the L.A. hustle. I wondered what had happened to the aspiring journalist and the aspiring filmmaker, long estranged from my life, when my landlord for the week stopped me as I turned to change in my room before heading out to the first restaurant on his list.

“You look beautiful just the way you are, kiddo. Go try Le Big Mac at Petit Trois and report back.”

And I did try the $18 burger conceived by a French food cart star turned celebrity from another cooking competition show. The longer I sat in the small strip-mall restaurant, though, the more I worried about my motivation for being in L.A. Did I really want to be known as a possible dessert cookbook author instead of, in my mind, an author author, anymore than Sharon Tate, who studied with Lee Strasberg, father of method acting, wanted her acting legacy to be suicidal showgirl Jennifer North in The Valley of the Dolls?

While the rest of Hollywood buzzed I preheated the tiny bungalow oven. Baking away from home means losing the dance of where to reach out and make contact with my flour canister or my cardamom or my stack of decorated baking cups. But I beat on, waiting for my yeast to activate, kneading until my wrists ached, baking loaf after loaf of bread until the audition-worthy loaf rose and showed itself.

Would being invited to this city end in opportunity or disappointment?
Click To Tweet

After a short and sleepless night of gunshots mixing with the lime tree perfume out my windows, I woke ready to conquer the world of reality TV. Retro dress, fresh baked bread in the back seat and a four-layer cake balanced on my lap, air conditioner cranked in the 100 degree heat, we drove to Santa Monica, where baking dreams either burn up or come true.

Maybe everything in my life led up to this moment—the mom who gave me my very own copy of Valley of the Dolls in my Easter basket one year; the sisters who towered their model-thin bodies above me, breath smelling of wheat germ and Herbalife; my desire as I got older to use the power of sugar to turn my house into a home.

Release forms signed at the audition prevent me from divulging what goes on behind the closed doors. I can say one women in the lobby, where we sat for hours waiting our turn for an interview, quit her job to try out, how another left her daughter in an Arizona hospital after emergency surgery.

I can also say, when the show aired months later, none of those 50 women milling about the holding room made the cut, just like I didn’t make the cut—the judge who interviewed me not sold by my four-layer cake or my pretty dress or my ability to dissect the narrative arc of reality TV. I had never made puff pastry from scratch. One “no” to puff pastry and the casting director showed me the elevator to the bottom floor where all the everybodies waiting to be half-rate, low-rent television somebodies threw their rejected baked goods in a trashcan the size of a king-sized bed after their turns.

I struggled in the parking lot to change out of my dress and leave my dreams of baking stardom behind. The world of potential swirled around me, but that shiny edge of promise, after a few hours in one casting call, had already dulled a little.

I refused to cry about my rejection as my first husband and I wandered the city in search of dinner. When our meal came at an Italian restaurant known for its collection of autographed celebrity photos, I glanced to my left to a framed picture of Sharon Tate. A colored movie still of her, dressed in a patterned nightgown answering a white telephone, the infamous gold bracelet I envied in my youth gripped around the perfection of her upper arm. A single tea candle in a small glass holder diffused its light across the picture to rest softly on that bracelet until a girl almost as dangerous in her loveliness approached the table and took a photograph of us. She sold the photo, framed in gold cardboard, Sharon Tate and her gold bracelet in the background of me in the middle of an Italian restaurant in the middle of Melrose Avenue in the middle of a city with the ability to cause one to dream impossible dreams that can almost never come true.

I struggled in the parking lot to change out of my dress and leave my dreams of baking stardom behind.
Click To Tweet

I finished my spaghetti as the girl with the camera ended her shift and sat on a barstool, drinking.  More than anything I wanted to tell her as she counted the money from her tourist mementos not to get caught up chasing fame, her symmetrical face longing to be filmed and photographed and hanged on the very wall where she worked while hundreds of people just like me passed through, and sometimes, when the light of the candle hit just right, almost looked up.

A dream analyst named Bob Hoss tells me that very few people actually dream about flying. He’s studied the 20,000+ dreams held in DreamBank, a project by UC Santa Cruz, and has concluded that supposedly common dream images like soaring through the air — or showing up somewhere naked, or losing teeth — are actually much rarer than we think. Far more people dream about circles instead; almost 30% of the dreams in the database feature circular shapes or motions.

Why our collective unconscious obsession with the spherical? According to Carl Jung, the circle symbolizes the unified self, when both consciousness and unconsciousness come together as a perfect whole. A dream in which circles appear just might be your unconscious self urging you to slow down and pay more attention to your dreams.

Hoss himself dreams of boats. His dream-boats represent his creative life, so if the boat is zooming across the water, his creative practice is buoyant. “If I’m under too much stress or ignoring that creative side, my boat will be taking on water, or the engine won’t run,” he says. But other than this boat imagery, Hoss rarely experiences the phenomenon of the recurring dream. He has this in common with many other dream analysts; as a group, they rarely dream in copies, because they’ve figured out how to unlock the nagging messages that recurrent dreams come bearing. “As soon as I do my dreamwork on [the recurring dream], it goes away instantly,” Hoss says. The rest of us might be haunted for years by some pestering missive from the unconscious world — a dream where we can’t find our shoes, a dream where it rains on our wedding day. But the dream analysts have managed to catch their dreams and pin them down, like so many butterflies. And they’re much happier for it.

You know that Family Guy clip where Stewie yells “Mom, mom, mom” for a good 30 seconds? That’s how I imagine our recurring dreams. They’re little psychic nags from our unconscious, begging us to pay sharp attention to something or to finally resolve some sticky issue. Recurring dreams might feel annoying — I often wake up exhausted from yet another round of my Trying to Throw a Party and Everyone Arrives Too Early dreamscape — but they’re actually trying to help us. “There can be some unresolved emotional issue that your dream is trying to get you to face,” says Hoss. Dream analyst Jane Teresa Anderson believes you can rewire your very brain by attempting to analyze these sorts of dreams:

“When you analyze a recurring dream, you identify the issue and the underlying mindset patterns that are keeping you stuck in the pattern. You can then change the patterns through a combination of awareness and…reimagin[ing] the dream to change the outcome. It’s an art and a science, and what this process does is reprogram the unconscious mind for better outcomes.”

It should go without saying that any dream analyst worth their salt already knows how to do this for themselves. And so by and large, their recurrent dreams are safely in their past. In fact, many of them look back at particular recurring dreams as the Xs that marked a dark epoch in their life — an epoch from which their own self-analysis rescued them.

Lauri Loewenberg, a dream analyst who remembers her dreams from the age of two onward and always recites them to her husband over morning coffee, used to dream every week — for years! — that she was walking through her childhood bedroom and discovering aquariums full of dead fish. In the dream, she knew that the aquariums had been there all along, but realized that she’d forgotten about them until that moment.

“The dream was about something in my real life that I’d neglected: my art,” she says. “I’d put my art aside in order to build my career as a dream analyst. My subconscious didn’t like that at all and it nagged me to death.” The issue came to a head when Loewenberg had a lucid dream about a woman with no face — her neglected artist self, she believes — who told Loewenberg, “You need to paint, and I need to sow.” These days, Loewenberg has a thriving pin-up art business in addition to her dream work. “I finally listened to the dream. And I haven’t dreamed of dying fish ever since,” she says.

Another dream analyst, Layne Dalfen, used the message inside her recurring dream to save herself from making a huge mistake. In the dreams, Dalfen was always alone in a shaky freight elevator, unable to touch the sides. The dreams started 44 years ago, a few months after she gave birth to her first child, Tina, who was born with Down Syndrome. Her doctor advised Dalfen to place Tina in a home and “forget you had her.” Dalfen listened to him — in those days, she says, it was a fairly common practice. “Three months later I woke up crying and couldn’t stop,” she says. Shortly after that, the dreams started.

Her trick as an analyst is to take the problem presented in the dream and ask herself what she’d do if it were happening in real life. If she were alone in a freight elevator in real life, she says, she’d “bring people into the elevator to put weight on the floor so it stops wobbling. And now you’re not in this huge space alone. You’re not flailing by yourself.” Dalfen realize that the dream was begging her to ask her parents for help — to bring them into the elevator, so to speak — so that they could all attempt to find Tina again. (Not coincidentally, Dalfen used to play in the freight elevator at her father’s workplace when she was a child.) She acted on the dream, and Tina ended up being a joyful part of her family’s life for the next four decades.

“I never had a freight elevator dream again,” Dalfen says. “Once your conscious understands what your subconscious is trying to say to you, the dream ends. You’re just having a discussion with yourself, but you’re speaking another language.”

Can You Make Donald Trump Resign From Your Nightmares?

It’s not that only dream analysts can cure themselves of their recurring dreams, but it’s mainly dream analysts who have the tools to do so. Many of the analysts I spoke to expressed a great sense of relief at having figured out the insistent dreams of their younger days. “I used to have a lot of recurring dreams, as a child and young adult, until I learned to understand them and pay attention to them,” says Anderson. “The only recurring dream I sometimes have now is looking for a public toilet and, at first, seeming like I’ve got to walk a long way to find one…suddenly I see a perfect toilet close by and I can empty my full bladder in peace and quiet.” She says that when she dreams this, it’s a nudging reminder from her unconscious to take time for self-care.

Another thing dream analysts have in common? Many of them know how to lucid dream. More importantly, they know exactly what to do when they find themselves dreaming lucidly. They know that these dreams are not the time to gorge on an entire dream pizza or fly above Kilimanjaro. That’s low-level stuff, they say. Lucid dreams are for learning the secrets of the universe, or at least exploring the nooks and crannies of your own wild mind. “The real fun is exploring the wisdom behind the dream,” says Hoss, who advises lucid dreamers to stop what they’re doing and tell the dream, Show me something I need to know. These dreams are like therapy on steroids — a (possibly) once-in-a-lifetime chance to discover something major about yourself.

---

Lucid dreams are for learning the secrets of the universe.
Click To Tweet

---

When dream analysts are lucid dreaming, they will often look for a person or animal within the dream and interrogate them, as dream characters tend to have all the wisdom. “If you ever get a lucid dream, ask a question, because you’ll get a really cool answer,” says Loewenberg. Says Hoss, “I’ll ask a dream character, ‘Who are you? Where did you come from?’ They’ll usually say, ‘I’m a higher level of consciousness.’” Just don’t expect them to pat your head and explain the meaning of dreaming itself. “They don’t think they’re characters,” says Hoss. “They think they’re dreaming you.”

Get a bunch of dream analysts talking about their lucid dreams and you’ll find that things get extremely meta. Hoss once lucid-dreamed that he was lecturing a bunch of dream characters about what it’s like to be in a dream. Loewenberg will often analyze her dreams while she’s still in them, and says that when she wakes up from a lucid dream, she’ll sometimes fall back asleep and dream that she’s telling someone about the dream she just had. Dream analyst Craig Webb has even had lucid dreams that seem to mysteriously reflect his clients’ waking reality. “I often dream with and even ‘for’ my clients,” he says. This can lead to strange parallels: One night, Webb dreamed he was swimming and frightened by nebulous shapes around him that seemed to be sharks. He purposefully shook off the fear and swam toward one terrifying shape, finding out that it was simply a log. He later learned that around the same time he was dreaming, a student of his was panicking underwater in Hawaii, sure she was swimming next to sharks. “She said she then remembered our class discussions about being able to lucidly choose her emotional state and mental focus,” says Webb, “and so she decided to continue snorkeling.” Shifting her perception of her waking reality, the student swam toward the mysterious shapes, just as Webb was doing in his dream. It worked: They weren’t sharks, either.

“Even with upsetting dreams…I know that I can turn them around and bring a better ending if I can become more lucid next time,” says Webb. “So I am never afraid to dream.”

It feels a bit mystical to say that dream analysts have tapped into a higher — or deeper — relationship with the unconscious, but their stories of dreaming seem to support that theory. After all, they work with their own unconscious mind every night, poke around it in, play with it like clay. Dreams may feel as personal as a fingerprint, but they have rhyme and reason, if you know where to look. “Since I began to study dreams, my relationship with them has changed…my dreams have become a partner to me,” says Loewenberg. “We work together, me and my subconscious mind, to make my life better in every possible way.

It’s a partnership not to be taken lightly, though. Angie Banicki, who reads tarot for celebrities like Jamie Chung and Sophia Bush and occasionally does dream analysis, has found herself slipping into a new sort of dream lately. She’s had an intense and fairly psychic dream life for a while now — a friend who works at NASA has an email from Banicki hanging above her desk in which Banicki correctly predicted her NASA job — but her latest dreams are something different. Something darker.

---

Dreams may feel as personal as a fingerprint, but they have rhyme and reason, if you know where to look.
Click To Tweet

---

It happened last year, when she did a tarot reading at Paltrow’s house and came home buzzing with intense energy from the party guests. That night, she had a dream about death. In it, her friend Dan — who’d died on Mount Everest — acted as her spiritual guide, and the dream itself involved two women and a man who were near a forest, dead. Something in the dream had to do with drugs.

The next morning, as Banicki drove along a highway that she rarely drives down, she saw a cluster of 10 police cars, and learned that two women and a man had been hit by a girl on drugs who lost control of her car. The three victims had gotten out of their car to take a closer look at the nearby forest, and the accident happened at the exact time that Banicki woke up. “I cried all the way home,” she says. “This is a whole new level of dreaming that I don’t know if I’m ready for.” The hills and valleys of the dreamscape may contain the sort of guidance we’re searching for in our waking life, but perhaps it’s best that not all of us know how to access those shadowy realms.

We can’t banish Trump from the real world. But we may be able to rid him from our dreams.

Illustration by Katie Tandy

The terrifying specter of a president unhinged to reason or morality has consumed our collective days; one would hope there’d be respite, at least, come nightfall.

We should be able to dream about a life without Trump.

And yet, so often, Trump remains in our subconsciousness as we slumber, waiting to terrorize again. Before the election, people were already dreaming of Trump — and since he assumed office, he has taken ever-more prominence in our nightly narratives.

Politicians making appearances in dreams is, of course, nothing new. In an interview with The Daily Beast, dream researcher Kelly Bulkeley reported an uptick in dreams about politicians like Ross Perot, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton during their respective runs for office, calling their dream appearances “metaphors for a feeling or a relationship in your life.”

But Trump dreams seem to be particularly common, and chilling; people have documented Trump torturing them in front of a group of white people, stiffing them on a date, and chasing them through a Walmart in their nightmares.

We should be able to dream about a life without Trump.

As Dr. Sue Kolod told Vice, the continued presence of our commander in chief has made it hard to know where the lines between the conscious and subconscious even exist anymore. “One of the things I’ve heard more recently than I can ever remember is a patient saying, ‘I feel like I’m in a nightmare, and I can’t wake up.”

So why are we dreaming of Trump? It’s hard to know for sure, but there are plenty of theories that can help answer that question.

Dreams happen most vividly, but not exclusively, during REM sleep, when our brains are almost as active as they are during wakefulness, but our bodies are usually in a state of temporary paralysis called atonia. But while the when of dreaming is clear, the what, how, and why are subject to fierce debate.

The Parallels Between Social Media And PTSD In The Age Of Trump

In the 19th century, dreams were often thought of as a “delirium.” Russian physician Marie de Manacéïne, however, theorized that dreams are a way to exercise the parts of the brain unused by our conscious selves. In 1899, Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams first published his theory of dreams as wish-fulfillment and symbolism full of sexual hangups. Carl Jung, initially a supporter of Freudian dream interpretation, later argued that dreams are a function of the imagination, a way to explore universal archetypes; he also said that while dreams do not need to be interpreted to perform their function, they exist to unite the conscious and unconscious mind.

Today, many argue that the purpose of dreams is to process memories and emotions — perhaps a subconscious imperative for Trump nightmares. “Dreams are many times a relief of fear, anxiety, or depression,” says Dr. Nancy Irwin, a Los Angeles-based therapist and dream expert. “If you are distressed by Trump, then know that your psyche is attempting to release those unpleasant feelings at night because it cannot do so fully enough by day.”

‘Dreams are many times a relief of fear, anxiety, or depression.’

Some argue that the presence of Trump is not just about the man himself, but about a cultural awakening to the fucked-up power dynamics that have existed since long before his election. Racism, classism, sexism, and other systems of privilege are nothing new, but they are still painful to confront viscerally — so instead, we may confront them in our dreams.

Cathy Pagano, a Jungian psychologist, astrologer, and soul coach, told me that Trump can also reflect our own fears about ourselves:

“When we dream of Trump, he symbolizes our collective Shadow: the parts of our American patriarchal psyche which has been ruling us for a while now. He represents the truth of what our leaders are really doing in Washington, on Wall Street, and in the boardrooms of all our corporations. He represents the hypocrisy, lies, and deceit that power holds onto.

The Shadow is the part of our psyche we don’t want to recognize, but which we ‘see’ in others. So if I dream of Trump, he symbolizes that part of me that I don’t like or want others to see. He might symbolize the bully, or the misogynist, or the racist, or the childish, entitled, delusional part of myself.”

Personally, my dreams are more confusing than heavy with symbolism. I do not suffer from frequent nightmares that re-enact trauma, or if I do, I don’t usually have them in my last REM cycle. When I recall my dreams, I recognize the nouns in them, but the narratives bear little meaning to my life.

The same has been true of Trump’s appearances in my dreams. Unlike in real life, he is not evil, but a benign-if-annoying figure, usually part of a troupe helping me look for something I don’t understand. His malice in waking life gets jumbled into well-meaning clumsiness — distinct from his usual bigoted, megalomaniacal, narcissistic incompetence.

Support Diverse Journalism — Become A Member Of The Establishment

It could be worse: If you search “trump dream last night” on Twitter, you’ll see many accounts of people dreaming of being fired or experiencing violence at his hands. And it could be better: Some people dream of his impeachment, or that he was never elected at all, or that they screamed at him and flicked him off.

I wish I was giving Trump the bird in my dreams, but I’m not. Instead, he only appears in those frustrating dreams where I have to figure out some kind of shape-shifting puzzle. But even if Trump is not, in my subconscious, the monster he is in reality, I still don’t want him disturbing my sleep.

Some people dream of Trump’s impeachment, or that he was never elected at all, or that they screamed at him and flicked him off.

Happily for me and others looking to banish Trump from their sleep state, there are some strategies for mitigating nightmares. One heralded approach to addressing traumatic dreams is a cognitive behavioral therapy method called “image rehearsal therapy” (IRT). The sleeper writes down or recalls the dream for 10 or 20 minutes during their waking hour, but they change some key part of the narrative so that it is now positive. “IRT acts to inhibit the original nightmare, providing a cognitive shift that empirically refutes the original premise of the nightmare,” writes the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine.

The University of California, Santa Cruz School of Oneirology proposes that while dreams may help us make memories and have significant cultural purpose, there is no symbolic connection between our dreams and our life. If we like our dreams, there’s no harm in looking to them for inspiration and guidance, but if they’re upsetting, we should forget them as soon as we wake up instead.

How My Abusive Father Helped Me Understand Trump Supporters

According to Pagano, if you dream you’re involved with Trump, the best thing is to work on your Shadow — which, she says, “isn’t so bad once you recognize it and work with it. Recognize your own part in what makes your life chaotic or selfish or frustrated and make some changes. This is the best option since you actually change your life.”

Pagano also emphasizes self-care as a way to productively address disturbing dreams. “The patriarchy wants us to ignore our feelings and repress our instincts and intuitions. You are a specific person, with specific needs and talents. If you get too caught up in the outer world’s chaos, and you don’t give yourself enough self-care and explore your own depths so you ‘know yourself,’ your mental health will certainly suffer.”

‘The patriarchy wants us to ignore our feelings and repress our instincts and intuitions.’

To successfully engage in self-care, you may want to recede from constant engagement with the news. Since I pitched this essay back in February, my political dreams have receded a great deal — they’re still creepy, but Trump is in them less. The change, I think, comes from my being less fixated on the constant low buzz of political minutiae. I don’t want to suggest that this is the way out for everyone — as a white cis woman with family resources, my livelihood is not as much under siege as it is for others. But personally, I can’t keep up with the fuckery anymore. So I’ve stopped reading obsessively of every actor and their place in this hell world.

According to Dr. Irwin, this approach is sound:

“Ceasing watching the news right before can help greatly. Stay informed, but do so a few hours before sleep. Allow your mind to decompress with funny, light entertainment, [but] nothing distressing, because your subconscious mind cannot tell the difference between real or imagined danger.”

While taking some time off from Twitter can be helpful, what can be even more conducive to reducing distressing dreams is actual productive political action. “Dreams are informing you of your feelings about a situation. Taking action to do damage control is ideal in turning powerlessness into power,” says Dr. Irwin. “The answer may be in taking some sort of action to make a difference in any way that you can — calling your state’s senators and representatives, joining protests, [or] helping get petitions signed.”

Trusted Resources For Your Resistance Against Trump

For the first few months of Trump’s presidency, I couldn’t sleep through the night. I woke up almost every night from confusing dreams or dire thoughts. Now when I awake, I try take care of myself and call my senators instead of getting pointlessly angry about Sarah Huckabee Sanders or Russia or whatever Mary Shelley-esque health care bill is on the horizon at the moment. Instead of refreshing Twitter when I’m mad right before bed, I seek out a local protest and take a little time to relax. I’ve stopped passively taking in the terror of his reign, and starting actively getting to work, and I’m dreaming a little better for it.

No one can deny Trump’s prominent space in our reality, but letting go of trying to keep up with every speck of spittle from his lips has relaxed some of my mental energy. I’m not trying to keep up as much anymore, and I learned long ago not to hold onto my dreams — even if he’s in them.

Donald Trump cannot be banished from my dreams anymore than he can be evicted from the White House, but I can refuse to let him ruin my sleep, my health, my life.

Looking For A Comments Section? We Don’t Have One.

]]>