We Will Never Be Friends

Claire Donato

Dream-content: I am gifting my analyst the red dress I purchased at TJ Maxx last summer. The brand name of the dress is not worth noting here. (When I first tried it on in TJ Maxx’s dressing room, I remember sending a photograph of myself wearing the dress to my father. I wanted him to say it looked nice on me.) I neatly fold the dress and offer it to her, along with a pair of culottes. I kneel down as I make this offering.These garments, I am aware, are for her to wear. When I wake up, I experience a burning desire to gift her this dress in waking life, and feel like its red color must bear some greater symbolic significance or motivate an artistic collaboration between us.

A Two-Way Mirror

I saw my analyst in person three times a week for four years until the COVID-19 pandemic shut down New York City in March 2020. During my final session before lockdown, I was possessed by a gut feeling I should sit across from her instead of using the couch. I’ll call my analyst ESfor the purpose of this story—not because these are her initials (which they are), but because in French (my first language), es is the present indicative form of être—“to be”—used with tu: “you.” I wanted to be held by ES’s face before I would not be able to be, for years. Or maybe some part of me implicitly knew that the duration of my treatment would involve, has always involved, reckoning with a two-way mirror. Me and ES, looking in and being looked at. Tu es qui? Et qui es tu?

On the mint-green desk where I continue to attend virtual psychoanalysis sessions long after lockdown—ES moved away from New York City at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, but our work together remains—I keep a stack of five ecofriendly notebooks whose covers are illustrated with turtles, whales, and hummingbirds. These are my dream journals. Around my desk, the journals are surrounded by a group of meaningful objects that feel like a compost heap of signifiers: a miniature copy of Mazzy Star’s So Tonight That I Might See; one knitted miniature lamb; one felted miniature alpaca; an oversized Dale Cooper bobblehead; a Pentax H3 camera; a vintage valentine featuring an illustration of two kittens; a neon silkscreened poster commemorating my late friend Mark Baumer; a cross-stitch hoop emblazoned with the phrase “KEEP ABORTION SAFE AND LEGAL.”

Slim, spiral-bound, and worn with attachment, my dream journals are a compost heap of signifiers, too. I revisit their pages when I feel at a loss, out of touch with desire: 

—I am cuddling with an extraordinary miniature horse that is telling me how it likes to be held. This scene takes place in a barn. I feel deep love for the miniature horse. There are myriad barnyard animals surrounding us. Why don’t I just live in a barn, I think to myself. I have my arm wrapped around the miniature horse, who is peacefully sleeping. Until I move my arm. “No, no, no, no, no,” it sharply snaps. “Don’t do that.”

—I dream that an unknown man who holds the essence of a former crush is living at a Zen Center while taking care of a monastic named Hojin. “We fell in love,” the unknown man says, though I am not sure whether he is referring to me or to Hojin. Then he says, “I love you.” “What did you say,” I say. “I love you too.” We kiss. “It’s time to see if this is a portal,” he says, his tongue beginning to shed plates into my mouth.

—I remember a fragment of a dream: my ex-boyfriend kisses me, looks me in the eyes, and says: “Maybe you can become attached to the silence.” 

To continue dreaming, I reread my dreams. 

Valentine

On the Valentine’s Day that fell amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, I created a handmade book containing transcriptions of every dream I had had between the years of 2018 and 2020 in which my then-inamorato made an appearance. This book was my Valentine’s Day gift to him: a collection of fragments gleaned from my unconscious in which he was a key player. 

It is sometimes said that a person who appears in one’s dream may not be themself. They may be someone else, a projection of oneself, an existential threat— like your mother, or your job. Many of the dreams I transcribed into the handmade valentine about my then-inamorato burgeoned in my unconscious before we entered our relationship, and before doom overcame it. We are in a hybrid hotel/locker room with your psychoanalyst, I wrote. He gives me a journal he’s written in and tells me he’s trying to sort out why he can’t finish any creative projects. “You’re afraid of death,” I say. “I am too.”

I felt abashed to share the details of my dreams with my then-inamorato—as I also feel abashed to share the details here—but also respected myself. To communicate another person’s presence within one’s own dream world is one way to hold without touch. So too is a dream a two-way mirror that can reveal to someone how they live in your body, how they stir your mind. 

Q&A

Do you use dreams to write your stories? Yes, but I can’t tell you. 

Erectile Dysfunction

When I write stories, a formal strategy upon which I lean to render scenes more surreal—and to otherwise support my formally nonlinear tactics—is to cut to a dream. Dream content, Freud wrote. Dream content, I mirror. The cut allows for a radical transformation of imagery that justifies time travel, teleportation, and the sudden presence of a larger-than-life ranunculus flower or hidden corridor. In a dream, a character can just as suddenly burst into fireflies as she may begin walking on her hands. A humanoid sculpture may appear, or our protagonist may take her then-inamorato’s hand, which is also a penis, and castrate it. And a person who is also an object of desire may appear naked with a very flaccid penis, and he may slow-dance with the story’s protagonist before the story reaches a terminal point.

Keeping Faith

I keep dreaming that my partner is kissing other writers who are more successful than me. In a recent dream, my partner says he has been kissing the writer Kate Zambreno—“just on the cheeks and the lips,” and “just a little bit.” In real life, I have never actually met Kate Zambreno, although I admire her writing. A variation of this dream has also happened with the writers Claudia Rankine and Joni Murphy. In the dream, I tell my partner he has taken advantage of our monogamous relationship, which is something I wish I had said to my then-inamorato when he cheated on me in the middle of the pandemic. My partner seems bewildered by my rage; I grow increasingly distressed. In a fit, I wake up and am repeating the following sentence aloud into my silk pillowcase: “You have taken my fidelity for granted. You have taken my fidelity for granted. You have taken my fidelity for granted.” 

Riddle

Naomi Falk, my editor, says a dream I include in my forthcoming book is a kind of archaic dream—that anyone reading my book who has had that dream will be able to relate to it, and people have always had the dream. But what does it mean to have had the same dream as someone else?

A Writer, A Writer, A Writer

Less than a year into my personal analysis, ES revealed to me that she was also a writer. “I studied creative writing as an undergraduate,” she said. “I suppose I should analyze why I still call myself a writer.” This is how I remember our exchange, which took place in the St. Denis, a now-bulldozed, former grand hotel on East Eleventh Street. I remember her asking: “How do you feel about the fact that I am also a writer?” But when I transcribed that memory, I accidentally wrote, “I remember asking: ‘How do you feel about the fact that I am also a writer?’”

I breathe air; I am surrounded by writers. My mother is a writer; my father is a writer. Sometimes the air is filled with smoke, whether it be from my father’s cigarettes or my then-inamorato’s cigarettes or the wildfires in Canada. Neither of my parents would call themselves writers. Two months ago, I purchased an air purifier for my apartment. I have a new fear: smoke. ES is a writer. I am a writer, but I cannot remember how I answered her. 

How Do You Feel about the Fact That I Am Also a Writer?

As a young writer—at the ages of nineteen, twenty, twenty-one—I had a skin condition called dermatographism. The condition may have been caused by birth control pills, depression and anxiety, or gluten. When I would trace letters on my skin, the letters would stand out in relief, embossed like a greeting card: HELLO, HELP ME, AAAA, CLAIRE. At the time, I became obsessed with dermatographism and started writing about it, though I cannot remember whether I dreamt about it—my skin condition felt so surreal in the first place that it had no business being in my dreams. With time or a change of diet or of environment or of medication, the condition eventually went into remission. Now only its impression remains—as does the sense that my writing practice is located somewhere underneath my flesh, and is not a choice. 

Slip of the Tongue

On the night of Thursday, July 6, 2023, I dream I am in Squirrel Hill, the neighborhood in Pittsburgh where I grew up. I am with my father—who recently retired from teaching foreign language education—and a couple of his students. His students are younger than me and telling me about the languages they speak. I recognize some of the languages’ names (Yiddish, Russian, Spanish), and not others (Xjffgdjnvur?). I share with my father’s students that although my mother is French, and French was my first language, I only speak English, though I wish I spoke more—a slip of the tongue? In waking life, I am a writer who has trouble formulating thoughts aloud, and feel bemused by the dexterity and confidence with which other people speak.

Like language, my father, his students, and I drift apart. We are now in what seems to be a crowded bar, separated from one another. I subsequently stand with a man I do not know. He says he wants to kiss me. I say no. “I am not single. I do not want to do that.” But in the dream, I do.

From across the crowded bar, my father says, “Don’t be an idiot, Claire. Use your heart.” So I blow hot air into the man’s mouth like the evil dragon I am. 

Tree of Life

My father, his students, and I are now standing outside of the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, one block from my childhood home. After a mass shooting took place at Tree of Life in 2018, photographs began appearing in the AP newswire of people protesting on my childhood porch: 1502 Shady Avenue. In the dream, Wilkins Avenue, the block where Tree of Life is located, is enveloped in plumes of smoke, which I understand to be pepper spray, but which I cannot help but read as wildfire smoke given recent climate emergencies in Canada and Hawaii. There is nowhere to go. In the dream, it is my understanding that this violence to the air is being committed by right-wing extremists, and that all of us in the smoke’s vicinity are in jeopardy.

I duck into a windowless building with the man into whose mouth I blew hot air. There, I learn he is one of the right-wing extremists. He wants to draw my blood, wants me to draw my own blood, wants to draw my blood for himself when he realizes I am not capable of doing it. He also wants to sew my skin, and does. He sews my thumb into the shape of a heart and begins sewing patterns into my forearms. I try to remind myself that, because it is papyrus, my flesh is strong and withstanding. White flesh like paper, black thread like ink. I had never before dreamt about my dermatographism. 

The First and Second Person

Several months after ES revealed to me that she was a writer (at least, this is how I remember the timeline in my head), I remember her asking me another question, which I may be misremembering: “Are you going to become an analyst, or am I going to become a writer?” To which, years later, I now respond: Who are you and I in this interrogative sentence?

Context existed for ES’s question, as I had recently expressed interest in wanting to better understand my treatment, and to possibly become a psychoanalyst one day. With transference at play, my treatment had become something of a two-way mirror.

“You are going to write a book,” I remember telling ES. “It will be called Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts.” Did I tell her this in person or in writing? Is there a difference? These sentences subsequently became dialogue in a story called “The Analyst” that I wrote at what felt like the pinnacle of my analytic transference. In it, a delusional analysand fantasizes about going on a road trip to the Hamptons—“a stretch of land to which I’ve never been, to which I’ll never go”—with her “analyst, [her] sister, [her] best friend.” The two settle into “a sun-soaked, minimalist three-story home whose floor-to-ceiling glass windows look out upon the ocean” for a writing retreat. Together, they cook tofu pups, drink blush wine, and bond over their shared affinity for Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse, tater spuds(“a kind of fanciful tater tot”), and the Velvet Underground’s “I’ll Be Your Mirror.”

In retrospect, the moment during which I wrote “The Analyst” may have been a particularly manic one in my transferential timeline. The story was really fun to write, and remains one of my favorite stories I’ve ever written. But I also recall feeling despair and relentlessly crying while drafting it. While ES and I have evolved into two people who enjoy each other’s company, at least sometimes, we will never go on a road trip. My tearful recognition was that I am my own unreliable narrator, and my analyst and I will never be friends. 

A Paid Advertisement

Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts, my short story collection, will be published on November 3, 2023, by Archway Editions. Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts is also the title of an imaginary short story collection in my aforementioned short story, “The Analyst,” which is dedicated to ES. Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts: ES did not write it. I did. But the book is also hers, because my transference is ours. 

Love Letters

I gave a copy of “The Analyst” as a gift to ES one Valentine’s Day a couple of years before the COVID-19 pandemic. This was during a moment in my life when I constantly tried to communicate my desire to crushes using written words of affirmation—love letters, one might say, because I was stupidly writing down my feelings in actual letters. My written advances consistently failed me, were rarely reciprocated. And this failure to communicate desire in writing played out for several more years after I gave ES a copy of “The Analyst”: an unreciprocated profession of yearning, an unrequited love letter of recommendation, a letter mailed to a man living in a monastery, a failed email crush. Writing this now, I cannot help but wonder if the lack of reciprocity that played out in my writing of “The Analyst” is perhaps not that much different from the lack of reciprocity I experienced each time I professed my feelings for a crush in writing. “A dream is a wish your heart makes,” Cinderella sings. In my dream, the wish is always to be loved back. At least, in the case of “The Analyst,” I am left with a story to publish. And, if my dream comes true, maybe I’ll one day be the subject of a clinical case study.