Bees, Birds, Cake
Guest Essay by Marley Medina
The below essay is guest-written by my perfect friend Marley Medina, with whom I share an eternal and spiritual history and future. Her substack is here, and her Instagram is here.
Recently, I’ve been having very vivid, very weird dreams. The kind of dreams that make my waking life feel a little more gauzy, sticking to me all day long.
A couple of weeks ago, I dreamt that Dakota Johnson was climbing up the walls of an art gallery like a spider, crawling towards her nest. Another night, I dreamt that I was pregnant, running through a field of bushy, golden crop, and all of the sudden, stopped short, realizing the potential of my life had been drained out like watercolor meeting the branchy texture of a canvas. I dreamt last night that I had signed up for a very intense cooking class and then, while I was focusing on how to make a perfect chocolate cake, the instructor started yelling at me, telling me I was a disgrace and my mother should be ashamed of me. I don’t know what mistake I had made to prompt this, but I started screaming back at her, trying to defend myself, to the chagrin of all the other older women in the cooking class who seemed to agree with her.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve experienced peaks and valleys of weird vivid dreams. They usually come in batches, one night after another, until my dreams go back to being pale, bleary, and hard to reach even if I try. I used to hate the kind that made me feel like I was wading through the remnants of the swampy dream world all day, freaked out by the loss of control in my dreams, let alone the feeling lingering long after I was awake.
The events of the past couple of years of my life have not helped this sensation, much of them very dreamlike themselves. Three years ago, before my ex broke up with me, I was alone in our shared hotel room and a New York City bird flew right over my head, presumably which had entered through the window that I’d closed when I got back into the room. When I called my ex to come help me, the bird was nowhere to be found, in fact, it was never to be seen by anyone but me.
This year I moved apartments twice, once because of a mold infestation and the other time because there were over 25,000 bees found living in the walls of my bedroom. In the interim, I lived with my best friend in the beautiful house she was sitting, owned by a man I’d never met, co-owned by the ghosts that roamed its halls. I became very scared of the silent phantom that lived in the guest room, so every night I slept on the very comfy couch while the homeowner's dog farted directly into my face. I also ate many delicious caesar salad wraps.
For the last five years, I have repeatedly watched what I thought to be the reality of my life deteriorate into something I did not recognize. In response to this, my brain’s automatic attempts to hold onto control – via the placement of items in my apartment, my body, my hair, my face – worsened. Choices like, “should I get takeout sushi from a place I’ve never been before?” weighed on me (because, well, I have vetted with both my eagle eyed attention to detail and trial and error my favorite restaurants in Los Angeles and if I am not there to inspect and watch then what will befall me? I have OCD btw.) My intrusive thoughts became gnarled branches I had trouble bending my way through.
The belief that my actions have the most extreme correlative responses translates to the idea that anything that happens that is uncomfortable, painful or hurtful, is my fault, for not choosing better, for not being smarter. It separates life into black or white, two choices, good or bad. Morality, in this mental landscape, is a choice between those two things and those two only. Beyond being pretty juvenile, this coping mechanism gives me no actual choices and few steps forward. It doesn’t align with the belief in my heart that mistakes happen, people can apologize and be forgiven, that empathy and love are at the core of what makes any real sense to me at all.
I have also watched the soil of my leveled past regrow into something different. The strange events of my life (and my weird dreams) have challenged me to let go of the habits that have anchored me into a false sense of safety, creating a practice of identifying what is within my control, what is even worth trying to be. I have found most, if not all, of the things that I hold most dear, require giving up control almost completely.
In Letters to a Young Poet (which I read because it is the favorite book of Harry Styles’ ex girlfriend Camille Rowe), Rilke says the below in a passage I love:
“We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience.”
I’ve recently come to appreciate the more strange and bizarro dreams. Sometimes life resembles the dream world more than anything else, and in those moments maybe our dreams can teach us how to proceed. Swimming through the nonsense while holding true to the things you know you cherish. When I spend a day feeling like I just watched Dakota Johnson crawl up a wall or get yelled at by a cooking class teacher or see a bird no one else sees, it feels less like a loss of control and more like a reiteration of a fact of life; if we can stay present with difficult and challenging things, at least we have a choice.
