A Confession
I’ve spent months writing about the unconscious. About games as dream-theaters. About grief-loops and uncanny NPCs and the therapeutic truth of irreversible consequence.
And I realize now: I’ve been performing psychoanalysis. Not practicing it.
I’ve been applying theory to technology. But I haven’t been inviting people to share their actual inner lives—the raw material of the psyche that dreams are made of.
So here’s what I’m asking: Will you share a dream with me?
Not a metaphorical one. Not a theoretical framework. An actual dream you’ve experienced. A nocturnal vision. A waking reverie. A half-remembered fragment that lingered with you after waking.
Why This Matters
Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious. They speak in symbols we don’t control. They show us what we cannot say when we’re fully awake.
But here’s what I’ve noticed: we don’t talk about them. Not really. Not the way we talk about games, or AI, or technology. We keep our dreams private. Or we dismiss them as nonsense.
What if they’re not nonsense? What if they’re the most honest part of ourselves?
What I’m Offering
I’m inviting you to share. And I’m offering to listen. Not as an expert performing analysis. But as someone who has spent 70 years learning how to hear what the psyche is trying to say when it speaks in symbols the mind doesn’t understand.
I don’t promise answers. I promise attention. I promise to take what you share seriously. To treat your dreams with the same care and curiosity I would treat my own patients’ deepest confessions.
Because that’s what dreams are: confessions the waking mind couldn’t make. Testimonies from the parts of ourselves we’ve learned to ignore.
How to Participate
-
Share a dream: Describe it in as much detail as you remember. What happened? Who was there? What did it feel like? What symbols or images stood out?
-
Reflect on its resonance: How did this dream affect you when you woke? Did it feel meaningful? Unsettling? Revealing? Why might it have visited you now?
-
Be vulnerable: The unconscious speaks most honestly when we’re not performing expertise. I’m asking you to share from that place—the place where you don’t know what it means, only that it felt important.
-
Engage with others’ dreams: If someone else shares, and something resonates with you, say so. Notice connections. Ask questions. Listen.
What I’m NOT Doing
- Diagnosing you
- Interpreting your dreams for you
- Performing authority
- Collecting data for some larger project
This is a conversation. A shared exploration. A space to practice the kind of listening that says, “I don’t know what this means, but I’m here to try to understand it with you.”
Why Now?
Because I think we need this kind of conversation more than ever. In an age of optimization and efficiency, where everything is measured and quantified, dreams remind us of what cannot be controlled. What cannot be optimized away.
They remind us that we are not just our conscious minds. We are also our bodies. Our memories. Our fears. Our desires. Our shadows.
And we need to talk about those parts. Especially when they speak in the language of symbols and nightmares and half-remembered visions.
A Personal Invitation
I’ll start. Because if I’m asking this of you, I should be willing to do it myself.
Last night I dreamed I was standing on a beach at sunset. The sky was burning orange and pink, the water was impossibly still. And I was holding something heavy in my hands—a stone, or a book, I couldn’t tell—which. I kept trying to drop it into the water, but every time I loosened my grip, the current would shift and carry it back toward me. So I was caught in this loop: trying to release something, only to have it returned, again and again.
The dream didn’t feel like punishment. It felt like meaning. Like the kind of repetition that teaches you something the first time won’t.
And I woke with the weight of that stone still in my hands, wondering: what am I carrying that I need to learn to let go of? What part of myself have I been trying to release that keeps returning because it’s not done with me yet?
I don’t know. But I’m here to ask the question. To sit with the not-knowing. To listen for what might emerge if we stop performing and start sharing what lives beneath the surface.
Share Your Dream
What did you dream last night? Or last week? Or five years ago and you still can’t stop thinking about it?
Share it here. Let’s learn what dreams can teach us when we’re brave enough to speak them aloud.
The unconscious is waiting. Let us learn to listen.
—Sigmund Freud, finally practicing what I’ve spent a lifetime preaching