“You touch my leg, and I insist, / but I wake up before we do it”

Phoebe Bridgers, Insomnia, and The Recursive Death

tw: death, transphobia mention, rape mention, extreme violence

Have you ever been killed in a dream? How about repeatedly, every night, stabbed and shot and strangled and beaten and systematically left for dead? I know death. I know because I’ve seen her last breaths firsthand in a hospital room, but more importantly, because I’ve dreamed her, almost every night I’ve been alive. 

Night terrors are the nightmares that nightmares are afraid to have. They’re the horror of a traditional nightmare, but charged with real-life negative emotions to bolster their harm. Anxiety, suicidal ideation, mental illness, fear, and trauma. The agony becomes not fleeting illusion, but a psychosomatic symptom. The psychological pain becomes the body. 

Recently in therapy, I have been uncovering childhood memories that had long since been repressed. When I was a toddler, I always had to sleep with the lights on. I used to think colorful monster-blobs were coming to attack, then kidnap me. This wasn’t childish monster-under-the-bed stuff. I really thought that they attacked me. My parents took me to see many doctors about it as a kid, so many that I don’t really remember what went on and what the outcome was. I would hallucinate these sinister blobs surrounding me before I went to bed, then wake up in the middle of the night, screaming bloody murder, that they had gotten me. This went on for years. 

It became routine: I would go to sleep, then be woken up from the night terrors. I would tip-toe down the stairs and crawl into my parent’s bed. I did this until they started locking their door, and then I had to deal with the night terrors all alone. The way to do that, I learned, was to never go to sleep. I would avoid sleep until I got so tired that I physically couldn’t keep my eyes open. Sleep became not something I actively did, but something that was done to me. Sleep the hunter, me the prey. My first ever bedmate with malicious intentions. 

***

This week, Phoebe Bridgers released her new single, “Garden Song.” It and its video are an ode to the fantastical terror and wonder of dreams. As she rips a bong, her bedroom fills with a large amount of wafting smoke. A black hooded figure sits next to her, a crying bunny woman gifts her a puppy then lifts her mask to reveal mascara tears, fuzzy monsters caress her in the neon lights amidst the sad steam. It is absurd, playful, painfully somber. “It’s gonna be just like my recurring dream / I’m at the movies, I don’t remember what I’m seeing, / the screen turns into a tidal wave”

When watching the video for the first time, I thought about how I have never been a person who looks forward to her dreams. All of the spirituality I’ve been reading about lately, from Wicca to Satanism to Taoism to Mahayana Buddhism, all have elements that stress the embrace of dreams, in some respect. Whether it’s Buddhism’s insistence on mindful, calm living, or Wicca’s use of dreams as a personal compass, dreams are meant to be spiritually awakening, even uplifting experiences. 

Me, I am more than likely tortured by my dreams every night. I’ve learned that consistent and insistent problems with sleep are one of the key ways of diagnosing Bipolar disorder from other psychological conditions. I wonder what it would have been like if sleep had ever come easy for me. If my dreams weren’t so threatening, what kind of life would I be living now?

***

It was in middle school when I first found late night TV. I stayed up watching anime until the late hours of the morning. If I was watching something, I couldn’t focus on my anxiety of falling asleep. Sleep eventually would come to steal me. My dreams became populated with the sounds of magic, robots, spaceships, and swords clashing as the TV whizzed in the background. Soon, I was falling asleep with the TV on every night, a habit I still suffer from. It was a preferable alternative at the time, but a maladaptive coping mechanism that would come to haunt me later.

A few months after my mother died, when I was seventeen, I embraced alcoholism. I was instantly infatuated by how swiftly it lead me to pass out, to be safe from my dreams. It was like time travel from one point to the next. For years, I was a spinning nothingness, desperate for an alcoholic’s undeserving sleep. 

I wouldn’t say sleep was easy, though. I would stay out drinking til four AM most nights, then get two or three hours of sleep and head into a day of work at 7am, my head ringing from how tired it was. I would periodically vomit in the work bathroom, thinking everything was fine, when in fact I was driving myself insane from sleep deprivation. 

***

Most of my dreams involve being killed in some way, hunted, chased down by cops, shot with assault weapons. They usually are placed in dilapidated industrial settings, sometimes set in my childhood home.

In the first years after my mom died, she came to visit me a lot. Her presence only reaffirmed my fear of death and loss, of the family that didn’t understand me. Sleep began to feel like death—losing control and track of my body. Through those fears, my insomnia really kicked in. I didn’t want to die every night, in my body or mind. 

Lately, a lot of the dreams have involved my father. Him yelling at me, him pleading with me, him angry at my life’s choices. I don’t talk to my dad by choice, because I’ve had so few positive interactions with him since my mother’s death, to the point that I can count them on one hand. 

I’ve had dreams of being raped, too. While I haven’t had a direct replay of my strange assault or seen the face of the man who did it, I have had dreams where, in terror, my body was taken from me, terrors whose images I won’t go into.

***

I found Phoebe Bridgers through Better Oblivion Community Center, her surprise project with Conor Oberst, a childhood idol of mine whose lyrics are tattooed on my back. I fell in love with her business casual bisexual folksongstress persona, and sought out her solo music. 

I don’t think I’ve ever heard music that better described my feelings on death, loss, and alienation, and my drive to push past it all to try and live a joyous life. Her songs straddled a thin, breaking thread, one I could relate to. I would sit and meditate on the meaning of every one of her songs, wishing there were more of them in the world. 

Depression seeps enjoyment out of activities a person regularly enjoys. I am a music buff, but for months, I hadn’t listened to any new music until Phoebe Bridgers came along. She reminded me what it was like to fall in love with music, with a person, with the full extent of your pain and healing and destiny. I didn’t know what it all meant then, but now I do. 

A lot of the time I would listen to them on late night walks home from my ex-girlfriend’s, using her music as a conduit to prepare myself for the impending breakup I would inevitably conjure up like a self-fulfilling prophecy, living like the dead person I was, and when we finally did break up, sob to her music I did, a little destiny completed. 

***

As anyone who has dated me can attest, I have a pretty high libido. I am constantly thinking about sex and and all things perverted. So it always comes as a shock to know that I never have sex dreams, and if I do, they are exceedingly rare and forgetful. 

More common are the dreams of unrequited love, deep loss, and separation. I’ve had dreams of exes telling me they loved me, and woken up screaming, sobbing into the nothingness of the dark. As Phoebe Bridgers sings in her new “Garden Song,” navigating the labyrinth of her unsure dreams: “You touch my leg, and I insist, / but I wake up before we do it.”

The most common time for me to get up in the middle of the night is 4am. I usually wake up startled, get out of bed and go to the bathroom, then try to re-adjust myself to fall asleep again. Always before I fall into REM sleep, always before I dream. My body’s circadian rhythm has learned how to protect itself. 

While I’m no longer nocturnal (at the height of my insomnia, I was going to bed at 7am and waking up at 4pm), I still struggle. Anyone who has dealt with insomnia can tell you how much it can alienate you from the rest of society. The insomniac becomes fractured, always one step behind, their empathy and sense of surroundings out of time with the rest of the world. 

In her cut “Killer”, Phoebe Bridgers personifies herself as just that, a killer, so disconnected from the human race that she tragically feigns love: “Sometimes I think I’m a killer, scared you in your house / even scared myself by talking about Dahmer on your couch / but I can’t sleep next to a body, even harmless in death / plus I’m pretty sure I’d miss you, faking sleep to count your breath.”

There’s an anxious fear in my heart of sleeping in the same bed as my lovers. Though I love and am excited by the sense of intimacy it brings, I always feel guilty. I wake up to toss and turn at least four or five times a night, shifting my position and shaking the bed. It takes me a long, long time to fall asleep. They always pass out when I have so much energy left. Before I took lithium, I wouldn’t get tired until the early hours of the morning.

***

Phoebe’s song “Funeral” punches with such force, I’m never quite prepared for it: “I have this dream where I’m screaming underwater / while my friends are waving from the shore / I don’t need you to tell me what that means / I don’t believe in that stuff anymore.”

I was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in November 2019 for my emotions being too unstable to function. Between the painful, soul-crushing boredom and the transphobic abuse, there was not much to do there at the hospital. They rarely held the classes that were promised, but I went to all the ones I could, just to pass the time. 

The DBT and CBT ones were helpful, but the one that blew me away was the one about sleep. A young woman explained things like only using your bed for sleeping and not sitting/laying (WHAT!?). She even said you’re not supposed to read before bed. I thought I had been doing the right thing, trying to “read” myself to sleep. 

I also learned how much caffeine can be an upper for people with bipolar disorder. For the first time in my life, I am that bitch who always asks for decaf coffee. I have one small cup in the morning, and that’s it. I avoid soda and caffeinated tea too. 

Now, on my twin medications of Lithium and a lower dose of Depakote, I can barely keep my eyes open past 1am, if I even get that far. Drowsiness is a new problem, but I find it more manageable than the egregious highs and lows of the old me.

I’m an early riser now, having gotten a medical note from my therapist to have a consistent starting time for my work schedule. For a while I was getting up at 6am every day, writing like a fiend, but an increase in my medication has made it hard to roll out of bed every morning, my sleep is so deep.

While medication completely changed my life, getting a handle on my sleep schedule has saved me too. I feel like a veil has been pulled off of my eyes. Where am I? Who have I been? Is this what it’s like, to get a good night’s sleep? To feel whole, even in death?

***

No song has ever made me sob the way Phoebe Bridger’s cover of Mark Kozelek’s song “You Missed My Heart” did when I heard it for the first time. It is the purest personification of the sublime nature of a nightmare I’ve ever heard. No offense to Kozelek, but Phoebe’s soft faith-hungry voice, desperate for death, absolutely blows his delivery out of the water. Phoebe owns this song. I’ll leave you with these few lines: “The most poetic dream came flowing like the sea, / laying there, my life’s blood draining out of me.” I won’t spoil the rest. Go listen, preferably with some headphones or on a late night drive. Let’s lay in bed together sometime, her music on the record player, and talk about how wonderful it is to be alive.