How to Remember Your Dreams
A Dream Story by Matt Leibel
Before you go to sleep, swallow three memories. These could be anything: the time you made S’mores in Iceland; the time you were set up on a date in a new city and the woman brought her sister and her mom along, and also their dog tried to bite you; the time a neighbor kid played you “Christian Rock” and for months, doggedly tried to convert you. Imagine the memories in capsule form and wash them down with artificial dream water (available over the counter at selected Walgreens). Dream a stenographer, park them in the corner of your dream with an old-school Smith-Corona typewriter, a coffee, a muffin, and leave them there throughout the night. Proceed to let your dream wash over you like an image tsunami. Don’t worry if any of it makes sense. Don’t worry if it’s traumatizing (your great-grandmother being reincarnated to sing L’il Nas X’s “Old Town Road” loudly in a Kosher Deli, for instance). Just let the stenographer do his/her/their thing. When you wake up, there should be a full-color printout of your dream waiting on your nightstand. Take this to your therapist’s office and ask them to analyze it. It’s probably about your fear of failure, your fear of losing teeth, your fear of flying insects, or your fear of your mother. You might also have accidentally dreamt the nuclear codes, in which case your therapist is legally obligated to report you to the FBI. To avoid situations like this, try to control your dreams in advance by “pre-dreaming” while still awake. On a sheet of paper, draw a line down the middle and label one column “what I do want to dream about” and label the other one “what I don’t want to dream about.” Fill in both sides. Just before you go to sleep, reverse the column headings so the “dos” are in the “don’ts” column, and vice versa. Because your dreams are not going to give you what you want: that’s much less fun for them. If the paper is blank in the morning, it means you dreamt of nothing at all. It could also mean you literally dreamt of a blank sheet of paper all night, which could signify (no therapist’s interpretation required here) that you have writer’s block, which I’ll admit I’m feeling a bit of, trying to find an ending to this brief disquisition on dreams. Maybe I’ll sleep on it, and the answer will be clear in the morning. Or maybe it will be a four-headed dog, singing the Gettysburg Address, barbershop-quartet style under a full moon—which, in the moments just before waking, morphs into the face of every writing teacher I’ve ever had, imploring me: DON’T PUT DREAMS INTO YOUR WORK.
Matt Leibel lives and dreams in San Francisco. His short fiction has appeared in Post Road, Electric Literature, Portland Review, The Normal School, Quarterly West, Socrates on the Beach, Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, matchbook, and Wigleaf. His work has also been anthologized in Best Small Fictions 2024 and Best Microfiction 2025. Find him online at mattleibel.com
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