The September 11 Dream Project

A few days after September 11, I had a dream about American Airlines Flight 11, the first of the two hijacked jets that crashed into the World Trade Center. The dream disturbed me because it seemed far too literal, too stark and unembellished; it was as if I'd dreamed an exact transcription of an account I'd read in the newspaper. There were no incongruous images, no bizarre shifts in setting, no puzzling scenarios of the sort one usually encounters in dreams. The dream merely inserted me in place of one of the hijackers' victims. Even my final cries - "I see water! I see buildings" as the plane screamed toward the Towers - were taken directly from life. Conspicuously absent were the typical distortions that give dreams their fascination and power.

Stunned by the attacks, as we all were, I was unable to think about anything else in the days of confusion and disbelief that followed. My reading was limited to newspaper and magazine reports about the bombings; to enter the imaginary world of a novel, a seemingly banal pleasure I'd always taken for granted, was suddenly out of reach. This dull fixation on the attacks made me worry about psychic breakdown, prompted fears that my inner life would cease. Such thoughts were more than a little self-dramatizing, especially given the suffering of the victims' families and the self-sacrifice of those involved in the rescue efforts at Ground Zero. And yet I don't think my fears were entirely spurious, given the way that the attacks imposed their terrible mastery over all of us, particularly here in New York, in the aftermath of September 11. My dream resonated with a sense that these public events now comprised the only world in which to dwell, that this new environment of bereavement and fear had displaced the more intimate and mundane reality of private life. The enormity of the attacks defied the imagination, left it paralyzed and mute - even, it seemed, in the realm of dreams.

These grim speculations led me to ask people if they'd been dreaming about the events of September 11. I was relieved to find out that the literalism of my dream was the exception, not the rule. The more I listened to others' dreams, the more I came to regard them as a window, however cloudy and imperfect, through which to view our immense collective trauma. From the morning of September 11 there was much talk in the press about the psychological health of the nation, but the language used to discuss what we were feeling often seemed inadequate, ready-made, at times borrowed from other tragedies. There were many instant clichés about September 11. Perhaps this was necessary, since most people had to find a way to express their fears and anxieties and consolations even as language faltered when confronting the task. The dreams and nightmares that came after the attacks, however obscure in meaning, were a direct response to the terror. They testified to the struggles with shock, outrage and loss in ways that were separate from the public discourse framing the attacks. This was why, I thought, they were worth paying attention to.

On October 2, I sent a mass e-mail soliciting descriptions of dreams related to September 11, and asked the recipients to forward my request to others who might want to share their dreams. The response was modest but nonetheless global, with a small 'g': I heard from people in Paris and Taipei, as well as from all over the United States (though the majority of submissions were from Manhattan and Brooklyn). Many of the dreams are gathered below as the September 11 Dream Project. I've edited them sparingly, since it¹s the content of the dream and not the form of the writing that matters. Certain contributions I chose not to include, such as dreams occurring before September 11 that claimed to predict the catastrophe, of which I received a few, or letters that used a dream as a springboard for polemical statements, whatever their political bent. I asked that contributors refrain from interpreting their dreams, because I wanted to preserve intact the strangeness of their logic and imagery.

The dreams should speak for themselves, so I'll limit my comments to a couple of strong impressions. I was struck by the deep concern for family ties that runs through the dreams, expressed through either a surge of protectiveness toward an endangered loved one or a fear of separation during moments of mortal danger ("I wince at this terrible death," writes one of the contributors, "and at the idea that my family will imagine it when they hear"; another dream ends in anguished uncertainty: "I can't find my family, and I sit down to rest next to a family with three small boys, and I don't want the boys to see me crying so I stop.") More surprising, perhaps, is how funny many of the dreams are, bringing to the surface a black humor that would have seemed illicit in our waking lives back in September. There was no place for comedy of any sort in those days of ash and dust and irrevocable loss; perhaps these dreams responded to that void by conjuring the absurd and provoking us to laugh, however guilty such laughter may have felt at the time.

As I write, in mid-November, the attacks remain the defining event of the moment, and no one can predict when this moment will end. The slaughter of thousands of innocent people gave birth to the present war and an edgy, uncertain mood that is sure to persist well into the future. But the intensity of September 11 and the days that followed, which no one wanted and no one could have imagined beforehand, is no longer with us. Thankfully not. The so-called returned to normalcy that has come about during the last few weeks is better described as the absence of that intensity, a release from the shattering feelings of grief, anger, and bewilderment that were so raw in the wake of those murderous assaults. These dreams are the most shadowy and ephemeral of phenomena, but I hope they bear witness to what was submerged in the minds of some of us as we endured those hard, wearying days.

James Gibbons

 James Gibbons is Assistant Editor at the Library of America. His essays have appeared in Raritan, Bookforum, and other publications. He lives in Brooklyn.