Fear and Power in the Russian Dreamscape

In August of 2020, I wrote in Putin Does Not Exist:

I’ve been playing with the idea of a “psychopolitical method”—a system of views and practices that would treat the inner life of the soul and the political dynamics of the society as parts of the whole, so one could apply it equally well to their personal life and the life of their city, country, the world.

Things one sees in their dreams and on their TV would be put on equal footing.

It’d be akin to Marxism or Freudian psychoanalysis in how they turn seemingly disparate events into a coherent picture that can guide one in thought and action.

This “dreams = news” idea has been in the background of much of my work. Most recently, I put it on the front page of an imagined newspaper with with real-world news, The Kali Yuga Chronicle:

Glenn Loury later used three stories from it in a pilot of an animated news show.

Lately, the news—of the war in Ukraine, a fascist crackdown in Russia, and the various consequences of both—have all but taken over my life. It’s hard to pay attention to anything else.

It is also hard to say anything useful about these things. I’m often left speechless and thoughtless.

So I’m going to try balancing out the news with the dreams, and see where that leads me.

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In a dream from two years ago, I’m watching Putin’s annual televised press-conference. But I’m seeing more than the event itself: somehow, I also perceive what led to each part of it, how and by whom it was prepared. I am “stunned,” according to the entry in my dream journal.

It turns out that the media and the intelligence services work as two independent arms of an immersive state theater designed to entertain one person. Their job is to arrange open-ended scenarios, contexts and situations, in which Putin would have a swell, easy time time playing the role of a leader, a winner, a person in control of all situations.

No-one was ever explicitly told that this was their job, and it is well understood that the artificial nature of the resulting reality is not to be mentioned out loud. Putin himself was never briefed on any of this and has plausible deniability as to how fake or real anything is. This principle of silence is important because it keeps the game feel real to all the participants—each knows about the parts they made up, but the rest just might be for real.

The only other rule that’s truly important, never to be broken or spoken about, is that Putin must always win.

If a spy or a journalist contributes to a view of reality in which Putin is having a difficult time, they’re going against the very premise of the national LARP, and must be removed from the game.

Both forces use unwitting people as pawns.

There are two specific stories that I remember.

In one, government agents incited a group of aloof, disgruntled teenagers to start making plans to assassinate Putin and seize control of the government. There was never a credible threat, but agents made the teenagers believe they were serious players. All but one were sentenced to death, but this was all only setting the stage. The goal of the operation was to leave one kid alive and bring him to the conference, so that Putin can talk to him personally, with the nation watching on live TV. He happily did so, using the tone of a harsh but merciful king.

The event also included questions and remarks from ordinary citizens.

One was angry at Putin for being too soft on the country’s enemies and demanded “harsher methods” from him. Putin spread his hands, shrugging: “They’re plenty harsh as it is. We’ve just executed all of this young man’s friends. True, this was necessary, but it was also sad: most of them were very young, brainwashed by the forces we all are aware of and need not mention by name.”

This was a good way to word it: the Russian secret services saw a humorous nod of approval, while the general public heard a reference to the U.S. State Department, the CIA, and MI6.

The second segment included a woman whose face was covered with a grey silky veil and couldn’t be seen. She was unhappy with the President too. She said,

“Your wedding must be called off.

You have no right to marry.

You already have a wife, and her name is Russia.”

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In much of today’s waking reality, Putin’s having a harder-than-usual time playing the winner: the war’s in a stalemate, the Russian economy is devastated by sanctions and boycotts, the country has no allies sans Belarus, there is a massive brain drain, and the actions of the military are destroying the reputation of the entire nation at an ever-increasing pace.

I wonder how much all of this matters to Putin himself. It would seem to depend on how good the spy-media complex is at maintaining his private reality.

How many people—screenwriters, actors, CGI artists, masseuses, and chefs—would it take to keep him convinced he’s still winning, as they spend the rest of their lives in a nuclear shelter after the end of the world?

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In another old dream

¹

, I’m running down a cobbled street in a vaguely Mediterranean town. There are a few friends by my side and an armed-to-the-teeth police squad behind me.

I’ve been worried and on the move the whole day. It started out hazy, but little by little I began to gain some lucidity, and the more attention I paid to the plot, the more suspicious it made me. There was a corpse in a bathroom, then handcuffs, and then a chance to escape. There was no time to think whether it made any sense.

But as I am running, something clicks.

I realize I am dreaming.

Which means guns can’t hurt me.

I stop and turn around slowly. A barrel of a gun is staring me in the face, and I’m looking back at it. Then I look up and meet the cop’s eyes.

I need to reassess my situation. I see he’s reassessing it too.

“This is a dream. We don’t need to run.”

I say something to that extent to a friend, but I can’t hear his reply. The cops, of which there are many, simultaneously turn their heads to one another and start talking loudly, drowning our voices in theirs. Communication becomes impossible, and even thinking straight gets hard.

What I do understand is it’s not a cop squad that I’m dealing with. It is an impersonal, psychic force, not quite separate from me, that wants to keep me distracted, isolated, confused, or afraid.

When it’s successful, the dream feels very real. The better I get at paying attention and keeping my cool—and I’ve gotten pretty damn good at it by the end—the trippier reality gets, the more freedom I have in it, and the better I understand what’s going on.

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Later in the same dream, I find myself in an alcove in an old brick basement. Around me are colorful fairytale characters that need my help.

They say, “We are like living sentences. Each one is a message that keeps repeating itself. But what these messages mean we don’t know ourselves.”

I ask them to say what they are, one by one. I listen attentively and try my best to understand. The messages do seem related, and by holding them in my mind, I start to piece together a narrative.

But soon, we hear loud footsteps—the police state of mind has found us, and we decide to disperse.

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The dream goes on like this for a while: some running and hiding, followed by talking and contemplation, followed by running and hiding again.

At the end, I come to a quiet part of the town, seemingly on the outskirts, with a desert approaching it from one side. There is a beer kiosk and two aging men having a pint at a bar table next to it.

Wide-eyed and filled with adrenaline from all my adventures, I’m eager to talk to these old-timers: “What do you think is this world? And what should we be doing in it?”

The men are not enthralled by my questions. I can’t quote them from memory (I had to leave my dream journals in Russia), but the general vibe is:

“The world is what you see all around.

You do what you want.

For instance, we’re having a beer.“

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More recent dreams.

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In today’s waking nightmare, I am not lucid. I’m in the run-away-from-the-cops stage of my life.

I still don’t know what reality is and I have a hard time thinking about the question. Whatever it is, it includes dead unarmed people, with their hands tied behind their backs, lying in the streets and mass graves in Bucha and other Ukrainian towns.

²

I do care about the second cursed question: What is to be done?

For now, the answer is I don’t know.

I try to be patient.

I let the feelings of uselessness arise and then pass away.

I hope that a better answer lies somewhere behind them.

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Cops are a common motif in my dreams. Another one is trains. They seem to represent life trajectories that I’m sometimes able to choose from, and at other times am carried along by the momentum of previous choices.

Once, I got on the wrong train and ended up in a city where there was a game: those who knew they were in a dream were trying to scare others into believing the dream was real.

I didn’t know I was sleeping when I first arrived. A crowd of “meta-Nazis”—that’s how I described them in my notes when I woke up—were going through the station, coming towards me. I was trying to figure out if I should be afraid when one of them gave me a friendly nod, as if he knew who I was. I went by them calmly and quietly.

Over the next few scenes, several seemingly unconnected people (and one small dog) tried to scare me, and this somehow made me suspect I was sleeping.

I eventually ended up on a mountain plateau, where a bunch of travelers were having a picnic. By now, I knew I was dreaming, and I also knew what the scare game was all about. I was practicing lucidity by trying to levitate.

In front of me was a cliff, and several kids were playing at its very age. I realized this was a great opportunity for me to make a big entrance into the game: if I pushed a kid off the cliff, it would undoubtedly scare everyone who was looking. But I wasn’t sure I want to play this game as it seemed cruel; and more importantly, what if I misunderstood something about the nature of dreams? I could end up actually killing a child.

As I was weighing my doubts, one of the kids looked me straight in the eye. He paused, stopping me in my thought, and then suddenly ran off and leaped off the cliff. It was so unexpected that I got scared for him myself, and a rush of adrenaline woke me up.

I thought, with my heart beating fast, “the little fucker outplayed me.”

³

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About a year ago, I dreamt I was running around in some catacombs with a bunch of heavily armed military types, and once again, I realized I was dreaming in the middle of this. Like in the earlier dream, I stopped running and looked the group’s leader straight in the eyes. I said to him, sternly: “This is a dream. You’re my imagination.”

I expected a triumph.

But he just stared back, silently and unimpressed. His facial expression said,

“Maybe.

So what?

What are you going to do now?”

I don't remember much of the rest of the dream, but I remember thinking at that moment, “This might be a long one.”

I knew I was going to get tired of knowing this was a dream and still having to go through whatever adventures these people were in. I was still in the catacombs, there were still gunshots around, and they were making it hard to disengage from the chaos and focus instead on contemplating the nature of the dream world.

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1. After I wrote this, I found I’ve already described this dream in Psypol in April of 2020, while thinking about the pandemic. I include the slightly different description here, because it’s a good illustration of how versatile these dream metaphors are—they find ways to apply themselves to very different waking-life contexts:

In my dreams, there’s often an impersonal force that operates through shape-shifting agents whose goal is to scare or manipulate me into following bullshit plot lines instead of paying attention to the nature of the dream world.

Once, my friends and I were being chased by riot police down a cobbled street in a southern city. I had been feeling the same kind of suspicion that day as the one I’ve been feeling this month, and during the chase it evolved into a knowing that I’m in a dream.

This meant that the cops posed no threat to me. I stopped and turned around. A barrel of an automatic rifle was pointing at my face, but it seemed no more dangerous than a toy gun. I turned my head to talk to a friend, but my voice drowned in a growing hum coming from all around: seeing that fear lost its effectiveness, the cops started talking loudly, all at the same time, making communication and even clear thinking close to impossible.

That’s how this force operates. It uses simple narratives and emotional hooks that require immediate action; and when that doesn’t work, it amplifies the noise, making the signal hard to perceive or transmit. Its goal is to not let me notice how strange, fluid and interactive the dream reality is, how central attention is to its creation and operation.

Death, illness and cops are good tested ways to make situations feel real. They sometimes come up in these dreams, and the virus (an impersonal, invisible force) has been making them more numerous in the waking world lately. Still, the pandemic—the most compelling, immersive news story that I’ve heard in years—somehow stops short of being fully compelling. I don’t really know what that means.

The best way I’ve found for thinking about it is that this new global narrative we’re living out is more like a writing prompt than a developing story. It’s a premise we now need to build on. And there may be a deadline.

2. “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,“ wrote German philosopher Theodor Adorno.

3. I wrote about this one as well.