Humanity Falls from Too Much Ambition

Last night I dreamed that several friends and I entered a peculiar store whose employees were apparently required to be geniuses. Nothing was sold. You went there to discuss history with exceptionally intelligent people, which strikes me as the sort of retail concept that would survive approximately eleven minutes in the American marketplace.

We began discussing 9/11. But because dreams have no obligation to respect architecture, history, or basic proportionality, the Twin Towers had been replaced by twelve yoga blocks. I began stacking them, one on top of another, until I had constructed a precarious foam monument to civilization.

I studied my creation and announced, with the confidence available only to prophets and sleeping people, “Humanity falls from too much ambition.”

Everyone seemed impressed.

Apparently, I had solved history with yoga equipment.

The conversation turned melancholy. We commiserated over tragedy and began exchanging memories. I told everyone about having lived in Africa. This was technically true: I lived in Nairobi when I was young. But Dream Me found those actual memories insufficiently interesting. Instead, I began describing African countries that did not exist, places I had visited only in other dreams several years earlier.

Nobody challenged me.

Quite the opposite. My African past conferred enormous prestige. The room seemed to interpret my stories as evidence that I possessed some rare combination of worldliness, political sophistication, moral seriousness, and international cachet. I was no longer merely a man who had lived in Nairobi as a boy. I had become Africa Man, seasoned traveler of nonexistent republics, bearer of mysterious geopolitical wisdom.

Among those impressed was the podcaster Josh Szeps.

Szeps decided that a man of my obvious stature could not simply be allowed to return home. He invited me to stay at his mansion-apartment in New York.

The dream version of Josh Szeps had achieved success on a scale that would embarrass a Russian oligarch. His apartment building had an enormous green elevator—not merely painted green but glowing with some supernatural emerald radiance. Stepping inside filled me with childish exhilaration. This was not an elevator designed to transport residents between floors. This was an elevator announcing that you had ascended into another caste.

When the doors opened, we entered an immense atrium where Szeps was entertaining the global elect. Diplomats circulated among the guests. Relatives of former presidents lounged around an enormous swimming pool. Beautiful people floated in the water with the effortless tans of people who apparently had assistants responsible for ultraviolet exposure.

I prepared to join them.

Then I removed my shirt.

I looked down.

My pale torso confronted me with brutal democratic clarity.

Everyone else seemed bronzed, sleek, and organically adapted to wealth. I looked like a man who had accidentally wandered out of Costco carrying a rotisserie chicken.

Suddenly I wasn’t sure I belonged in the pool.

Yet what struck me most strongly wasn’t embarrassment. It was desire.

I looked around at the atrium, the pool, the diplomats, the presidential relatives, the magical elevator, the impossible dimensions of the apartment, and discovered something about myself I might have preferred not to know.

I loved it.

“This is really for me,” I thought.

The realization was almost obscene.

I had apparently spent decades cultivating the identity of a reasonably skeptical intellectual while concealing somewhere inside myself a minor Bourbon monarch waiting for suitable accommodations.

But this wasn’t ordinary wealth. Dreams don’t bother with granite countertops and favorable mortgage rates. The opulence had been elevated into myth. Everything glowed. Wealth had become majesty. Privilege had become transcendence. I wasn’t merely visiting a luxurious apartment. I had been admitted into Olympus.

And admission was the crucial part.

The dream wasn’t really about money. It was about tribal membership.

My stories about Africa—an Africa partly real and partly manufactured by my unconscious—had functioned as my entrance credential. I possessed the correct experiences. I understood the correct things. I had traveled through the correct worlds. Therefore, the tribe had recognized me.

Come in.

You’re one of us.

Ride the green elevator.

Meet the diplomats.

Get in the pool.

For a few magnificent minutes, my existence had been externally certified. I was sophisticated. Interesting. Cosmopolitan. Important. People wanted me there. I belonged among the beautiful and consequential.

And apparently my unconscious wasn’t content with mere belonging. It threw in staggering wealth as part of the benefits package.

I got moral prestige, intellectual prestige, social prestige, friendship, acceptance, a New York mansion, international dignitaries, a swimming pool, and a magical green elevator.

My unconscious has extremely reasonable expectations.

The source of this extravaganza was considerably less mysterious than the dream itself. I had fallen asleep listening to Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps. The episode was “Just Josh: The Unlearned Lesson of 9/11.” His voice apparently slipped past the guards at the entrance to my sleeping brain, commandeered the production department, and spent the night directing a surreal pageant about 9/11, Africa, ambition, wealth, status, tribalism, and my insufficiently tanned stomach.

I’ve had these dreams before. A podcast continues playing while I sleep, and its host crosses the membrane between audio and consciousness. Suddenly we are friends. We travel together. We undertake adventures. The voice coming through my earbud becomes a character inhabiting an elaborate world assembled from memories, anxieties, vanity, and whatever psychological contraband happens to be lying around.

This time, however, the dream exposed something wonderfully embarrassing.

I began the evening listening to a serious discussion about the lessons of 9/11.

By morning, my unconscious had transformed it into a fantasy in which my profound connection to imaginary African nations earned me admission to an international aristocracy.

Humanity falls from too much ambition, I had solemnly declared while stacking yoga blocks.

Then I got on the magic elevator because apparently I wanted the penthouse.