There’s something about dreams had when you are young: how the shape they take might mirror the wisp of worn hair, or perhaps the fuzzy blaze of San Bernardino summer. There’s something about the worlds you create, when the center of your universe was an empty church, a dilapidated basketball court; when sanctuary was an abandoned boat, washed against the rocks at the end of a freshly-paved parking lot. When I was young, I dreamt about taking that broken boat and setting sail towards the middle of the Pacific. I would somehow find myself adrift, lying against the rafts staring into a blue sky, dozing off into a dream.

There’s something about the innocence you hold, or maybe the innocence you lost; something about the dreams conceived that dissolve when you age, how your naïve fantasies once took the shape of your nauseating feelings; that dreaming no longer takes a form so vivid and intense, and that no one expects or prefers your dreams to take those forms anymore.

But I’ve never been able to really meet that expectation: that one should not let their dreams take those forms; that one should not let it “get to their head.” I’m too intense, too passionate, too contemplative, for such a thing. I want to form dreams, build worlds, create images, but most of all—I want to have feelings.

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Believe me, this mind makeup is nothing I wholeheartedly enjoy. It leaves me wrought with worry, paralyzed with fear, and often still stubborn about indulging those nauseating feelings. I’m building worlds upon fine porcelain, upon fragile glass. I’m trying to navigate as though I can actually live in these images I create because, how else might I explain reality? We tell ourselves stories to keep us sane. We create these ultimately unreal narratives that have yet to ever manifest. Being introspective, then, is a cursed thing because it makes it easy for the mind to assign a thought upon every single thing. With every thought, a new image is conceived, and with every image grows an inventory of a world created; a world that can never actually exist. Or at least completely.

I think about Susan Sontag’s seminal collection of essays, On Photography, and understand why the photograph became more of our world than the world it was supposed to simply capture. That by framing (and thus excluding) we create images that are within the bounds of our subjective unconsciousness, that we seek a subjectivity that makes us feel safe, that we hope to avoid the whole picture.

Sontag explains, “that photographs are often praised for their candor, their honesty, indicates that most photographs, of course, are not candid.” Equally so, we dream of images that we deeply hope can manifest into reality, that we convince ourselves they are and will be true reality; that this time will be different. And so often we pick up the pieces of a shattered world, we feel so tragically lost, when it ultimately comes to its truth. We mourn over an idea that never had any real weight to it. We let these dreams unlatch us from any groundedness a sobering perspective would have anchored us to.

Sontag: Photographs state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading toward their own destruction. But it’s too cynical, too nihilistic to decide that all images and all dreams must ultimately be fatal. I don’t think On Photography was ever a rigid, totalitarian critique on the act of creating images. No, humans have always created images, and it would be asinine to then tell someone “stop worrying about it.” Once conceived, a dream, a thought, an image, whatever forms from you is now inextricably apart of you. Again: what matters to you, matters to you. It’s not just suppressing these things and somehow believing that you will be free from all emotional hurt. Murakami once more: Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent. And so I try to take Ava Huang’s advice: What if you just gave up on clinging onto experiences? What if you just let the next thing unfold? I share this with friends and I repeat it to myself, but I should take my own advice.

__

That fragile glass of a dream (or dreams) will eventually shatter, yes, but have you ever considered that even being able to form a dream first had to start from yourself? You’re left with pieces of these dreams of yours, but pieces of yours (of you) nonetheless. You might toss these pieces away, clearing the debris, and try to show people you are pristine, unbroken. But what you have actually done is thrown pieces of yourself away. You have neglected that you can also rebuild these dreams. You could always give them new forms.

Jenny Zhang: I think everyone wants to make something touchable, but most of us don’t out of fear of being laughable. Yes: it is humiliating and even painful to piece back these broken pieces, but wouldn’t you want to still have something to share? Something to be proud of? Something worth risking to lose again?

I don’t think Susan Sontag was ever trying to tell us to forget the act of creating images. That because of its inevitable pattern in this capitalist context, photography would simply be a perfunctory act, voyeuristic, and thus ultimately pornographic. No: creating images, having dreams is human nature. It’s a matter of not letting them oppress you: “photographs are a way of imprisoning reality,” Sontag states, “understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still.” Instead, it’s about understanding their fragility, accepting their loss, letting these images pass through you, and ultimately rebuilding them so we have something to still call our own, to still be proud of.

And perhaps that’s the “something” about the dreams when you are young; about the forms they take; about the images you remember. That when we age, as Garth Greenwell laments, and eventually come into full consciousness of ourselves, what we experience is leave-taking and a loss we seek the rest of our lives to restore. Our dreams from their very infancy will inevitably be shattered and we’re left with these pieces. And still, we rebuild them, restore them, from these pieces that are inextricably us.

__

Two years ago in March, I was lying down on a small bath towel separating us and our Mitsuwa set meals from the sand in Venice Beach. I was looking up into that blue sky I once dreamed of. The saltwater winds blowing our hair, having them wrestle each other. I was adrift, laying not on some broken raft as I once dreamt but on the lap of someone I loved, my head against their belly. I was not in the middle of the Pacific, instead on the mounds of sand at its threshold.

A dream, I realize. Familiar and also different. This dream, too, reborn from the pieces of a younger dream, will shatter (has shattered) just as it did then, just as it will again. And so I lied there in the safety of a loved one’s caress, dozing off into another dream: one that I will cherish; one that will be broken; one that will be undeniably mine.

There’s something about dreams had when you are young: how the shape they take might mirror the wisp of worn hair, or perhaps the fuzzy blaze of San Bernardino summer. There’s something about the worlds you create, when the center of your universe was an empty church, a dilapidated basketball court; when sanctuary was an abandoned boat, washed against the rocks at the end of a freshly-paved parking lot. When I was young, I dreamt about taking that broken boat and setting sail towards the middle of the Pacific. I would somehow find myself adrift, lying against the rafts staring into a blue sky, dozing off into a dream.

There’s something about the innocence you hold, or maybe the innocence you lost; something about the dreams conceived that dissolve when you age, how your naïve fantasies once took the shape of your nauseating feelings; that dreaming no longer takes a form so vivid and intense, and that no one expects or prefers your dreams to take those forms anymore.

But I’ve never been able to really meet that expectation: that one should not let their dreams take those forms; that one should not let it “get to their head.” I’m too intense, too passionate, too contemplative, for such a thing. I want to form dreams, build worlds, create images, but most of all—I want to have feelings.

__

Believe me, this mind makeup is nothing I wholeheartedly enjoy. It leaves me wrought with worry, paralyzed with fear, and often still stubborn about indulging those nauseating feelings. I’m building worlds upon fine porcelain, upon fragile glass. I’m trying to navigate as though I can actually live in these images I create because, how else might I explain reality? We tell ourselves stories to keep us sane. We create these ultimately unreal narratives that have yet to ever manifest. Being introspective, then, is a cursed thing because it makes it easy for the mind to assign a thought upon every single thing. With every thought, a new image is conceived, and with every image grows an inventory of a world created; a world that can never actually exist. Or at least completely.

I think about Susan Sontag’s seminal collection of essays, On Photography, and understand why the photograph became more of our world than the world it was supposed to simply capture. That by framing (and thus excluding) we create images that are within the bounds of our subjective unconsciousness, that we seek a subjectivity that makes us feel safe, that we hope to avoid the whole picture.

Sontag explains, “that photographs are often praised for their candor, their honesty, indicates that most photographs, of course, are not candid.” Equally so, we dream of images that we deeply hope can manifest into reality, that we convince ourselves they are and will be true reality; that this time will be different. And so often we pick up the pieces of a shattered world, we feel so tragically lost, when it ultimately comes to its truth. We mourn over an idea that never had any real weight to it. We let these dreams unlatch us from any groundedness a sobering perspective would have anchored us to.

Sontag: Photographs state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading toward their own destruction. But it’s too cynical, too nihilistic to decide that all images and all dreams must ultimately be fatal. I don’t think On Photography was ever a rigid, totalitarian critique on the act of creating images. No, humans have always created images, and it would be asinine to then tell someone “stop worrying about it.” Once conceived, a dream, a thought, an image, whatever forms from you is now inextricably apart of you. Again: what matters to you, matters to you. It’s not just suppressing these things and somehow believing that you will be free from all emotional hurt. Murakami once more: Emotional hurt is the price a person has to pay in order to be independent. And so I try to take Ava Huang’s advice: What if you just gave up on clinging onto experiences? What if you just let the next thing unfold? I share this with friends and I repeat it to myself, but I should take my own advice.

__

That fragile glass of a dream (or dreams) will eventually shatter, yes, but have you ever considered that even being able to form a dream first had to start from yourself? You’re left with pieces of these dreams of yours, but pieces of yours (of you) nonetheless. You might toss these pieces away, clearing the debris, and try to show people you are pristine, unbroken. But what you have actually done is thrown pieces of yourself away. You have neglected that you can also rebuild these dreams. You could always give them new forms.

Jenny Zhang: I think everyone wants to make something touchable, but most of us don’t out of fear of being laughable. Yes: it is humiliating and even painful to piece back these broken pieces, but wouldn’t you want to still have something to share? Something to be proud of? Something worth risking to lose again?

I don’t think Susan Sontag was ever trying to tell us to forget the act of creating images. That because of its inevitable pattern in this capitalist context, photography would simply be a perfunctory act, voyeuristic, and thus ultimately pornographic. No: creating images, having dreams is human nature. It’s a matter of not letting them oppress you: “photographs are a way of imprisoning reality,” Sontag states, “understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still.” Instead, it’s about understanding their fragility, accepting their loss, letting these images pass through you, and ultimately rebuilding them so we have something to still call our own, to still be proud of.

And perhaps that’s the “something” about the dreams when you are young; about the forms they take; about the images you remember. That when we age, as Garth Greenwell laments, and eventually come into full consciousness of ourselves, what we experience is leave-taking and a loss we seek the rest of our lives to restore. Our dreams from their very infancy will inevitably be shattered and we’re left with these pieces. And still, we rebuild them, restore them, from these pieces that are inextricably us.

__

Two years ago in March, I was lying down on a small bath towel separating us and our Mitsuwa set meals from the sand in Venice Beach. I was looking up into that blue sky I once dreamed of. The saltwater winds blowing our hair, having them wrestle each other. I was adrift, laying not on some broken raft as I once dreamt but on the lap of someone I loved, my head against their belly. I was not in the middle of the Pacific, instead on the mounds of sand at its threshold.

A dream, I realize. Familiar and also different. This dream, too, reborn from the pieces of a younger dream, will shatter (has shattered) just as it did then, just as it will again. And so I lied there in the safety of a loved one’s caress, dozing off into another dream: one that I will cherish; one that will be broken; one that will be undeniably mine.