Fantastic essay! Or maybe it’s really several essay-ettes. The smoke allergy nightmare; the actual nightmare nightmares; the Benadryl; the night of horror in the Stockholm hotel; the moment of the dreaded electoral vote flipping over. I guess it IS just one essay— about various genres of nightmare! Beautiful writing about terrible things.
I don't know how you get through this life in this place and time without something that starts out helping you survive, which you ultimately have to confront as probably now harming you. And then I truly don't know how you get through this life when you choose to stop that specific harm, but I'm trying. I hope you have better health or at least different harms now.
Oh my stars, Brandon, that is an intensely powerful piece of writing. Thank you for entrusting it to paper (or pixels) and for entrusting us with it. I can tell already that it is a needful thing that I'll reread. (It hits me particularly hard because Reasons.)
Thank you, thank you so much. I'm so glad I got to read this. It definitely is, as Maria Jette said, beautiful writing about terrible things.
Thank you for writing this beautiful essay. It’s making me feel so many beautiful horrifying emotions all at once. I can relate a little too much to the Benadryl habit, I too, often take a similar antihistamine, Piriton, when I struggle with sleep or when I simply want to escape the world and escape myself. These are terrible times and there is so much anxiety to be felt. I hope we get through this, by confronting all our fears and anxieties and hope.
FWIW I believe you, Brandon, about losing your resistance or acclimation or whatever-you-call-it after only a few short months away from home, because the same thing happened to me when I went to college. In August I could push my face into the long fur of the elderly dog we'd had since I was five years old and feel no ill effects. When I returned in December, I could not be in the same house with him without starting to wheeze.
Uh oh. I take 100 mg of diphenhydramine a night, not prescribed, obviously. Also in part because of nightmares (& I still wake up screaming a lot of nights because of it). I wish I could message you about this, but I’m still out of the country for a few more days. Also: this is stunning, as usual, and I will grab the new Unnamed book when I’m back.
Such beautiful writing it was overwhelming to just read it, can’t imagine how harrowing it must’ve been to live through it.
To bare oneself so takes unfathomable courage and you have it in giant quantities!
I loved, loved, LOVED the series on The Bostonians. Your writing made me get the book and read it. So grateful to have your insights and reflections as I read. I keep going back to your essays.
We who are watching from afar (but then just how afar when America holds a whiplash over almost every country on earth and we live in fear of when it’ll come down on us) the American election train wreck can only marvel at how Americans live through it.
"My thought about these lines is that the blankness of my sleep is but an illusion. And that just because I don’t remember the nightmares does not mean that they did not happen."
This rings very true.
Once I had to spend 3 or 4 weeks accompanying my dad in a small room in a foreign hospital immediately after he'd got out of an induced coma. He was very heavily medicated throughout but had the most intense dreams, almost all of them nightmares. I have no doubt the medication was as paranoia-inducing as it was pain-relieving. It was terrifying getting woken up at 2am as he screamed at some vivid apparition that he was convinced was real, but somehow even scarier that 5 mins later he couldn't remember anything about it.
Some of the more elaborate/amusing moments from that time...
A recurring delusion that the hospital was a cruise ship and all of the nurses were drug dealers trying to get him addicted (you can see the logic in both I guess).
One very long night when he was convinced he was Sherlock Holmes and any time I tried to calm him down he'd address me as Watson.
One day when I got sent to speak to some doctors in a different town and came back many hours later to an elaborate story of him being flown around in a helicopter (my dad was petrified of flying and had never so much as set foot on a plane). Anyway, that one turned out to be true - they'd literally flown him to the same hospital to the same rooms I'd spent hours travelling to and back again and yet our paths hadn't crossed. Only time in his life he ever flew!
I've gone down a cul-de-sac, but a beautiful piece of writing Brandon, thank you.
Beautiful. I have had severe allergies my whole life and while other drugs "work," more or less there is nothing like the sudden relief and oblivion of Benadryl. I have struggled with insomnia and fatigue especially since becoming a parent. Almost every parent I know and many of their kids rely on something to get us to sleep and something else to wake us up. Melatonin is so widespread but it put a haze on me the next day worse than Benadryl ever did - scared me in the ways you describe. Then there are the many relying on modafinil and off label ADD drugs to function. There's a whole lot of something in this, but I don't know what. Makes me miss the days drugs were for dancing or fucking, but so it goes.
Getting good sleep can feel like such a challenge when stress and screen time keep us wired! I’ve found that making a few evening adjustments, like sticking to a consistent bedtime and reducing blue light exposure, really does help with winding down. Using something like nightease glasses has made it easier to relax without cutting screen time completely, which has been a big help on restless nights. Thanks for all the thoughtful tips on building a better sleep routine—every little bit helps!
hi, this was really touching. it is a difficult season we are in.
it also made me realize i do not lucid dream, which i thought was perhaps the case sometimes in the early morning when i am in a state of semi-wakefulness, and the dream world/real world veil begins to thin. my dreams are distressingly vivid (the situations of the dreams are not so alarming as the feeling that i will be stuck in them forever) and my brain is good at incorporating real world things (cat crying, roommates putting away dishes, woodpecker pecking, etc.) into them. reading the bit about being at the mercy of the fictions in your brain made me realize that the presence of reality in the dreams might not be a sign of my agency exerted upon the dream so much as being at the mercy of stimuli, lol. perhaps i am making no sense. dreams are weird and can influence your entire day. i love and hate them. i fully love this essay, though. so, thanks!
This arrived in my inbox just after I left a comment at your Instagram post on “Tennis after dark,” in the NYT. I wondered if you would write more about writing at night. You have such fluency, such grace and power! I wonder how (or if) going to bed at ten or eleven will affect them. How malleable is your writing day? I suppose this is just another way of asking for more, please, as I fight my block—er, my book, I meant to say—and try to develop some flexibility or resilience or continuity of access, myself.
probably one of my favorite pieces that you've shared on substack. I'm happy you had the mental fortitude to quit the antihistamines and their various analogs. well said about how it's worth confronting the bad dreams, instead of denying ourselves the experience.
Fantastic essay! Or maybe it’s really several essay-ettes. The smoke allergy nightmare; the actual nightmare nightmares; the Benadryl; the night of horror in the Stockholm hotel; the moment of the dreaded electoral vote flipping over. I guess it IS just one essay— about various genres of nightmare! Beautiful writing about terrible things.
I don't know how you get through this life in this place and time without something that starts out helping you survive, which you ultimately have to confront as probably now harming you. And then I truly don't know how you get through this life when you choose to stop that specific harm, but I'm trying. I hope you have better health or at least different harms now.
Oh my stars, Brandon, that is an intensely powerful piece of writing. Thank you for entrusting it to paper (or pixels) and for entrusting us with it. I can tell already that it is a needful thing that I'll reread. (It hits me particularly hard because Reasons.)
Thank you, thank you so much. I'm so glad I got to read this. It definitely is, as Maria Jette said, beautiful writing about terrible things.
Thank you for writing this beautiful essay. It’s making me feel so many beautiful horrifying emotions all at once. I can relate a little too much to the Benadryl habit, I too, often take a similar antihistamine, Piriton, when I struggle with sleep or when I simply want to escape the world and escape myself. These are terrible times and there is so much anxiety to be felt. I hope we get through this, by confronting all our fears and anxieties and hope.
FWIW I believe you, Brandon, about losing your resistance or acclimation or whatever-you-call-it after only a few short months away from home, because the same thing happened to me when I went to college. In August I could push my face into the long fur of the elderly dog we'd had since I was five years old and feel no ill effects. When I returned in December, I could not be in the same house with him without starting to wheeze.
Okay thank you!!! MY PEOPLE! It's so awful! #SuddenOnsetAllergies.
Did you ever see the Benadryl spiders ?
No !!! I don’t know what this means and I don’t want to! Omg
Uh oh. I take 100 mg of diphenhydramine a night, not prescribed, obviously. Also in part because of nightmares (& I still wake up screaming a lot of nights because of it). I wish I could message you about this, but I’m still out of the country for a few more days. Also: this is stunning, as usual, and I will grab the new Unnamed book when I’m back.
Such beautiful writing it was overwhelming to just read it, can’t imagine how harrowing it must’ve been to live through it.
To bare oneself so takes unfathomable courage and you have it in giant quantities!
I loved, loved, LOVED the series on The Bostonians. Your writing made me get the book and read it. So grateful to have your insights and reflections as I read. I keep going back to your essays.
We who are watching from afar (but then just how afar when America holds a whiplash over almost every country on earth and we live in fear of when it’ll come down on us) the American election train wreck can only marvel at how Americans live through it.
To better, saner times!
"My thought about these lines is that the blankness of my sleep is but an illusion. And that just because I don’t remember the nightmares does not mean that they did not happen."
This rings very true.
Once I had to spend 3 or 4 weeks accompanying my dad in a small room in a foreign hospital immediately after he'd got out of an induced coma. He was very heavily medicated throughout but had the most intense dreams, almost all of them nightmares. I have no doubt the medication was as paranoia-inducing as it was pain-relieving. It was terrifying getting woken up at 2am as he screamed at some vivid apparition that he was convinced was real, but somehow even scarier that 5 mins later he couldn't remember anything about it.
Some of the more elaborate/amusing moments from that time...
A recurring delusion that the hospital was a cruise ship and all of the nurses were drug dealers trying to get him addicted (you can see the logic in both I guess).
One very long night when he was convinced he was Sherlock Holmes and any time I tried to calm him down he'd address me as Watson.
One day when I got sent to speak to some doctors in a different town and came back many hours later to an elaborate story of him being flown around in a helicopter (my dad was petrified of flying and had never so much as set foot on a plane). Anyway, that one turned out to be true - they'd literally flown him to the same hospital to the same rooms I'd spent hours travelling to and back again and yet our paths hadn't crossed. Only time in his life he ever flew!
I've gone down a cul-de-sac, but a beautiful piece of writing Brandon, thank you.
Beautiful. I have had severe allergies my whole life and while other drugs "work," more or less there is nothing like the sudden relief and oblivion of Benadryl. I have struggled with insomnia and fatigue especially since becoming a parent. Almost every parent I know and many of their kids rely on something to get us to sleep and something else to wake us up. Melatonin is so widespread but it put a haze on me the next day worse than Benadryl ever did - scared me in the ways you describe. Then there are the many relying on modafinil and off label ADD drugs to function. There's a whole lot of something in this, but I don't know what. Makes me miss the days drugs were for dancing or fucking, but so it goes.
Getting good sleep can feel like such a challenge when stress and screen time keep us wired! I’ve found that making a few evening adjustments, like sticking to a consistent bedtime and reducing blue light exposure, really does help with winding down. Using something like nightease glasses has made it easier to relax without cutting screen time completely, which has been a big help on restless nights. Thanks for all the thoughtful tips on building a better sleep routine—every little bit helps!
This is an extraordinary essay.
hi, this was really touching. it is a difficult season we are in.
it also made me realize i do not lucid dream, which i thought was perhaps the case sometimes in the early morning when i am in a state of semi-wakefulness, and the dream world/real world veil begins to thin. my dreams are distressingly vivid (the situations of the dreams are not so alarming as the feeling that i will be stuck in them forever) and my brain is good at incorporating real world things (cat crying, roommates putting away dishes, woodpecker pecking, etc.) into them. reading the bit about being at the mercy of the fictions in your brain made me realize that the presence of reality in the dreams might not be a sign of my agency exerted upon the dream so much as being at the mercy of stimuli, lol. perhaps i am making no sense. dreams are weird and can influence your entire day. i love and hate them. i fully love this essay, though. so, thanks!
This arrived in my inbox just after I left a comment at your Instagram post on “Tennis after dark,” in the NYT. I wondered if you would write more about writing at night. You have such fluency, such grace and power! I wonder how (or if) going to bed at ten or eleven will affect them. How malleable is your writing day? I suppose this is just another way of asking for more, please, as I fight my block—er, my book, I meant to say—and try to develop some flexibility or resilience or continuity of access, myself.
I apologize for the informality, but my first thought once I finished your essay was, ‘damn, B.’ Just, bravo
probably one of my favorite pieces that you've shared on substack. I'm happy you had the mental fortitude to quit the antihistamines and their various analogs. well said about how it's worth confronting the bad dreams, instead of denying ourselves the experience.