Your Dreambody Must Be Heard: Writing Trauma in the School of Dreams

Writing is dreaming. Dreaming is writing. Cixous knows this. I know this. Dreams catch us, catch me, unravel, and tangle me as I surface through sleepfog. I reach for them in the cool morning light, “full of enjoyment, full of terror” (Cixous, Dream I Tell You, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 78, 2006). My dreams and my writing have always been tangled with trauma. My trauma recovery has depended not on literal or linear stories, but on abstract and abject images, strange occurrences, body memories and nighttime dreams. I have depended on dreaming to understand my own trauma, and I have depended on writing to make it feel real. Dreaming, writing, and trauma is a performative tangle of affect, image, language and cognition. I propose that writing in Cixous’ School of Dreams offers an embodied, performative literary form that affirms trauma as an affective and unresolved experience, rather than demanding it conform to the phallogocentric principles of linearity and logic. By writing trauma through the lens of the always-dreaming body—not only nighttime dreams but affective experiences, memories, dissociation, flickers in our periphery—we can write about our experiences through a performative, affective autoethnography, and claim for ourselves an alternative form of testimony.