Ayad Akhtar’s argument in The Atlantic is not that dreams predict the future or that meditation cures despair. It is narrower and harder to dismiss: the vocabulary available for describing inner experience — diagnosis on one side, brain science on the other — is not adequate to the thing itself, and the cost of that inadequacy is a public silence about what people actually live with.
The essay opens at twenty, with a sensation the author calls a hole. It was concrete and unfalsifiable at once: doctors found no medical cause, and the emptiness felt less like nothing than like something growing, “a viscous emptiness.” With it came instability, a new susceptibility to other people’s opinions, and a recklessness that ran one night to driving drunk with no belief that it mattered. He was missing class, drinking before rehearsals, and dreaming of “rocket ships out of control, conflagrations and invasions, and, yes, holes into which I would disappear.” A girlfriend ended it over tea and told him to get help.
Merton, then Freud
A friend from a Kentucky farm handed him Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain. Akhtar found the account of restlessness and disgust immediately recognizable and the solution unusable: Merton’s turn to God read to him as “naive and distorting.” He was committed to remaining literal about the sensation — a hole growing inside him — and treating that honesty as the only available form of self-help.
The psychiatrist his mother found was more interested in his sex life than his interior void. But a volume on the shelf behind the analyst’s head was The Interpretation of Dreams, and reading it started what Akhtar calls, more accurately than “curiosity,” a relationship. He began recording dreams nightly, tying a pencil to his finger to wake himself between sleep cycles. Recall expanded. In one dream he drew an empty circle on a page of a Quran his grandparents had given him and reached through it to touch cool water; he woke thinking the hole might lead somewhere better.
From Freud he moved outward — other analysts, then Swedenborg, Ibn Arabi, Rabbi Nachman — and eventually found in a late Jung the instruction to treat dream images as real in their own right, exercising what Jung called the compensatory function of balancing conscious bias. His despair began to dim, though he is careful to say he cannot be sure the framing produced that.
The essay is honest about how this reads from outside. He reports dreams that preceded events: a friend appearing in Tuscany two days before he arrived, an attack on Manhattan two days before September 11, a cough-inducing fog weeks before the coronavirus. He does not claim to know what to do with these, only that they made “any picture of the universe that failed to make room for what could only be experienced as a kind of magic” untenable for him.
Practice, and the case against chasing states
A yoga class on the Upper West Side led from dream-work into meditation, then years of instruction in other techniques — Gnostic shapes, Sufi colors, intoning Hebrew names at a pitch that shook the bones of the ear. A Vedic teacher warned him against seeking states rather than truth, and declined to define truth: “The truth is not like knowledge about that tree. Only the tree knows its truth.”
A physician he met over martinis delivered the deflationary account: he had become addicted to activating parts of his cerebral cortex, pulling neurological switches for his own pleasure chemicals. Akhtar then cites Andrew Newberg’s 1990s scans of Tibetan monks and Franciscan nuns, which showed strikingly similar quieting in the regions that orient us in space and time, while the practitioners described what happened in incompatible terms — union with Christ, or emptiness. He notes that this emptiness is not his hole: for the Buddhist, emptiness and form are inseparable, whereas his hole was a wound, then, gradually, an opening. Whether his stability returned because of practice, suggestion, or time, he declines to adjudicate.
The real thesis
What the essay builds toward is a claim about speech rather than about technique. He had spent decades steering conversation away from these experiences, “obedient to the rule that such things could not be talked about without sounding foolish or deranged,” and came to see the reticence as deforming. Without listeners, the still, small voice is harder to hear. He cites Emerson’s “The Over-Soul” on language’s failure to paint the subtle order of experience in its own colors, and the Russian novelists who treated soul as the moral substance of life rather than a Sunday word. What he mourns is not their metaphysics but their seriousness — the assumption that the boundlessness of the inner life is a fit subject for public argument.
The essay ends with a last dream, recorded after finishing a draft: a well with no bucket, crowds of shepherds and masons and architects circling it, everyone trying to work out how to draw water whose surface they can see shimmering at the bottom.
Read the full story at The Atlantic.