Justice Notes: Dreams
A White-Collar Journal forum for criminal justice, lived experience, and the personal search for redemption
The trauma of incarceration lingers long after the arrival home, often stubbornly rooted in the unconscious. Since returning home from prison nearly five years ago, I have nightmares every night. My dreams have little to do with hope or aspiration and everything to do with where I’ve been. What follows is an attempt to understand them.
Backward Dreams
Why is something so rooted in the past—dreams—so often described in the language of the future? The American Dream. The dream of a better life. Forward-facing wishes, fantasies projected onto an imagined horizon. My dreams face backward.
For nearly five years now, since I arrived home from prison, my nights have been occupied by a steady procession of nightmares. They arrive, reliably, every night, but always different in their details: different locations, unfamiliar people, scenes that make no logical sense when placed side by side. They share a common structure. I am always lost, and searching for a destination, a home base, a way out. And there is always something—or someone—threatening just out of frame.
Often, I am back in prison. It’s the last day of my sentence. I’m supposed to be released. I know this with certainty. And yet I’m in the wrong place—across the compound, in another building, somewhere far from where I need to be. I’m frantic, trying to get back in time, trying to find the right door, the right office, the right person. I know if I don’t arrive where I’m supposed to be, freedom will be delayed or denied altogether. I wake up before I find out which.
These dreams may not be real, but they’re faithful to the emotional truth of incarceration: the powerlessness, the confusion, the constant sense that release, relief, or resolution can be revoked by a misstep or misunderstanding. During the day, I no longer feel imprisoned. At night, my mind takes me back there.
At 83, dreams of the future are few and fragile. Ambition narrows. Time compresses. The fantasies that once animated youth—career, success, reinvention—no longer have much traction. What remains is the daily work of staying present.
It’s curious that after centuries of study, analysis, and speculation, dreams remain so poorly understood. We have theories, categories, and disorders. We can measure sleep cycles and track brain activity. But we still can’t reliably explain why certain images return, why the mind insists on rehearsing what has already ended, or why some experiences lodge themselves so deeply that they refuse to stay in the past.
Control is the great illusion. We speak casually of “working through” trauma, as if the mind were a cooperative partner. Mine seems to have other plans. Every night, it pulls from the same well, rearranging the pieces but preserving the threat.
Before sleep, I sing to my wife. I want to dream of her. It’s a kind of joke, but I love the song. It feels like an invocation, a small prayer whispered into the dark. But that dream almost never arrives. And when she does appear, it is sometimes in ways I would rather forget—brief, disorienting, touched by the same unease that permeates the rest of the night.
Perhaps dreams are just reckoning devices—places where the mind insists on an accountability. Prison may be over in the daylight hours, but at night the nervous system remembers the confinement, threat, and uncertainty long after your release and reentry.
Sometimes, writing this feels like mumbling and scribbling—language circling something it can’t quite name. You’re not sure where you’re going. And sometimes, not knowing where you are is the most honest place to end.
If you’re drawn to the idea of storytelling as self-reckoning, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
Thank you for reading White-Collar Journal. Subscribing is free, and I hope you’ll continue with me as I explore stories of incarceration, justice, and redemption.
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