I read somewhere—I don’t remember where—that the human brain is incapable of inventing new faces in our dreams. In other words, every face that you’ve ever dreamt of is based on someone you’ve experienced in your waking life.

It explained a lot. Like how when a person that seems so familiar to you makes a cameo in your dream, but you just cannot place them. Maybe it’s because you crossed paths with this person at some point in your life, but the memory is locked away somewhere deep. Or maybe it’s someone with an interesting face you saw in a TV commercial. Maybe it’s just someone you sat next to on the train one morning.

Either way, it’s someone you’ve seen. Somewhere.

But this can’t be true for me. Not everyone in my dreams is someone I know, even distantly. That would be impossible.

Let me explain. As long as I can remember, a certain individual has made appearances in my dreams. He’s a man, I think, or a male-like figure. He’s tall, very tall, and broad-shouldered. He has no features on his face save for a fleshy, black hole. It looks like his face has caved in on itself. It’s spun into his skull like it’s been flushed.

I’ve dreamt about this man for as long as I can remember. Not just nightmares and fever dreams, but also the nice dreams: the warm, sweet dreams, the sex dreams, the nostalgic dreams, and even the abstract, spacey, overwhelming dreams. He’s always there, somewhere. Watching me.

Maybe I think too highly of myself, but what if I simply have an overactive imagination? What if my brain is special? Maybe my brain is capable of generating new characters and creatures like a video game. 

Probably not though. Maybe I should think more Freudian about this. He’s probably just myself, but with some sort of symbolic twist. You know, maybe I don’t know myself or some bullshit, which is why I don’t “know” this man, blah blah blah. Maybe I watch too many explainer videos on YouTube.

Or maybe I do know this guy. Maybe it’s that man that watches me sleep every night from the other room, behind the shelves, hands in pockets. Face-hole looking directly at me. Maybe this man has been watching me since I was a child, from the rocking chair in the corner of my nursery and then later behind the TV set in the corner of my childhood bedroom and then even later standing on that little desk insert that colleges put in dorms, you know, in the corner. Maybe I do know this man very well, better than most. So, it would make sense that he’s in all my dreams.

I read somewhere—I don’t remember where—that the human brain is incapable of inventing new faces in our dreams. In other words, every face in your dreams is someone. You may not know them, but they certainly know you.