For a long time, I misunderstood the nature of this dream. At first glance, it presented itself as something simple, almost embarrassingly human in its familiarity: a sex dream. A clandestine rendezvous. Desire. Intimacy deferred but anticipated. The subconscious staging its usual theater of longing. But recurring dreams are rarely about the thing they initially appear to be about. Desire is often merely the disguise deeper psychological tensions wear in order to gain entry into consciousness. This particular dream, over time, revealed itself to be something far stranger.
It always begins the same way.
I am walking through an abandoned train yard. The atmosphere is empty but not lifeless. There is a profound stillness to the space, as though it exists outside of ordinary time. Sand covers much of the ground. Rusted tracks disappear into fog. The geometry of the place feels vaguely industrial yet surreal, almost theatrical in its emptiness. The landscape itself feels psychologically symbolic rather than physically literal, Daliesque in the truest sense. A place constructed not from geography, but from emotional architecture.
There is an abandoned boxcar sitting alone on a piece of track. I know instinctively that this is where I am supposed to go. The destination never changes. Alongside my path there is always water. At first, only a narrow stream. Running water accompanying my walk toward the boxcar. Each time the dream recurs, the water changes. It becomes wider, deeper, more difficult to cross.
What once existed as a manageable stream slowly transforms into something immense and consuming, swallowing more and more of the landscape each time the dream returns. The widening feels significant. Evolutionary. As though something unresolved inside me is expanding rather than diminishing. The purpose of the journey initially appears erotic. I am moving toward a secret tryst with someone familiar to me. A man whose presence feels emotionally intimate despite the fact that I cannot identify him specifically. His face never fully resolves because it is not truly one face at all. He is an amalgamation. A composite figure assembled unconsciously from every person I have ever loved, desired, pursued, or emotionally attached myself to. This detail feels essential.
The dream is not truly about one individual person. It is about intimacy itself. Or perhaps more accurately, longing itself. Because I never actually reach him. I move toward him. I attempt to kiss him. He moves away. Not cruelly. Not mockingly. More like a figure obeying rules I do not understand. He beckons me forward while remaining perpetually beyond reach. There is invitation without fulfillment. Nearness without arrival. And eventually I follow him into the water.
This is where the dream transforms emotionally.
The water stops functioning as scenery and becomes force. Current begins pulling against me. Mud forms beneath my feet, slowing movement, trapping my legs, resisting progress. Sometimes I nearly reach his outstretched hand before the current drags me sideways. Other times I become stuck entirely while he disappears slowly into the fog ahead of me.
And every time, the feeling is identical: Panic. Longing. Disorientation. The terror of losing both direction and self simultaneously.
For years I struggled to understand why the emotional atmosphere of the dream felt so familiar until I realized my thoughts consistently returned to Season of Migration to the North. Not simply because of the imagery of drowning, though that is certainly part of it. The famous sequence where the narrator fights desperately against the river while suspended between surrender and survival carries almost the exact emotional texture of this dream. That sensation of being overtaken by forces larger than oneself while still compulsively moving toward them. But the deeper connection, I think, lies elsewhere. The dream feels tied to the novel’s obsession with fractured identity and the impossibility of belonging fully anywhere.
In Season of Migration to the North, identity is unstable, hybridized, fragmented by geography, memory, colonialism, sexuality, masculinity, longing, performance, and displacement. The characters exist in a perpetual state of psychological in-betweenness. Never fully belonging to one world or another. Never entirely at home within themselves. Mustafa Sa’eed in particular becomes a figure constructed through projection — desired, mythologized, misunderstood, fragmented into versions of himself depending on who is perceiving him.
That feels deeply connected to the dream.
The man I pursue is not a singular person because perhaps he represents not simply lovers, but every fragmented version of intimacy and identity I have attempted to anchor myself within. He is familiarity without fixedness. Recognition without stability. Desire assembled from memory rather than reality. Perhaps the widening water represents the growing emotional complexity of identity itself.
Because identity is never static. The older we become, the more psychologically layered we become. Every relationship alters us. Every rejection reshapes us. Every migration between social worlds, emotional states, communities, aesthetics, and selves leaves residue behind. We become accumulations. The dream increasingly feels less like a pursuit of another person and more like a pursuit of coherence.
The abandoned train yard reinforces this feeling. Rail yards are places of transition. Arrival and departure. Human movement. Temporary belonging. But this one is abandoned. Movement interrupted. Connection decayed. The tracks remain, but whatever once traveled through them no longer does. That feels important because there is a peculiar loneliness that emerges when one exists perpetually between categories. Between communities. Between identities. Between forms of belonging. Too fluid for one space, yet too contradictory for another. Too emotionally aware to fully surrender to performance, but too psychologically fragmented to feel entirely settled within authenticity either.
The dream captures this emotional geography perfectly. Even the fog contributes to it. There is no horizon, no direct source of light, no clear orientation. Everything exists in ambiguity. Perhaps that ambiguity is the point.
The figure in the water beckons me forward, but never allows contact because the dream itself may understand something I consciously resist admitting: perhaps the longing itself is more stable than fulfillment would be. Perhaps pursuit has become psychologically safer than arrival or perhaps the figure represents reconciliation with selfhood, a selfhood perpetually deferred.
There is also something deeply revealing about the fact that I continue following him despite the repeated failure. Despite the panic. Despite nearly drowning each time. Some part of me still enters the water willingly, still choosing pursuit over retreat, which may ultimately connect most strongly to the ending of Season of Migration to the North itself. The narrator suspended in water. He is caught between annihilation and continuation. Crying out not for certainty, but simply for life.
Perhaps that is what this dream actually is beneath all its erotic imagery and surreal symbolism: not a fantasy of intimacy, but a psychological struggle over whether one can ever truly belong to another person, to a place, to an identity, or even fully to oneself. Perhaps the reason the dream recurs is because I still do not know the answer.