What Does a Sex Dream About Trump Say About My Sexuality?
And more importantly, my humanity?
--
It started in Taipei. My friend and his new wife, both diplomats, finally made it to their new assignment after multiple flights, two weeks of quarantining in New York and then another two more days of flights and layovers.
The walls of their new apartment were completely carpeted, with big red and grey geometric shapes emblazoned against a felt-y matte black. Like a new mall movie theater in the 90s. Even the countertops were carpeted. To absorb the noise in the crowded complex, they were told.
Everyone who couldn’t make it to their summer wedding in Costa Rica was reuniting here, post-pandemic. Iggy Azalea was there, (because I had googled her right before I went to sleep) lounging on a bed, propped up on her elbows in that slumber-party pose, chin in hands and feet in the air, encouraging people to fondle her ass, to prove it was real. She was only wearing lingerie. Garish purple. A thin zig-zag of fabric strips.
After rearranging and turning all the furniture upside down to make forts we all settled in for marathon movie night. My newlywed friend was big-spooning me, his arm draped over me and chatting animatedly. I didn’t want to make his wife uncomfortable so I rolled away and went and visited with some people I didn’t know under another furniture fort.
Suddenly we were all swimming in our clothes through a shallow creek to get to the next bar. But it was more sludge and moss than water and we quickly realized it was little more than ankle-deep. I stood up with an older brunette who looked like a Linda, we laughed and kept wading toward the footbridge illuminated with white Christmas lights.
I never made it to dinner with my friends.
With no transition, I am sauntering down a hotel hallway in heels and a little black dress. With purpose. Toward him.
There he was, 1980s Trump with that ridiculous golden pheasant hair whooshed back, standing in a small circle of people. I pushed through the low hum of conversation and interrupted them without a word. He locked eyes with me and I smiled at him like that and the repulsive man understood. He smirked at me, like a reflex. It was like I was watching myself in an 80s tabloid. We didn’t speak.
Then I was suddenly in the dream, no longer looking in from the outside. I took his racist hand, that revolting clammy slab of meat, (I assume it’s clammy), and pulled him from the group and led him toward my room. His room? I don’t know. It was empty but for a rumpled unmade king-sized bed and generic hotel furniture. A wall-to-wall floor-to-ceiling window that looked out over the waterway I’d just been swimming in. I remembered tossing my phone out of a fishing boat but reaching into the water, deeper there, and saving it before it sank any farther. It’s still dark out.
I realize he doesn’t wear cologne. He smells like nothing, not even dry cleaning. Even paper has more of a scent than he does. The faint traces of hotel disinfectant fade into the deep navy of the paneled walls, the vaulted ceilings and the interrogation-bright lights.
Every last light in the room is on, a yellow-white bath that soaks the entire room. We’re apparently going to do this sinful business with the lights on. I push him onto the bed.
He’s wearing that chin-heavy overbite smirk, surprised but still smug. He is used to women taking the lead and though I note this, and feel repulsed by it, I still want to come and I still intend to use his body to do it. Only the arousal is lucid. I am so turned on.
I start dry-humping him, high-school style, with both our clothes still on. His blue rectangle of a suit crumples around the overripe banana of his dick. It is lumpy, bent the wrong direction and he can’t stay hard. I tell him he needs to straighten it out, unfold it from his underwear and make it point toward his tie — instructions I think will make sense to him.
I pull my dress up so the only fabric between us is my panties, his slacks and probably those tighty-whitey girdles we can always see through his golf khakis. I remember that he is actually an obese elderly man and I feel nauseated but my dress is now a loose billowy blouse and as I move it flutters out over his face. A brief reprieve. I am grateful I can’t see his face anymore and try to keep grinding against the part of his dick that still feels kind of hard but it is segmented like a stuffed ant — I can only feel the head and the back third. The middle is so soft, almost nonexistent, it’s like sinking into a saddle. There’s not enough friction and my body is so tense and so ready to explode but I can tell it won’t.
A housekeeper walks in on this understated satyr-and-nymph spectacle and doesn’t seem shocked.
“Occupied,” I look over my shoulder at her, all business.
“Did you just say ‘occupied’?” His voice asks from under the bib of my shirt still covering his awful face — even his tone of voice is a perpetual smirk. “That’s what you say in a bathroom, not when you’re fucking,” he laughs at me like I’m the tacky one.
“We’re not fucking,” I remind him as sternly as possible but keep scooting back and forth on his bumpy gym sock of a dick.
The maid comes in anyway, stacks more towels in the giant armoire with the broken door hanging open, a full-length mirror on the inside that thankfully faced the window as it hung there like a broken arm.
I woke up, utterly confused and googled Freud.
Because what the fresh hell else could I do. Perhaps that chain-smoking misogynist could enlighten me from beyond the grave. Perhaps he learned something from the mating rituals of eels or having tea with Virginia Woolf that could help me understand why my subconscious would betray me with a red, white and blue-in-the-face fascist.
The only thing worse than seeing/watching/reading/hearing Trump spitefully, gleefully be exactly who he is is the thought of being with him. Yet that’s precisely the limbic-system house of horrors my brain concocted. It couldn’t have been a run-of-the-mill murder nightmare or a creepy child playing with headless dolls? It had to be him?
So much for peacefully indulging a Saturday and sleeping in.
I wasn’t sure if I wanted to tell anyone in my real life — the seething anonymity of the internet often seems like a less consequential place to air my dirty laundry. But I also needed answers. I made it less than a day before I confided in one of my best friends. We had talked early that morning right after I woke up but I was still pulling the Jenga pieces out of my waking mind and trying to make sense of it.
Back up, she texted back when I told her right before I headed to bed. Why did I not hear about this firstly today?!???
I cracked up at her use of ‘firstly’ and told her it had taken me the whole day to decide if I could bring myself to say it loud, to breathe it back into the universe in any way.
Yeah, that’s a pretty big betrayal! Holy hell, she said.
She is happily married. I fear she’ll pity my ongoing, and now involuntary celibacy. (Side note: See? “Incel” doesn’t have to drive you to homicidal shooting sprees.)
I feel more doomed by three months of quarantine celibacy than I did by the previous year of it. Because that year was my choice. If I were a sports franchise or a free agent I could call it a rebuilding year after the worst relationship I’ve ever had — intentional superlative. But now? What if we can never meet new people? What if we can never flirt again? And even if we can, all of my insecurities will be right there waiting for me. What if my celibacy proves that my insecurities are the reason I am alone? I’m not pretty enough, I’m not curvy enough, I’m too old. It’s too late for me.
Quarantine has heightened that deep abiding fear — not of dying alone but of living the rest of my life alone.
Was the sex the McGuffin in this dream? Or was it the most indisputable evidence that “not even if he was the last man on Earth” can swan-dive straight to the second circle of Hell after just a few months in quarantine?
It’s tempting to Occam’s razor our dreams off with the simplest possible explanation instead of looking for zebras when we hear hoofbeats. But the vast science of dream psychology encourages us to do just that, to dig deeper. And I’m not alone in dreaming about Trump. That makes me feel better and worse.
When I told my girlfriend she immediately texted me a link to an unexpected article that broadly contextualized my shock and revulsion.
“Trump’s Presidency was always surreal, even before his radical incompetence confronted a pandemic. Crawford has been a clinical social worker and a psychotherapist in New York for twenty-five years. Starting in 2016, her clients ‘were reporting dreams with Donald Trump in a way that’s not common for other Presidencies,’ she said. ‘He was a looming figure in people’s psyches.’ She realized that it was in dreams that Americans were making sense of Trump.”
This is a true friend, people.
“In the aftermath of Trump’s election, Crawford started a blog on which people could post dreams anonymously. Then she started gathering dreams from social media. Soon she had three thousand.”
But that didn’t explain why I had what was unmistakably a sex dream, even with limited nudity and without (thankfully) penetrative sex.
Another group of dreamers saw Trump in the place of the men who sexually abused them. “People who’ve experienced sexual abuse by teachers or by parents or by authorities are activated by that reality,” Crawford said.
This was not the case in my dream. He did not represent any of the men who’ve hurt me. It was unmistakably him and I was unshakably confident, comfortable, and in charge. He was incompetent and required a lot of direction but I still chose him. Everyone else was faceless except for my longtime friend at the very beginning of the dream.
“For Crawford, these dreams serve a social function, one that’s also reflected in ‘The Third Reich of Dreams’: the unconscious mind attempting to pull the dreamer back into alignment with an absurd and despicable world.”
There is nothing more absurd and despicable than trying to get yourself off on Trump’s limp dick.
I am grateful I’m not the only one whose subconscious has been infiltrated by the biggest baby bully and his big-boy tantrums.
But when I’m finally able to drift off late into the night I want to escape The Second Koming of the Klan, our economic implosion and the looming Christ-less theocracy he has ushered in, not be alone in a hotel room with it.
I just wanted to go to Taipei with my friends.