An essay by Stephanie Valente

Still, The Dream Continues

I. On Lynch

Of course, it was a dream. I was dreaming. I dreamed I was watching Mulholland Drive for the first time. A woman cried. A key opened nothing. A box held everything. A silence split me in two.

This is the first film that taught me not all answers belong to us. Some stories refuse to be solved. Some truths exist only in the dark, in the red-curtained slip between memory and mirage. I learned this at fifteen.

David Lynch never taught me how to understand art. He taught me how to let it disturb me. That was the gift.

Somewhere, in a room lined with red velvet and riddles, he handed me a flashlight and said: You’re not supposed to see the whole picture. Just the flicker. The flicker was enough.

II. The Best to Ever Do It

I have a Twin Peaks tattoo. It’s on the back of my arm, the bendy place, the dreaming place.

That show rearranged my blood. It still does. Every time there’s a clue revealed from Laura Palmer’s diary, some part of me falls silent. Still.

Lynch gave us suburban surrealism without irony. He gave us grief in a cup of coffee. Terror on a swing set. The Devil in a denim jacket.

What is Twin Peaks if not a myth through the mouth of soap opera? A Greek chorus in log form. A tragedy rewritten as Americana. An elegy with a damn good cup of coffee.

I watched it again. And again. The finale echoed in my ribs like my first heartbreak.

The best to ever do it.

III. Negative Space

“Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper.” — David Lynch

When I started meditating, it sounded like a portal.

The deeper I went, the stranger my dreams became. Sometimes I woke up mid-sentence, like someone else had been writing in my sleep. Fragments of dialogue became prophecies and omens. A name became a character.

Meditating, particularly transcendental meditation, became a conduit for creativity. Not instantly, no. But a slowness that afforded my mind space.

Silence in its own right is erotic. Let me explain.

There’s an eroticism to stillness, to letting the unconscious drip through cracks in the floorboards. It’s not about controlling the art. It’s about being soft enough to receive it.

I think of it as devotion. I think of it as blending haunting with seduction.

IV. In the Red Room

The first time I dreamed in red, I woke up with my mouth tasting like salt. Somewhere, between sleep and the enigma of night, a door opened without a knock.

Lynch fashioned a door between one world and another, and you follow. You don’t ask why the floor is chevron-striped or why the man speaks backwards. You don’t question the whisper behind the diner. You accept the strange as purposeful.

Because Lynch didn’t make films. He built doorways. Portals lined with humming things and women with secrets you can’t quite name. When the lights go down and the final reel burns to nothing, the dream remains.

Once you walk through, you’re never the same.

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Stephanie Valente is a poet, copywriter, and the author of the collection Internet Girlfriend, published by Clash Books. She is at work on a novel. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. @stephaniemariavalente and https://stephanievalente.substack.com