10.1.3 I Dream Of Janeway
- Ric Crossman
- 1 hour ago
- 8 min read
Dream Catcher
When you're on the USS Protostar, every shore can mean shore leave.
Sounds like a dream come true.
Dream Logic
Stories about the risks of our head-tales escaping confinement have been around for a while. In the Western canon, we can go back at least as far the 9th century, and Ovid's version of the tale of King Midas: he who dreamed of being able to turn all he touched to gold.
That's was just a daydream, of course, which is to say; a fantasy. The kind of dreams this episode's title evokes are something rather different. CS Lewis made this point with unsettling elegance in the 1950s, towards the end of The Voyage Of The Dawn Treader. After months of travel through uncharted ocean, the titular vessel finds itself at a island long thought a legend; a shore where dreams come true. Our heroes are absolutely thrilled at the prospect, until the man they meet there bursts their bubble with a poker forged from wasps.
Fools!” said the man, stamping his foot with rage. “That is the sort of talk that brought me here, and I’d better have been drowned or never born. Do you hear what I say? This is where dreams--dreams, do you understand--come to life, come real. Not daydreams: dreams.”
It's one of my favourite moments of horror via pedantry, the kind of twist capping off any number of "what if a computer did a murder" stories over subsequent decades. Things get even better (for me, not the protagonists) when we learn the island's subconscious-searching algorithm keeps throwing up the worst nightmares it can find. This heightens the horror, of course, but it's also necessary to fully sell Lewis' definitional switch in the first place.
Because the truth is that our dreams aren't wholly distinct from our desires. The former are twisted, incomplete reflections of the latter.; strange admixtures of want and need and fear and frustration. Our fantasies turned feral.
This is perhaps particularly true of our dreams of the past. The sounds and shapes of what we once knew, that have learned how they can hunt us, and how they can bite.
This is the ground upon which "Dream Catcher" plants its spores. The hungry fungus infesting this strange new world seems to intuitively understand a fundamental truth For those forced to escape to the stars, the homeworld is the only planet that's gravity well deepens with distance. The further you flee, the more your dreams of home weigh you down,
Dal, Gwyn and Pog all dream of their own versions of home, and in each case, something is subtly - or not so subtly - off about the experience. For Jankam, this is mostly written in the episode's margins. Notice how he finds himself irresistibly tempted by the smell of food from his old home, despite us seeing just last episode that the Protostar replicates Tellarite food so well even he couldn't pick fault with it. Take note also that, while he says the aroma reminds him of his time aboard the sleeper ship, the actual backdrop the spores prepare for him is drawn straight from some rustic fairy tale. This is wholly in keeping with the nature of dreams; two elements which were never combined in reality somehow evoking the feeling of familiarity more strongly than either could alone.
Jankam doesn't realise anything is amiss, despite this incongruity, despite the ludicrousness of finding Tellarite cuisine bubbling away in the middle of nowhere of an apparently unoccupied planet in the Delta Quadrant. He doesn't even stop to ask how the smell reached him through the spacesuit he's insisting he needs to wear [1]. But then, this is dream logic too. What happens is simply accepted by the dreamer. The concept of a dream itself only exists in the waking world [2].
And at least the dream he's unknowingly trapped within is a happy one. Mere minutes after escaping the Protostar brig, Gwyn's subconscious imprisons her somewhere far sadder.
Here is where we reach the fog-wreathed borders of Lewis' Dark Island. Here is where the nightmares graze.
Character Spores
The idea of a planet rummaging around your hind-brain and presenting the results to you unsolicited isn't new within Trek, as I alluded to with my oh-so-clever opening sentence. What we get here isn't a retread, though; it's real progress. One of the reasons "Shore Leave" didn't quite reach warp speed was a failure to give its robots enough density. We could have learned a great deal about our characters from where their minds chose to wander. Instead, we get a grab bag of open source silliness. Rabbits and tigers and scares, oh why? Only Kirk's robotic phantoms, representing his insecurity over his comparative youth as a captain and his regrets over what reaching that rank required he leave behind, give us any sense of the consciousness lying above a literalised subconscious.
"Dream Catcher", in contrast, tells us a tale of childhood tragedy in the space of seconds. The spores' rifling through Gwyn's mind choose her father as the best bait - again, the dream of home - but break their own illusion almost immediately by having the Diviner express pride in his daughter. This simple act of parental approval is so alien to Gwyn, it strikes her as more suspicious than her father choosing to leave his life-support system. It simply isn't believable, a kindness not just undreamt of, but outside the boundaries of what could be dreamed. What are the indescribably long odds of finding stew from a distant spaceship found cooking on an abandoned world, compared to Gwyn's father volunteering that he is proud of her?
Dal, for his part, is going through a rather more generalised form of parental neglect. The first time I watched this, I had the distinct impression both of Dal's "parents" were literally faceless. Or perhaps that was just something I dreamed. Regardless, what's actually happening is just that they have their backs to him. Which is something of its own metaphor for where Dal finds himself, of course. If Gywn's tragedy is that she's homesick for a toxic environment, Dal's is that, to paraphrase Soul Asylum, he's homesick for a home he never had.
This is distinct to never having a home at all. Indeed, there's no doubt that this is where Prodigy is heading, and not simply because of the inertia of narrative precedent. Indeed, this is already where Zero has ended up The temptation the planet sets out for them is nothing but the part of the ship they're living on that they find most interesting. They're already doing what they most want to do, in other words; quite literally living the dream.
But there's more to this than Zero. The saddest part of Dal's dream is him being faced with the faceless - the fact the parents he's desperate to meet and talk to (or even yell at) don't actually exist in his memory. The most interesting part, though, is the planet choosing to summon the spectre of Janeway to explain what's going on. The implication is obvious; for all Dal's arrogant dismissals, his efforts to close his heart to Janeway have been no more successful than Pog's attempts to seal a Starfleet spacesuit. By placing her right beside Dal's literally half-formed image of his parents, "Dream Catcher" asks the question as to what his actual parental figure(s) is going to end up looking like.
Subtle? No. But then ultimately this is a show for children. That doesn't mean dumbing down your stories, but I think it does argue for bringing your themes a little closer to the surface. Reading a subtext is like reading anything else; kids will need to practice.
Past Imperfect
The end result, like any truly wonderful dream, is something strange and sad, but with a beauty both alongside and within that sadness. For all the other ways in which this is a ridiculous comparison, this makes "Dream Catcher" strange bedfellows with the very best work of David Lynch. There are even moments of (barely) child-friendly horror; not-Janeway's sudden turn; the grasping, thorny tentacles of the erupting fungus, and - the image that stayed with me most clearly - Rok-Tahk giggling with delight as the very earth swallows her to be digested.
Crucially, though, while our heroes are clearly in quite a lot of trouble, and clearly not all pulling in the same direction (Dal is arrogant, Pog is contrary, all of them are lying to Janeway, and Gwyn is a literal prisoner), the ways their inner selves are brought out by the spores help to contextualise the antagonism, rather than super-charge it. It's here that we see the major difference between this episode and Enterprise's "Strange New World", the other episode in this cycle which features a crew falling apart after becoming infected by psychotropic particles on an unexplored planet. I went to bat for that episode as one of Enterprise's best outings, but its foundations in the prejudice T'Pol experiences as the only Vulcan on a human vessel produces a sour aftertaste, one mostly missing
from the hallucinogenic mushrooms rampaging across "Dream Catcher". If nothing else, this all makes this episode unusually easy to place in the episode rankings.
More than anything else, though, what makes this episode shine is the position it takes on what we leave behind. The message we're given is this the past's pull is undeniable, but to succumb to it entirely will consume us. Where we come from shapes who we are, and will always have its hold on us, but it was neither perfect, nor what we picture in our minds when we try to think back. We never remember our dreams quite the way they happened. There are gaps, and confusion; the feeling always taking precedence over the fact. We forget that at our peril. No matter what visits us as we sleep, there's not really anything more we can do than move forward once we awake. However we remember the past, lingering in those memories is a poor, even dangerous, substitute for figuring out how to live in the present.
What better message could a show for the newest generation of Trek viewers possibly give us?
[1] Fun head-canon exercise: how do the spores penetrate Jankam's spacesuit? My theory: he doesn't know how to properly seal a 24th century suit, but admitting that to Janeway would defeat the purpose of putting it on in the first place. Or at least. defeat the stated purpose. I'm left wondering whether what's actually going on is an exercise in comfort. Perhaps life on the sleeper ship regularly required he don a spacesuit, so he's doing so again now as a way to centre himself in a new environment. Perhaps, even before setting foot on the planet, Pog needed a way to help him dream himself home.
[2] I have a friend who insists that not only can they recognise a dream while inside one, they can leverage that knowledge to wrest control of the dream, forcing it into whatever configuration they choose. I'm not going to say my friend is lying. I am going to say such people are great and terrible wizards, with power over Hypnos himself. Probably best not to mess with them.
Episode Ordering
1. A Man Alone 2. Dream Catcher
10. Code Of Honor