I keep having these dreams where I am using a phone, sometimes an iPhone but more often some combination of every phone I’ve ever owned since 2005. And I need something bad—instructions on how to find my first period math classroom (though I haven’t had to step foot in even a college classroom since 2017) or an e-ticket for a concert I am already at the door for. Or else I am walking along two-way, three-lane traffic hoping to call for a ride, and always I’m a little or a lot lost.

But in each dream, the phone fails me. Often disintegrating in my hands with flakes of glass sticking to my fingers. Or sometimes the phone has buttons and the key cover cracks and I am desperately mashing the rubber circle beneath. Sometimes I flounder, stressed that I can no longer remember how to type messages using a T9 keypad.

I don’t think the dreams are very hard to interpret. I don’t trust my phone, and I don’t trust myself without it either.

I’ve come to know for certain that I don’t want the world at my fingertips. I have proven to myself that I am ill-equipped to self-moderate my consumption of any media (Substack included) on my phone. But like the rest of us, I am scared to loosen my grip completely. Why? Because I am afraid of that feeling that ends all my phone failure dreams. I am afraid of being unreachable. Afraid of feeling incapable. Afraid of being “out of touch,” so I keep the glowing rectangle always always always within arm’s reach.

The most unsettling part about these dreams for me is that once the phones fail to function (the screen cracks or the buttons flake or the light goes out), I keep tapping.

I don’t look up. I don’t look for another way, at least not in my subconscious.

(A playlist I made in 2018 that is still great)

But I am awake. Looking up. Looking for a different way to be.

And right now that’s offline. At least when it comes to the pocket computer. My laptop has never had the same lure or lurking ability to interrupt me when I’m in the middle of, you know, living.

When I was about nine years old, I left my Nokia brick phone outside in the backyard for a day and half before I remembered to look for it. Even though it got rained on a bit, the brick functioned perfectly afterward.

May it be so easy again—to simply forget my phone.

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