I had a dream recently — a kind of dream I hadn't had in a while. It goes like this: I meet someone, we talk, sexual tensions rise, then dream-me has to choose how to let them know that I have genital herpes.
I can't remember exactly when my STI first showed up in a dream or the details of what happened, but I remember that I loved it. I was in awe of myself. I was relieved. I was intrigued. It's happened periodically in the eight or so years since, and I still love it every time.
After I was diagnosed in 2011, I experienced what many newly diagnosed people do: initial devastation and upheaval to my self-conception followed by a period of reorientation — that is, emotionally and mentally adjusting to the change in my body and building the skills to support that change internally and interpersonally.
During that early process (as part of it, really) I clunkily made my way through conversations with prospective partners about our STI statuses. With each attempt, I got smoother. More confident. Less self-conscious and more receptive. But it still required effort, as if gearing myself up like a wind-up toy to initiate something that otherwise wouldn't naturally occur. In the beginning, disclosure seemed like a bridge to cross, a checkpoint to clear.
So when I found myself communicating about STIs in my sleep, I was pleased. It signaled that I had integrated my status into my consciousness and understood it as part of me — not as this other, auxiliary thing to accommodate.
And, importantly, my dream disclosures have always gone well. As far as I can remember, they've never led to ridicule, judgment, or rejection. Sure, I generated the scripts myself. But what's more honest than subconscious thoughts in the privacy of your own mind? My imagination could've admitted anxieties and indulged worst case scenarios. Instead, herpes appears in my dreams positively, mundanely, revealing possibility: You can have what you want.
Dreams, like all fantasy realms, offer us space to explore, practice, and workshop. Our fantasies are labs or playgrounds in which we can experiment with different ways of thinking, being, relating. In this way, our fantasies serve as crucial portals between non-existence and existence. "You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine, and at last, you create what you will," said George Bernard Shaw. "The effort of the imagination is to turn the boundary into a horizon," said Barry Lopez. A thousand more quotes hint at the same thing: Fantasy is not frivolous, it is world-building.
I started incorporating herpes into my waking fantasies around the same time as I found myself dreaming about it, some two or three years post-diagnosis. I didn't mean to, but I had to. There I would be, lying on the bed imagining a cute little situation to get off to, and then it'd hit me: For this storyline to continue, we have to talk about STIs.
At first I tried reminding myself that this wasn't real life. In a fantasy of my own design, I could make anything be true, couldn't I? I could imagine myself as someone who doesn't have herpes, or the world as a place where STIs don't exist at all. But I found those alternatives uncompelling. Such fantasies rested on the very premise that they could never come to fruition; they felt less real and therefore less potent. I had edited myself out of my own desires.
A few times I tried to imagine myself as herpes-positive with universally agreed upon clearance not to share that information with partners. No physical harm, no foul. But I didn't like that either. While I've had my fair share of consensual non-consent fantasies (in which I am so irresistible that someone cannot help but fuck me like the slut that I am), this particular dynamic of withholding my status from others turned me off. It was built on a lie — but more significantly, it came from a place of weakness. The primary reason I’d want to avoid sharing my status is the fear that it would mean losing access to what I want.
Thus, I decided to try something else. Instead of attempting to repress any thoughts about STIs, instead of imagining myself in a different body or in an alternate, impossible reality, what if I simply allowed myself to have herpes? What if I wrote my status into my fantasies?
In my mind, I played with different ways of introducing the conversation, and I composed my partners’ responses. They could be respectfully curious and I, being wise, experienced, and hot, would initiate them into deeper understanding of sexual health and human connection. They could be unbothered and impatient to get it on already. They could be turned on by the whole thing, because CONFIDENCE IS SEXY AND SO IS CARING FOR YOUR FELLOW CREATURE, OK??? Or they could respond with something I’ve always dreamed of hearing: “I have it too.”
Instead of using herpes to cockblock myself, I began inviting it into the scene. It was an intentional choice and an experiment at first, but it felt natural. And why shouldn’t it? I was only letting the soft animal of my body be what it is. (h/t Mary Oliver)
The dominant cultural narrative around STIs is that they’re bad, gross, and shameful. There’s another narrative in which STI-positive sexuality is permitted, provided it’s sufficiently sterile and responsible. When does it get to just be, though? Bringing herpes into the fantasy realm has helped me achieve pleasure in the moment, but over time it’s done much more. It’s served as an accidental practice of radically normalizing, and eroticizing, my herpes-positive sexuality.
I recognize that just as imagination gives us space to workshop reality, it also holds potential as an escape. I don’t take for granted the fact that I feel safe enough in my body, spirit, and material conditions to claim this vessel in my dreams — both waking and subconscious.