You wake up and everything is in place. The job, the home, the people, the routine. It is all familiar. Yet something does not quite fit.
It is not necessarily that anything is wrong. Everything might be right, but for someone else. Your life looks like your own without quite feeling like it. As if somebody else wrote the script and you are playing the part.
That was the feeling I wanted to put on the shirt: I Woke Up In Someone Else’s Dream.
Building the sentence into a block
The design is compact and heavy. “I WOKE” sits on the first line, then “UP IN,” “SOMEONE,” and “ELSE’S.” The last word, “DREAM,” carries extra weight.
The different line lengths pack a whole sentence into a dense block. I wanted it to have the presence of words printed on a wall. You have to stay with it for longer than you would with a single word across a chest.
First you read the sentence. Then, perhaps, you pause over what it means. That pause is the reason I made it.
A description rather than an answer
I have made other shirts that ask philosophical questions. What If It’s Not a T-Shirt? questions the thing you are looking at. Not Here to Explain declines to justify itself. Existing Not to Impress, But to Be takes a position.
This sentence describes an experience instead. The life in it might be beautiful. The question is whether it feels like yours.
I do not hear it as saying that life is meaningless. I hear someone stepping back for a moment and asking: how did I get here? There can be curiosity in that question, as well as discomfort.
It is the kind of thought that might turn up in a late conversation with somebody you know well. I wanted the shirt to leave that conversation open.
Porto airport
I was returning to Estonia after three months in Porto. At airport security, a member of the security staff looked at my chest and read the words.
“Did you really wake up in someone else’s dream?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Where?”
“In Porto.”
“How was it?”
“Absolutely amazing.”
They smiled and said, “Come back.”
I remember that exchange because it was so ordinary and so genuine. Airport security is usually all movement and routine. Put this here, take that out, keep going. The sentence on my shirt interrupted that routine for about twenty seconds, and two strangers had an actual conversation.
Some designs start a joke. Some bring a familiar situation to mind. This one created a small moment between people who would otherwise have passed each other without speaking.
Why DREAM comes last
The sentence moves toward that final word. “I woke up” gives you an action. “In someone else’s” starts to place it somewhere. Then “DREAM” makes the reality of the whole sentence uncertain.
If this is a dream, what counts as waking up? And whose dream is it?
That is why the last word is heavier. It changes everything that came before it. The typography gives it the final beat, but it does not supply a final answer.
You can keep the question.
Anti, the guy who makes these shirts