What does a dream feel like? I don’t mean how does a dream make you feel after you’ve woken up: I mean how do you physically feel within your dream? How does it feel to touch something? Do you feel it at all? 

I liken it to my leg falling asleep. I touch my leg with my finger. My finger feels my leg, but my leg doesn’t feel my finger. This is somewhat of a crude example, but it stands. 

And now what if this was how you experienced life — this feeling washing over your body, mind and soul. The world touches you, but you don’t touch the world. You are awake and still dreaming.

“I wish I could get over this feeling of slipping under.”

Title Fight is in no way a stranger to depictions of sadness, loneliness and depression, yet there is something so salient about the lyricism of “Numb, But I Still Feel It.” Perhaps it is because the name of the track is so transparent about what the track will communicate: the contradictions inherent to the individual experience of sadness. On days that are hard to get through, I constantly struggle to reckon with what I know versus what I feel. 

This internal dispute between knowledge and emotion is what perpetuates the dreamlike nature of existence that Title Fight is expressing here. I know that I exist in the world. I can affect my reality. I can make choices that affect my life. Where contradiction surfaces is in the acknowledgment of that reality while having the unshakeable, oppressive feeling that you exist at the whim of the world. Despite any efforts, you are a passive occupant in the universe incapable of living in it with agency. Things happen to you instead of you happening to them. The world touches you, but you don’t touch the world.

“I talk but no one listens /

Can’t make my own decisions.”

Talking with no one listening; decisions you make that aren’t your own; two directly opposing forces coexisting at once, in the same place, at the same time: Describing these feelings in words feels self-defeating. How can I sensibly convey a feeling which, by its very nature, is not sensible?

“Numb, but I still feel it crawling under my skin.”

If you’re numb, how do you feel? If you feel, how are you numb? Back and forth it goes forever, a cycle that keeps me in a syntactic stasis.

“I threw it all away /

But it still stays the same.”

Does this make sense to you? Does it even have to? After all, it doesn’t matter if a dream makes sense: It only matters how it feels.

“Every day I lie asleep /

Trying to wake up from this dream.”