Brad Pitt Opens Up His Dream World

We know him as a legendary leading man, a Hollywood power broker, maybe the greatest heart-throb of all time. But Brad Pitt isn't attached to any of those old conceptions. And, as Ottessa Moshfegh discovers, his ambitions for the rest of his life are more mystical than we ever could have imagined.

- Ottessa Moshfegh

Brad Pitt tries to remember his dreams. He keeps pen and paper on his bedside table and records everything he can recall when he wakes up in the morning. "I've found that to be really helpful," he says. "I'm curious what's going on in there when I'm not at the helm." He tells me this one recent afternoon in the brightness of his living room, at his Craftsman home in the Hollywood Hills. For a long while, his sleep had been haunted by a particularly persistent and violent dream the particulars of which he later describes for me in an email exchange. He writes:

For a solid four or five years there, the most predominant dream I would experience would be getting jumped and stabbed. It would always be at night, in the dark, and I would be walking down a sidewalk in a park or along a boardwalk and as I'd pass under an Exorcist-like street lamp, someone would jump out of the abyss and stab me in the ribs. Or I'd notice I was being followed and then another flanked me and I realized I was trapped, and they meant me grave harm. Or being chased through a house with a kid I'd help escape but got pinned in on the deck and stabbed. Always stabbed. And I would awake in a terror. I didn't understand why it/they would want to hurt me. This stopped a year or two ago only when I started going straight back into the dream and asking simply why?