by Greg Isle
The dreams began after a week of blackouts. The first one was always the same, a recurring nightmare that frightened me more than the blackouts had. I remember how intrigued Rachel was when I first recounted it, and how uncharacteristically sure she was that she understood the image. I sat in the deeply padded chair opposite her desk, closed my eyes, and described what I had seen so often.
I'm sitting in a dark room. There's no light at all. No sound. I can feel my eyes with my fingers, my ears, too, but I see and hear nothing. I remember nothing. I have no past. And because I see and hear nothing, I have no present. I simply am. That's my reality. I AM. I feel like a stroke victim imprisoned within a body and brain that no longer function. I can think, but not of any specific images. I feel more than I think. And what I feel is this: Who am I? Where did I come from? Why am I alone? Was I always here? Will I always be here? These thoughts don't merely fill my mind. They are my mind. There's no time as we know it, only the questions changing from one to another. Eventually, the questions resolve into a single mantra: Where did I come from? Where did I come from? I'm a brain-damaged man sitting in a room for eternity, asking one question of the darkness.
"Don't you see?" Rachel had said. "You haven't fully dealt with the deaths of your wife and daughter. Their loss cut you off from the world, and from yourself. You are damaged. You are wounded. The man walking around in the world of light is an act. The real David Tennant is sitting in that dark room, unable to think or feel. No one feels his grief or his pain."
"That's not it," I told her. "I did a psychiatry rotation, for God's sake. This isn't unresolved grief."
She sighed and shook her head. "Doctors always make the worst patients."
A week later, I told her the dream had changed. “There's something in the room with me now."
"What is it?"
"I don't know. I can't see it." "But you know it's there?"
"Yes."
"Is it aperson?"
"No. It's very small. A sphere, floating in space. A black golf ball floating in the dark." "How do you know it's there?"
"It's like a deeper darkness at the center of the dark. And it pulls at me."
"Pulls how?"
"I don't know. Like gravity. Emotional gravity. But I know this. It knows the answer to my questions. It knows who I am and why I'm stuck in that dark room."
And so it went, with slight variations, until the dream changed again. When it did, it changed profoundly. One night, while reading at home, I "went under" in the usual way. I found myself sitting in the familiar lightless room, asking my question of the black ball. Then, without warning, the ball exploded into retina-scorching light. After so much darkness, the striking of a match would have seemed an explosion, but this was no match. It blasted outward in all directions with the magnitude of a hydrogen bomb. Only this explosion did not suck back into itself and blossom into a mushroom cloud. It expanded with infinite power and speed, and I had the horrifying sense of being devoured by it, devoured but not destroyed. As the blinding light consumed the darkness, which was me, I somehow knew that this could go on for billions of years without destroying me altogether. Yet still I was afraid.
Rachel didn't know what to make of this dream. Over the next three weeks, she listened as I described the births of stars and galaxies, their lives and deaths: black holes, supernovas, flashes of nebulae like powdered diamonds flung into the blackness, planets born and dying. I seemed to see from one end of the universe to the other, all objects at once as they expanded into me at the speed of light.
"Have you seen images like these before?" she asked me. "In waking life?"
"How could I?"
"Have you seen photographs taken by the Hubble space telescope?"
"Of course."
"They're very much like what you're describing."
Frustration crept into my voice. "You don't understand. I'm not just seeing this. I'm feeling it. The way I might feel watching children, or combat, or lovers together. It's not merely a visual display."
"Go on."
That was what she always said. I closed my eyes and submerged myself in my most recent dream.
"I'm watching a planet. Hovering above it. There are clouds, but not as we know them. They're green like acid, and tortured by storms. I'm diving now, diving down through the clouds, like a satellite image zooming in to ground level. There's an ocean below, but it's not blue. It's red, and boiling. I plunge through its surface, deep into the red. I'm looking for something, but it's not there. This ocean is empty."
"A lot of things came to me when you described that," Rachel said. "The color imagery first. Red could be important. The empty ocean is a symbol of barrenness, which expresses your aggrieved state." She hesitated. "What are you looking for in that ocean?"
"I don't know."
"I think you do."
"I'm not looking for Karen and Zooey."
"David." A hint of irritation in her voice. "If you don't think these images are symbolic, why are you here?"
I opened my eyes and looked at her perfectly composed face. A curtain of professionalism obscured her empathy, but I saw the truth. She was projecting her sense of loss about her own family onto me.
"I'm here because I can't find answers on my own," I said. "Because I've read a mountain of books, and they haven't helped."
She nodded gravely. "How do you remember the hallucinations in such detail? Do you write them down when you wake up?"
"No. They aren't like normal dreams, where the harder you try to remember, the less you can. These are indelible. Isn't that a feature of narcoleptic dreams?"
"Yes," she said softly. "All right. Karen and Zooey died in water. They both drowned. Karen probably bled a good bit from her hands, and where she hit her head on the steering wheel. That would give us red water." Rachel reclined her chair and looked at the ceiling tiles. "These hallucinations have no people in them, yet you experience strong emotional reactions. You mentioned combat. Have you ever been in combat?"
"No."
"But you know that Karen fought to save Zooey. She fought to stay alive. You told me that."
I shut my eyes. I didn't like to think about that part of it, but sometimes I couldn't banish the thoughts. When Karen's car flipped into the pond, it had landed on its roof and sunk into a foot of soft mud. The electric windows shorted out, and the doors were impossible to open. Broken bones in Karen's hands and feet testified to the fury with which she had fought to smash the windows. She was a small woman, not physically strong, but she had not given up. A paramedic from the accident scene told me that when the car was finally winched out of the muck and its doors opened, he found her in the backseat, one arm wrapped tightly around Zooey, the other arm floating free, that hand shattered and lacerated over the knuckles.
What had happened was clear. As water filled the car and Karen fought to break the windows, Zooey had panicked. Anyone would, and especially a child. At that point, some mothers would have kept fighting while their child screamed in terror. Others would have comforted their child and prayed for help to come. But Karen had pulled Zooey tight against her, promised her that everything was going to be all right, and then with her feet fought to her last breath to escape the waterbound coffin. For her to cling to Zooey while suffering the agony of anoxia testified to a love stronger than terror, and that knowledge had helped bring me some peace.
"Green clouds and a red ocean have nothing to do with a car accident five years ago," I said.
"No? Then I think you should tell me more about your childhood."
"It's not relevant."
"You can't know that," Rachel insisted.
"I do."
"Tell me about your work, then."
"I teach medical ethics."
"You took a leave of absence over a year ago."
I whipped my head toward her and opened my eyes. "How do you know that?"
"I heard it at the hospital."
"Who said it?"
"I don't remember. I overheard it
. You're very well known in the medical community. Physicians at Duke refer to your book all the time. They did at New York Presbyterian, too. So, is it true? Did you take a leave of absence from the medical school?"
"Let's stick to the dreams, okay? It's safer for both of us."
"Safer how?"
I didn't answer.
By the next week's appointment, the dreams had changed again.
"I'm looking at the Earth. Suspended in space. It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. Blue and green with swirling white clouds. It's a living thing, a perfect closed system. I dive through the clouds, a hundred-mile swan dive into deep blue ocean. It's bursting with life. Giant molecules, multicelled creatures, jellyfish, squid, serpents, sharks. The land, too, is teeming. Covered with jungle. A symphony of green. On the shore, fish flop out of the waves and grow legs. Strange crabs scuttle onto the sand and change into other animals I've never seen. Time is running in fast-forward, like evolution run through a projector at a million times natural speed. Dinosaurs morph into birds, rodents into mammals. Primates lose their hair. Ice sheets flatten the jungles and then melt into savannah. Twenty thousand years pass in one breath—"
"Take it slow," Rachel advised. "You're getting agitated."
"How could I be seeing all that?"
"You know the answer. Your mind can create any conceivable image and make it real. That photograph of the earth from space is an icon of modern culture. It moves everyone who sees it, and you must have seen it fifty times since childhood."
"My mind can create animals I've never seen? Realistic-looking animals?"
"Of course. You've seen Hieronymus Bosch paintings. And I've seen the kind of time-lapse images you're describing on television. In the old days, Life magazine did things like that in print. 'The Ascent of Man,' like that. The question is, why are you seeing these things?"
"That's what I'm here to find out."
"Are you present in this surreal landscape?"
"No."
"What do you feel?"
"I'm still looking for something."
"What?"
"I don't know. I'm like a bird scanning the earth and sea for . . . something."
"Are you a bird in the dream?"
She sounded hopeful. Birds must mean something in the lexicon of dream interpretation. "No."
"What are you?"
"Nothing, really. A pair of eyes."
"An observer."
"Yes. A disembodied observer. T. J. Eckleburg."
"Who?"
"Nothing. Something from F. Scott Fitzgerald."
"Oh. I remember." She put the end of her pen in her mouth and bit it. An unusual gesture for her. "Do you have an opinion about why you're seeing all this?"
"Yes." I knew my next words would surprise her. "I believe someone is showing it to me."
Her eyes widened, practically histrionics from Rachel Weiss. "Really?"
"Yes."
"Who is showing this to you?"
"I have no idea. Why do you think I'm seeing it?"
She moved her head from side to side. I could almost see her neurons firing, processing my words through the filters that education and experience had embedded in her brain. "Evolution is change," she said. "You're seeing change sped up to unnatural velocity. Uncontrollable change. I sense this may have something to do with your work."
You could be right, I thought, but I didn't say that. I simply moved on. My silence was her only protection. In the end, it didn't matter, because the theme of evolution died, and what came to dominate my sleeping mind shook me to the core.
There were people in my new dreams. They couldn't see me, and I only saw flashes of them. It was as though I were watching damaged strips of film cobbled together out of order. A woman walking with a baby on her hip. A man drawing water from a well. A soldier in uniform, carrying a short sword, the gladius I had learned about in Mrs. Whaley's eighth-grade Latin class. A Roman soldier. That was my first real clue that this was no random series of images, but scenes from a particular era. I saw oxen pulling plows. A young woman selling herself on the street. Men exchanging money. Gold and copper coins with the imperious profile of an emperor upon them. And a name. Tiberius. The name triggered something in my mind, so I checked the Internet. The successor of Augustus, Tiberius was a former commander of legions who spent much of his reign leading military campaigns in Germania. One of the few important events of his rule—seen through the lens of hindsight—was the execution of a Jewish peasant said to have claimed to be king of the Jews.
"Was your father deeply religious?" Rachel asked, upon hearing about these new images.
"No. He was ... he looked at the world in a more fundamental way."
"What do you mean by that?"
"It's not relevant."
An exasperated sigh. "Your mother, then?"
"She had faith in something greater than humanity, but she wasn't big on organized religion."
"You had no religious indoctrination as a child?"
"Sunday school for a couple of years. It didn't take."
"What denomination?"
"Methodist. It was the closest church to our house."
"Did they show films about Jesus' life?"
"It's possible. I don't remember."
"You grew up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, right? It's more probable than not. And of course we've all seen the grand biblical epics from the fifties. The Ten Commandments. Ben-Hur. Those things."
"What are you saying?"
"Only that the accoutrements of these hallucinations have been sitting in your subconscious for years. They're in all of us. But your dreams seem to be moving toward something. And that something may be Jesus of Nazareth."
"Have you heard of dreams like this before?" I asked.
"Of course. Many people dream of Jesus. Of personal interactions with him, receiving messages from him. But your dream progression has a certain logic to it, and a naturalistic tone rather than the wildness of obsessive fantasy. Also, you claim to be an atheist. Or at least agnostic. I'm very interested to see where this goes."
I appreciated her interest, but I was tired of waiting for answers. "But what do you think it means?"
She pursed her lips, then shook her head. "I'm no longer convinced that this has to do with the loss of your wife and daughter. But the truth is, I simply don't know enough about your life to make an informed evaluation."
We were at a stalemate. I still didn't believe that my past had anything to do with my dreams. Yet as the days passed, the scarred strips of film in my head began to clear, and certain dream characters to reappear. The faces I saw became familiar, like friends. Then more familiar than friends. A feeling was growing in me that I remembered these faces, and not merely from previous dreams. I described them for Rachel as accurately as I could.
I’m sitting in the midst of a circle, rapt bearded faces watching me. I know I'm speaking, because they're obviously listening to me, yet I can't hear my own words.
I see a woman's face, angelic yet common, and a pair of eyes I know like those of my mother. They don't belong to my mother, though, not the mother who raised me in Oak Ridge. Yet they watch me with pure love. A bearded man stands behind her, watching me with a father's pride. But my father was clean shaven all his life. . . .
I see donkeys . . . a date palm. Naked children. A brown river. I feel the cold, jarring shock of immersion, the beat of my feet on sand. I see a young girl, beautiful and dark-haired, leaning toward my face for a kiss, then blushing and running away. I'm walking among adults. Their faces say, This child is not like other children. A wild-eyed man stands waist deep in water, a line of men and women awaiting their turn to be submerged, while others come up from the water coughing and sputtering, their eyes wide.
Sometimes the dreams had no logic, but were only disjointed fragments. When logic finally returned, it frightened me.
I'm sitting beside the bed of a small boy. He can't move. His eyes are closed. He's been paralyzed for
two days. His mother and aunt sit with me. They bring food, cool water, oil to anoint the boy. I speak softly in his ear. I tell the women to hold his hands. Then I lean down and speak his name. His eyes squeeze tight, expressing mucus. Then they open and light up with recognition of his mother. His mother gasps, then screams that his hand moved. She lifts him up, and he hugs her. The women weep with happiness. . . .
I'm eating with a group of women. Olives and flat bread. Some women won't meet my eyes. After the meal, they take me into a bedroom, where a pregnant girl lies on the bed. They tell me the baby has been inside her too long. Labor will not begin. They fear the child is dead. I ask the women to leave. The young mother fears me. I calm her with soft words, then lift the blanket and lay my hands on her belly. It's distended, tight as a drum. I leave my hands there for a long time, gently urging, speaking softly to her. I can't understand what I'm saying. It's like a soft chant. After a time, her mouth opens. She's felt a kick. She cries out for the other women. "My baby is alive!" The women lay their hands on me, trying to touch me as if I possess some invisible power. "Surely he is the one," they say.
"These are stories from the Bible," Rachel said, "known by millions of schoolchildren. There's nothing unique about them."
"I've been reading the New Testament," I told her. "There's no record of Jesus healing a little boy of paralysis. No description of him eating a meal with only women, then inducing labor."
"But those are both healing images. And you're a physician. Your subconscious seems to be casting Jesus in your image. Or vice versa. Perhaps the problem really is your work. Have you moved further away from pure medicine? I've known doctors who fell into depression after giving up hands-on patient care for pure research. Perhaps this is something like that?"
She'd guessed correctly about my moving away from patient care, but my lucid dreams weren't some strange expression of nostalgia for my days in the white coat.
"There's another possibility," she suggested. "One more in line with my original interpretation. These images of divine healing could be subconscious wishes that you could bring Karen and Zooey back. Think about it. What were two of Jesus' most notable miracles?"