The Eyelid

by S. D. Chrostowska

  Seeing me take fright, Chevauchet turned to me and said, ‘You are perhaps beginning to understand why I want to unite nightmares, which are awful, and daydreams, which are generally pleasant.’ And he told me of nightmares that ‘run in families’ and that sheer repetition renders unshakable.

  To take the nearest example, the elder brother of the wolf boy we had caught falling had long been harassed by the same bad dream. He was in a wood-panelled room with thick Persian carpeting when he would hear a noise coming from beneath the floor. Curious, he would lift the rugs, heavy and dust-packed, and, no nearer the source of the mysterious scratching, pry loose the floorboards, which splintered. This still not unravelling the mystery, he would dig even deeper, under the room, clearing away the dirt with his hands. At which point he would remember the curse and, as panic tunnelled his vision, realize that he too must now be struck down by the Egyptian pharaoh, whose secret tomb he had disturbed – to be buried in it.

  The recurring nightmare of the boys’ mother, which Chevauchet narrated for me, was altogether more unsettling for hewing closer to actual history – its darkest chapter, to boot.

  It started off innocuously. She dreamt of herself as a pubescent girl in a wing chair vis-à-vis an old woman. The matron was a member of the Wagner clan – one of Richard’s grandchildren – by then too innocent and senile to play a Valkyrie. Her heart and the only part of her memory still intact belonged to the Third Reich, when she was young and attractive. She pronounced Reich like a talisman, savouring it, making her young listener cringe.

  At one point, the girl, who was Jewish, would be shown an antique pocket watch. It was expensive, a personal gift from the Führer! The girl could not understand all that the old woman was telling her in beaming, toothless German. But she nevertheless grasped enough to know that both Hitler and his Minister of Propaganda used to pay calls to this very room in courtship. Each had taken tea in the very armchair that now held her hostage. She looked closer at the watch and out jumped the dedication: The bigger the lie, the better it works. Yours, Adi. The dream always ended there, in shock.

  In the same vein, the mother dreamt of having been condemned to death by the Gestapo. The SS officer ordered to execute her liked to do it in his billet. To avoid some kind of inspection (there was a knock on the door), he would shove her into a shallow chest of drawers, where she would lie, folded flat like a sweater, until the coast was clear. When it was okay to do so, he would let her out. Afraid he would now ‘do the deed,’ she would appeal to his humanity, imploring him not to kill her: ‘I can stay put in this drawer for hours’ – and she would fold herself neatly again – ‘Like so!’ ‘The war will be over any day now!’ (it was the winter of 1944), she reasoned with the man from the SS. She would open the other drawers, feeling at home. The deepest one, on the bottom, contained her woollens. It was infested with moths. So none could escape, she proceeded to spray everything with the insecticide Kapo®. This complicity in the killing made her feel safe. But the gaping holes in her best sweater knew different …

  Chapter Thirteen

  Just as Chevauchet was wrapping up his account of the dream, we dismounted from our pegasus, deposited as if on request at a chalet or country inn. It was a Golden Lion, Lion d’Or, a rare sight these days. A bell somewhere struck midnight.

  We checked in at reception and, in search of a warm meal, made our way over to the restaurant. We sat down and ordered. Busy conversing with the other guests at our table, I did not at first see the dwarf who had planted himself at my elbow. He hung on patiently until, following the glances of Chevauchet, who sat across from me, I took notice of him. At this, he placed in my lap an amputated finger. It did not appear to have been severed per se, but detached whole like putty. The messenger grinned idiotically, then turned around and left.

  I asked Chevauchet what it meant, to which he replied sheepishly that it was up to me: ‘After all, it is your dream.’ Queasy, I called a waiter and sent the finger back like a dish that disagreed with me. Within minutes, the little man was at my side again and dropped the finger, Dalíesque and éclair-like, back in my lap. This farce repeating several more times without explanation, I decided to take matters into my own hands, chased him out of doors, and returned to finish my dinner. Only then did it dawn on me that, like the singer of ‘Les Feuilles mortes’ in Gates of the Night, I may have belittled a warning from fate, leaving it no choice but to teach me a lesson.

  Before we retired to bed, I asked Chevauchet to explain to me our mode of travel and what spying on the dreams of strangers was meant to serve. It was a question he had apparently anticipated; he laid out his thinking reasonably and succinctly.

  Dream-hopping, as he called what we did, would, if generalized, build community, and not just among individual dreamers but also among their figments – those they themselves dreamt into existence and would want to associate with. These phantoms would be ‘dependents,’ and a shared responsibility.

  Diplomacy, of the kind Chevauchet had undertaken, could succeed only by such activity. Where real life demanded passports, here only a passe-partout would do. All should enjoy right of passage through the dreams and daydreams of others, on condition that they abstained from meddling in them. Such passage already occurred between one’s own dreams and daydreams. They were ‘our own’ in name only, being in no way our property. We could not even be certain of being their makers. And since dreams neither really belonged nor were original to us, a dream-community ought to be possible.

  As the restaurant slowly emptied for the night, our attention was drawn to the television playing in the background. Below the image of a news anchor, a message scrolled across the screen: Unsafe tunnel, extreme temperatures, and vermin make recovery of bodies and search for evidence difficult. Then the words UP NEXT: Chrysanthemums, or the Day of the Bombs, which I took to be the title of a late-night feature.

  The eye of the camera panned across a black-and-white landscape: a misty orchard, its trees frosted over, bare and gnarled. From a distance they made a stereogram pattern. In fact, the story, of which this was the opening sequence, had the faint contour of a bas-relief figure hidden in a repeating-panel picture, each of its individual segments, on the contrary, sharp as in a camera obscura.

  Next, I saw a paysage covered in chrysanthemums the size of cabbage heads. The entire horticultural zone seemed enclosed in a kind of bubble. The flowers were vividly hued and, similar to crepe paper, rough to the touch. They were being cultivated like so many shrines. Above them extended an astonishing Oz-like skyscape, the clouds wildly polychromatic and transmuted in ever-changing variations, as in a kaleidoscope. They had a colouring-book appearance. Nearer to the ground, a warm breeze rustled the treetops, shaking out the dust. There was no one about; only later did I spot people kneeling at chrysanthemum patches, attending to them like sextons or altar boys, or walking, heads bent, around a cabbage field, of the ornamental variety (the cold, if not severe, enhanced its colour). Every now and then, a noiseless, solitary cyclist would cut across a vista of strapping conifers. Sunshine as on a late-spring or early-autumn day illuminated the forest in shafts. Along the rim of it ran a plain country road, down which we headed.

  Little by little, a gigantic rubber sphere came into view on the horizon. A glossy, purple-brown ball the size of a strawberry moon, it came bouncing over hills. According to announcements made over the airwaves, it was the fallout from the bombings of several American cities. Buffalo was the first hit. An intertitle informed: The Tragedy at Buffalo.

  The newscasts reached me as through invisible loudspeakers concealed in the clouds. Their volume was the same everywhere, the announcer’s voice booming overhead. But drowning it out near the ground was the hum of a nuclear plant, or of a distant stampede of buffalo. I saw no installation or transmission towers anywhere, yet the atmosphere was maximally charged.

  The road led to a block of flats, winding long like a train, and to arrive at the very last unit took some time. The air insid
e was pure and sterile. The furnishings were minimal: a chair, a bed, and a bicycle, as if to suggest a getaway.

  On the white wall, next to a poster for the Pan-American Exposition of 1901, I made out the following nostalgic verse, presumably composed before the attack by the room’s last tenant:

  A horror ran up my leg and lodged itself in my brain.

  Remember when we had no need of bullhorns?

  It was enough to speak.

  Those days have fallen silent.

  This is not a prophecy.

  The lines gave way to an ‘Indian-head’ test pattern.

  Chapter Fourteen

  We were now above the great park, and the ink in the sky was fading. I was puzzled by the way time seemed to compress and expand in Chevauchet’s company.

  ‘It must be about seven o’clock,’ I hazarded.

  ‘So it is,’ he replied, visibly excited. ‘The witching hour of dreams of power!’

  Down below, we saw an arena in which two naked men were locked in hand-to-hand combat. We descended and blended into the crowd observing the fight. The people assembled were clearly plebians, whereas the fighters appeared to belong to the noble caste. Their skin was painted gold; beneath the paint it was black. From one of the onlookers we learned that, in these parts, when the king died (as happened recently), the chiefs met to choose a new leader. Confounding cruelty with bravery, they made their head the fiercest one among them. During the past nine days, said the commoner, their exploits took the form of duels with pows or criminals, then with one another. He who showed himself the most valiant or terrible, capable of the greatest violence, would henceforth be feared as the greatest in the nation and be named king. He would be given a triumphant welcome in his future palace, where new trials and excesses awaited him, lasting another nine days. Although it was not given to the masses to witness it, intemperance and debauchery would there be taken to such an extreme that the new ruler almost invariably succumbed, and the ceremonial would start over. It was rare for the festival not to cost the lives of many men, concluded our dream-interlocutor on a note of grand pathos.

  This was ‘The Spectacle to End All Spectacles.’ For centuries now, the ritual had kept the number of tyrants to a bare minimum.

  We moved away and spied the dream’s dreamer pressing through the crowd to get closer to the contestants, one of whom had just lost an ear and roared like a wild beast. Then our man did something bizarre: he entered the arena and lay himself down flat on the ground like a log, and waited in this position to be trampled to death.

  ‘Seems to me more like a dream of impotence!’ I remarked to Chevauchet.

  ‘A desire too long repressed can, in a dream, turn into its opposite; disappointed dreams give birth to their contraries. The dialectic of wishing is delicate and unpredictable.’ The pensive tone of his response implied I had chanced upon something fundamental, a vulnerability in the mechanism that was also, however, its strength.

  With this ended the first of my many visits to Onirica.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Diplomacy was the righteous upright cousin of double agency. It required being simultaneously in two states. With one foot in dreamy Onirica, the other in waking Fantasy, folded in two like a folio, Chevauchet straddled both. Or rather, he worked in their overlap.

  And just as each leaf had its other half somewhere pages apart, so each night-dream had, if I understood him right, its counterpart, its ‘distant double,’ in reverie. But what were dreams? He was averse to such general definitions. The most he would venture was that they were singular and that they constituted a realm of individual freedom even when all other freedoms had been stripped and collective freedom taken away. Yet this liberty was not what we were used to calling ‘autonomy.’ It was, he insisted, ‘isonomic’ – ordering blanket equality and allowing us to imagine, beyond, or beneath, individuals, an undifferentiated ‘collective unconscious.’ Such unconscious was neither real nor unreal, and neither true nor false.

  The freedom in dreams was likewise not a negative, escapist one. Night and day, the dreamer remained bound to reality. Night-dreams were in thrall to the past. At the same time, they were unfettered from official history, the artificial continuity of the past. Binding dreamers were the details of the lives they had lived, things insignificant or unnoticeable, subconscious or forgotten. It was inventory from this past, and not their personal ‘stories,’ that lay its dead hand upon them and gave them nightmares. This past, and not official history, held them in its grip, and did not keep them awake at night but, on the contrary, tenaciously asleep.

  It was a strange kind of freedom, but it was freedom nonetheless. And what held true for nocturnal dreams in this respect was even truer of reveries: they were mental islands of liberty, even for the isolated. Chevauchet liked to refer to the sixteenth-century philosopher Étienne de La Boétie on matters of freedom, and did so in this case. Should a tyrant take the liberty of action away from us, so we could no longer communicate our aspirations or even think clearly, we would still be free in our daydreams. Only, we would be isolated in them. Our reveries would, in effect, make our enslavement and tyranny unbearable, reinforcing the prison we once took for a citadel. This might push us to break out in search of company. On the other hand, when extreme isolation was sought voluntarily, and our mind revolved around ideals, the freedom of such reverie was squandered, put in the service of an imaginary heaven for one.

  Reveries were linked to aspiration, to projects and hopes. They were optative, future-directed, but whether they had a future depended entirely on whether their dreamer was ready to chase them, and on how far they were prepared to go.

  For Chevauchet, the future ‘belonged’ to daydreams.

  They were the core of his unified theory of utopia (as naive and idealistic as this sounded). Dreaming was no more intrinsically totalitarian than awakening – under the name of ‘class consciousness’ – was inherently revolutionary, leading to emancipation. Speculative utopian blueprints and abstractions left him cold. Utopia was quite simply the plurality of dissonant dreams and poetic traditions, chief among them being Romanticism and Surrealism. These utopian currents awoke latent myths containing values of the unjustly silenced, the vanquished – values that any oppressed could claim and incarnate, bringing to life in such manner past struggles and lost causes, redeeming them. This kept the sphere of action open for universalization. But values could also be co-opted, turned against themselves, dialectically reappropriated. They were in constant danger of ending up as grist or caught in the ‘birdlime’ of ideology.

  ‘Only in dreams can we still act, can there still be any real change.’ By this he meant that we could change the world for the better only through, or by way of, wishful thinking that ‘awakened’ our potential for unrest. Real wakefulness, however, was the enemy. And the aim was not revolution as we know it. Our resistance to the system could only take shape where one overthrew the symbolic order of reality: in a united dreamworld. Only there could its ‘vanishing lines’ be seen. ‘Another world exists: inside this one,’ he would repeat, quoting Paul Éluard. ‘Dream what you would like to become reality,’ he would add himself, with last-words finality.

  Chapter Sixteen

  At first, I did not see how diplomacy could go hand in hand with fomenting revolution. Granted, the one Chevauchet prepared was non-violent and would take place entirely within dream states. In the crudest terms, so I could comprehend it, the mission was to unite night- with daydreams, the tension between them being at a breaking point. Its main obstacle was always the fear that reveries would slip control if one ceded too much ground to their nocturnal others. Night-dreams were widely held to be exotic country, a lawless dimension of the past that, once visited, served no purpose, but only revived or reinforced undesirable memories. The Onirican ‘republic’ was pure anarchy. It mattered little that criminal wishes could as readily bloom in the so-called free and conscious mind, their roots planted firmly in the soil of reverie. By co
ndemning night-dreams as illogical and immoral, dreamers closed their eyes to the same in their woolgathering.

  What was immoral was servitude, which did not exist in dreams. Wilful enslavement was the norm everywhere the ‘emperor’ was invisible.

  ‘Servitude is no less servile for being voluntary,’ Chevauchet would say. ‘Willing it only makes the bondage more profound. You accept state coercion in exchange for the ability to act on your selfish urges, available as a shrinking set of options. Captive minds, sworn to inaction, generally give up thinking of vengeance, treason, revolt, and crime. You congratulate yourselves on your impeccable morality, even if purchased at so high a price. Your easy conscience lets you sleep at night. But dreams are where you give yourselves over to wickedness with impunity and where you stow the skeletons. Where you allow yourself to be ravished by incubi and succubi. Dreams do your dirty work. They are the theatre for your private catharsis. So you disown them.

  ‘Meanwhile, little by little, you give in to the lure of insomnia to make you still more upstanding, still more efficient and productive, to the detriment of creativity. You sacrifice sleep and, with it, your dreams. And what if you could not sleep at all? What if that guilty pleasure was denied you, knowing that, in your willed servitude, you would not resist? Would your conscience be as clear then? Would you not, then, rise up to defend your right to sleep – which is as much as saying “your right to dream”? You would realize that dreaming was not only your private underworld, but your last scrap of freedom as well. By then, of course, it would be too late. Because you would have already traded in sleep for money. You are constantly aided and nudged to cut down on it. All the propaganda is bound to take and make insomnia desirable. You seem to forget that losing sleep will, over time, cost you not just your dreams but also your daydreams, and ultimately even thinking creatively, what is called “thinking for yourself.” It is just a question of when.