“Did you ever notice the one thing all dreams have in common? In every dream I ever have, and maybe everyone’s dreams?”
We all looked at each other.
I said, “They’re boring if they’re someone else’s?”
Frank opened his mouth to say something more intelligent, but closed it again, stumped. Alisa said, “They’re irrational?” But recognizing the inadequacy of her response, she just shrugged when no one said anything in response.
“So here it is. A lot of dreams are about sex, right? And a lot of dreams are about traveling. And a lot of dreams are about being unprepared for tests and being lost in strange cities and stuff like that. And yeah, Alisa, they’re all irrational and strange, I mean, that goes without saying that we usually don’t have dreams that make sense. And I would also say that most dreams are about feeling confused and at a loss in some way. But I’m talking about something else. I’m talking about, if you’re dreaming that you’re in your home, even if you’ve been living in your actual home for the past thirty years and know it inside out and backward, the dream home is going to look completely different. Why? I mean, why should this be the case, when even your unconscious mind knows perfectly well what your own house looks like?”
Everyone else was eating by now, but Diane just kept on going. I thought of the slanting wall in my house’s dormer room, and of the slanting walls in the version of Berto’s I had dreamed.
“And at some point during the dream, your home is going to turn into an airport or a Chinese restaurant or something. And if you’re talking to your father in your dream, first of all he’s not really going to look like your father, and maybe he’ll have ‘breasts’ that you think are a little weird for some reason you can’t quite put your finger on, and second of all, at some point he’s suddenly going to turn into your college boyfriend or whatever, and he’s not going to look like himself either, and then all of a sudden you’re on a tour boat on the River Volga fishing for sturgeon with slices of pork.”
We could tell she’d thought of that example because Frank had ordered the pork chops. He said, “Okay, let’s grant what you’re saying is true. In dreams, everything changes.”
Diane said, “No, in dreams everything constantly shifts. That’s a little bit different. Everything is constantly unstable, like it’s all melting like a big bowl of sherbet and the colors are swirling together. And here’s what I’m getting at.”
Frank said, in his mock-professorial voice, “Yeah, Diane, why don’t you tell us what you’re getting at?” Big laughter all around the table. She waited for it to stop.
“Well, what is the one thing all of us have in common in our real, waking lives? No matter how important or unimportant or young or old we are, we are all getting older at exactly the same rate, one minute at a time, with every breath we take, no exceptions, no exemptions. If you’re a kid, you’re growing, and if you’re an old fart, you’re dying, but either way, every day you’re one step closer to death. You…cannot…hold onto…anything. Ever.”
Frank said, “Well, this isn’t something any of us don’t already know.”
She looked at Frank directly now. “But our knowledge of this fact was inborn, or I should say created in us the moment we were ripped from that incredibly comfortable and safe and warm womb, so that we instantly knew in our bones that nothing was ever going to be safe and comfortable and predictable ever again, that we were going to change and grow old and then die, and sometimes at a young age from a horrible stupid disease like ALS, and this inherent knowledge, this vestigial knowledge that’s as much of a reflex as the hairs bristling on our face, that is the thing that causes us to dream in a way in which everything is unstable and shifting and ripped away from us at any given moment. At the end of the day—”
“The end of the night,” I interrupted.
“Yeah, at the end of the night. Okay. At the end of the night, all of our dreams are rehearsing and remembering and trying to work out this terrible knowledge that everything slips away, and that’s why in our dreams we feel confused and lost and everything does slip away. What is underlying all of it, every time we ‘lose’ our home or our parents in a dream and they disappear and we forget about them and suddenly find ourselves fishing with pork on the Volga is the absolute shock and outrage we once felt about being born, because at that moment we also experience the shock and outrage we will feel when we realize we are going to die. And we never forget this, and it haunts us every time we close our eyes.”
For the entire duration of Diane’s speculations, I had been fighting an urge to flee to the bathroom or leave the restaurant entirely, stranding Alisa with her friends. I couldn’t take it when Diane talked about feeling our deaths in our bones, and I especially couldn’t take it when she talked about how our dreams shifted and transmuted, because it made me think not at all of MariAngela but rather of a long, white box of roses that, when opened, revealed instead of roses a tiny human skeleton.
But being the good and responsible person that I was, I shoved away this image (which was something real and certainly not a dream) and attended, if not so much to Diane’s words, at the very least to the meaning behind the words. And so to avoid giving anyone at the table the impression that anything was disturbing me, I forced myself to ask a reasonable and perfectly apropos question.
“So you’re saying that MariAngela’s shock and outrage about dying from a neurological illness somehow communicated itself to me before I even knew she was sick?”
“No, not exactly. Or maybe that’s part of it, too. But what I’m really saying is that your own shock and outrage about your own doomed existence is what made you pick up on her communication. You heard her with the little hairs on your face, or the little hairs inside of your ears, or whatever.”
I took a long time to answer, and when I did, my voice sounded high and light, like someone else’s. “I sort of understand, but why did it just happen for the first time that night? I’ve had other friends who were distraught or died.” I started to say more, but I was too close to the edge and too focused on Elizabeth’s death to think about MariAngela’s life, so I just sort of stared at the food on my plate for a moment.
“First of all, Charlie, I don’t believe it’s never happened to you before. I think if you searched your memory you’d see that it’s happened many times before. But let’s assume that it’s happened rarely. Why, this one night, did you pick up on this one woman’s transmission that wasn’t even directed at you?”
“Because he’s got a thing for her, that’s why,” Alisa said, and the three of them laughed.
“Well, maybe,” Diane said, “and maybe she likes him, too.” She said this as if it were a matter of the slightest consequence, and my opinion—and for that matter, Alisa’s—didn’t matter at all. “My point isn’t about why he had this particular dream this particular night. For whatever reason, he was ‘open’ that night, like how every once in a while your neighbor’s Wi-Fi music files used to pop up on your computer. But the point is that we’re all dreaming the same thing every time we dream, no matter how stupid or random the surface subject matter might be: We’re remembering what it was like to be born, when everything was shapeless and incomprehensible, and we’re dealing with how we morph into something different every single moment of our lives, and we’re dreading what it’ll be like when we finally morph into something horrible and gruesome to look at and then we die.”
I know that I haven’t presented a very good portrait of Diane. I’d never even heard her refer to death before, and she really is incredibly vivacious most of the time.
But after that, it took us a few seconds—it felt like minutes—to pick up our forks and start eating again.
6
That night, because we’d both had too much to drink, and perhaps because we were both a bit unsettled by what Frank and Diane had had to say, Alisa spent the ni
ght at my house. Normally, we spent the nights together only on the weekends. No big reason, and I really probably did want to marry her, but she’s a morning person and I’m a night person, and we both travel a lot, so it’s just easier to keep separate places. I’m not thrilled about her sterile condo, and she’s equally unenthused about my creaky old house with the weird dormer room and the Christian missionary furniture, but that night, she was happy to be in bed with me.
The sex thing didn’t seem to be happening that night, because she said she’d eaten too much and her tummy was a little sensitive, so I rubbed her stomach for her, being the good guy I am, and then I kneaded the little hollow area under her ribs, and then I slid slowly over the ribs and massaged her breasts for a while and nibbled the side of her neck, and then she must have felt better because she started to lift her hips up and down slowly at first and then really fast, and I got my underwear off in a big hurry before she’d changed her mind. She seemed more turned on than usual and grunted even louder than normal, and that turned me on even more, even though it sounded a little bit like the baby-seal noise that MariAngela had made.
Or maybe because it sounded like the noise that MariAngela had made.
She came so hard that her eyes actually rolled backward into her head for a second. Afterward, neither of us could get to sleep, and then Alisa said, lightly, “You know what would be cool? How about if I try to communicate my dream to you tonight? Like, I’ll dream about something specific, you know, a rake or a shovel or something, and then in the morning you tell me the objects you had in your dream, and maybe one of them will be a rake or a shovel.”
I laughed. “But how are you going to control what you dream about? Maybe while you’re falling asleep, you’ll plan on dreaming about a rake, but it’ll end up that you’re dreaming about an igloo instead, and then you’ll forget what you dreamed about anyway, and then I’ll wake up and it turns out that I dreamed about storing slices of American cheese under my armpits and then where’ll we be?”
At this, Alisa laughed too. We dropped the subject and went to sleep.
Except we didn’t really drop it at all. I had to go to New York for a couple of days to interview some job candidates for a creative director position, but when I got back, Alisa was all excited. I’d wanted to tell her about my walk along the High Line, and the Chelsea Market, and the Picasso show I’d seen at the Gagosian (speaking of suprarational transmutations!), but she had her own agenda.
“Okay, so I’ve been doing some research. Duke University used to do a bunch of investigations into psychic phenomena, and the results were pretty inconclusive, but I read about this one really simple experiment that I think we could do with your dreams.”
We were sitting in Alisa’s condo. I had come straight from the airport, and I was pretty fatigued, so I just flipped my palm up to indicate my apathy.
“C’mon, Charles. You can zone out later, but this is important. I won’t even try to describe the Duke experiments themselves, and frankly I thought a lot of them were pretty pointless, but I’ve adapted one of them for us. It’s basically about just sending the simplest possible message to you, without any emotional content at all, just a binary code like a computer.”
“Meaning?”
“Just a yes or a no.”
“But what about what Frank was saying at dinner about high emotion and low emotion?”
“That’s all well and good, but it was a total fluke. He said so, even Diane said so. She had this big theory about why we dream the way we do, but even she was totally lame when it came to explaining why MariAngela came to you in your dream that particular night. If it was just a matter of high emotion and low emotion, we’d be having dreams with our distraught friends in them all the time.”
“So if we can’t explain why this happened to me this one time, how are we going to replicate it artificially? I mean, you can’t will that kind of thing unless you’re a professional psychic, which I’m not sure even exists.”
“I’m not either, and I don’t think the Duke experiments proved anything one way or another. But this is such a simple thing, either ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ that, I don’t know, it’s just a little blip that can leak through your defenses. Basically, what I’m going to do is just go down to the basement. You know that light switch just above the laundry table across from the washing machines?”
“You mean here, in your condo? Not really. No.”
“No, I guess you wouldn’t. That would mean you’d done my laundry for me at some point in our relationship.”
“What are you talking about? When you had the flu? And that other time, after your ‘margarita mistake?’ ” I didn’t have to explain what I meant by that; both times, I had washed her clothes in her condo’s laundry room, but I sure hadn’t been paying attention to any light switch. I’d also been down there once or twice to search for an opening where chipmunks had been sneaking in; they’d scamper up a chink in the foundation walls and through a heating vent in the floor of Alisa’s living room, where they’d proceed to pillage whatever oatmeal cookies and granola bars, or crumbs thereof, she’d left lying around in the kitchen.
She said, “Okay, so you’ve done my laundry a couple times. I stand corrected. But let’s not get off track.”
“You were the one who got off track with the laundry crack.”
“Just listen. So what I’m going to do is go down to the basement tonight before I go to bed. Are you sleeping here tonight?” I shook my head. “Well, doesn’t matter one way or another, I don’t think. I mean, MariAngela wasn’t in bed with you when you had the dream about her, was she? Ha ha. So anyway, I go down to the basement and flip the light switch either up or down. That’s all I do. And when you’re drifting off to sleep, you know, just at that point where you start to realize that you’re falling asleep, I want you to concentrate on the image of me flipping the light switch. I’m going to do that every single night from now on.”
“And then what?”
“And then nothing. I do this every single night before I go to bed, and eventually, one of these nights, I think you’re going to have a dream about it. I mean, that’s what I’m hoping, and that’s what this research was talking about. You’ll have a dream where you’re seeing me flip the light switch, and you’ll either see me flip it up or down, and then you’ll remember it the next day and tell me.”
I was quite unimpressed. “And then what?”
“And then we’ll go to the basement together and see if the light switch is in the position you saw it in, in your dream.”
“Yeah? So?”
“So then, I don’t know if you’ve heard of this thing called lucid dreaming, but the idea is that if you really concentrate on your dreams before you go to sleep, then while you’re sleeping, you can start to control the action of your dreams a little bit. You know how Diane was talking at dinner about how everything shifts in your dreams and nothing is stable? Well, if you’re a lucid dreamer, you can start controlling the shifting and making things happen the way you want them to, just because you’re aware in your dream that you’re dreaming, so you can do anything you want to do. I mean, sometimes I’m dreaming that I’m walking in the middle of the air, and then suddenly I kind of will myself to wake up because I know it’s just a dream, and then I wake up and get out of bed, but I’m still walking in the air, but it feels incredible because it’s real.”
“You mean, you’ve dreamt that you’ve woken up, but you’re actually still sleeping.”
“Exactly. But it just feels more real is what I’m saying. So in your case, if you really focus on the light switch and making it real, you can control that, too, and pretty soon every night if we’re lucky you’ll be dreaming about the light switch.”
“Still not quite making the connection.”
“If you dream every night about the light switch, and you’re right about its positi
on more or less just half of the time, then there is no connection. But if every time you have the dream, the light switch is in the position I left it in, then you’re psychic. There’s no other explanation. I mean, either you’ve picked up what I did with the light switch…”
“Or…?”
“Or, this just occurred to me, maybe the causality works in the other direction, and you somehow influence me, here in the waking world, to flip the switch one way or the other, and your dream just confirms what you already know. Either way, it’s cool, and it works.”
“Yeah, so what if I happen to guess right one night? I tell you the next morning that it’s ‘up’ and you say, ‘Wow, you’re psychic!’ Then the next night, since I know it’s up to begin with, the only way you can flip it is down—wash, rinse, repeat, I’ll be right every time.”
“Nice try. But I can toggle the switch up and down as many times as I want, purely at random—I mean, unless you really are somehow influencing my supposedly random acts, though the more I think about it the less likely I think that is. No, it’s all about me and how I communicate to you in your dreams the position I leave the switch in. I could leave it in the up position five nights in a row if I wanted. And there’s no way you’d know the pattern, unless it came to you in your dreams.”
I thought about this for a moment. “But why can’t I just do the same thing you’re talking about while I’m awake? I can just stare off into space and guess, or visualize, or whatever, the position of the light switch. And then I’ll tell you what position it’s in.”
She took her forefinger and pointed it directly to the bridge of my nose. I swear at that moment, even though it wasn’t a knife, the hairs bristled again. “That’s why,” she said. “Because it’s something that’s out of your conscious control. It can only happen when you dream.”
Everything Solid has a Shadow Page 4