“And turning them into a nightly horror flick?”
“It’s no use trying to understand the workings of your unconscious mind, Dave. There’s no logic to it. It’s not a rational entity. Almost by definition, what it pushes up into view passeth all understanding.”
“But Freud—”
“Freud was a pioneer, and pioneers by definition don’t know where the hell they’re going. Columbus thought he’d landed in the Indies, remember? But they turned out to be the West Indies. What Freud said about dreams a hundred years ago was all well and good in its day, but it’s not the last word on the subject. It’s pretty much the first word.”
“These dreams are disgusting. Appalling. Loathsome.”
“So?”
“They’re emerging out of my own mind. And they’re the sickest, most revolting things. Charlie, I feel ashamed to be having dreams like that.”
“Ashamed? Of what?”
“That I could be generating such garbage. That I could be capable of imagining things like that. How can I not take responsibility for that? These are my dreams, these hideous things, the products of my own personal mind, as much my own creation as a novelist’s novel or a composer’s song or a playwright’s play is.”
“Wrong. You’re trying to compare art—conscious, dedicated craftsmanship—with the muck that comes drifting randomly up out of the sewers of your mind.”
“Randomly? Freud said—”
“I told you: screw Freud,” said Charlie. “Freud didn’t know jack. It’s all random. You aren’t inventing this stuff, you’re simply having it dumped on you by some impersonal inner force while you lie there asleep and defenseless. Why blame yourself for it? That’s like somebody blaming himself for having cancer. For Christ’s sake, you don’t need to take responsibility for the flavor of your dreams. Isn’t real life rough enough? Dave, there’s no sense whatsoever beating yourself up over what goes on in your head when you aren’t even conscious.”
He is walking a tightrope stretching from one great midtown tower to another, eighty-odd floors above the ground. He knows that there is a crowd of people watching him from below, hundreds of people, maybe thousands, though he dares not look down. It is a cool sunny day, crisp and dry, and a brisk wind is blowing. He can feel the tightrope quivering against his bare feet. He has never done anything remotely like this before, and yet it was with great assurance that he had stepped out onto the rope, clutching his balance-pole lightly against his chest. At first it was easy. One step, another, another—
He realizes he is terrified. Nothing surprising about that; and yet he had felt no fear at the outset, and only now, perhaps a third of the way across, where he has gone too far to turn back, when it would be even more difficult to return to his starting point than to continue on to the opposite tower, do great sickening spasms of terror go curling upward through his body.
Keep going. Step. Step. Step. The rope sways. He adjusts his balance with the pole. Step. Step. Step. Yes! He is halfway across, now. Step. Step. He has never been so frightened in his life; but, then, he has never done anything as crazy as this before. And he is starting to think there’s a chance he will make it. Step! Step! Step!
“Hey, schmuck!” calls a raucous voice from the roof of the tower behind him. “Schmuck, look at me!” And, like a schmuck, he does, twisting around and glancing up over his shoulder, and sways and grabs air and topples, and topples, and topples, and the pavement comes swooping up to meet him.
He begins to keep a diary of the dreams, searching for some common denominator in these calamitous scenarios. There is always danger in them, of course. Tension, dread, suspense. He is in dire peril. Each night he finds himself in some stark situation not of his own making, where external forces threaten to snuff him out. He has been out boating on the bay, and is swept overboard and carried out to sea, and bobs, alone in the cold trackless waters, unable even to see the shore, let alone reach it. He is hiking in the woods, disturbs a branch, is seized in the jaws of some remorseless metal trap. He is being frog-marched through the streets with a jeering mob swarming on both sides of him, led to a plaza where a stake and a great pile of logs and straw awaits him, and then a crackling blaze—
The rack—the thumbscrew—the garrote—
He draws elaborate structural diagrams of the dreams. He makes charts. He devotes evening after evening to their analysis. He is an educated, thoughtful man, though his life has not worked out quite the way he had expected. His daily work is trivial and it bores him, but it is his work, and without it he would long ago have been lost. These days it is his bulwark against the nightly mysterious assault of these dreams. And now he applies the same sort of analytic techniques to the dreams that he uses each day in the office to sort and classify and draw conclusions from the information that he is paid to sort and classify and draw conclusions from.
An interesting pattern begins to emerge. He tells Charlie about it, his one confidant.
“It’s starting to become clear,” he says, “that I’m dreaming, not about myself, but about someone else. I’m not the protagonist—the victim—in all these various grisly events, but just a spectator. I’m there, I’m plenty scared, but I’m not actually the one in jeopardy. I’m just standing to one side, watching, like somebody at a movie.”
Charlie is puzzled. “Really? Are you sure of that?”
“Sure? I’m not sure of anything. But that’s how it starts to look as I write up my summaries of what I’m experiencing.”
And he explains that as he replays each nightmare in his mind he has discovered that he has in fact displaced the center of the event. “We always assume that the central figure in our dreams, the consciousness through whom the dream is communicated to us, is ourself. We see him moving about before our mind’s eye like an actor on a screen, but we attach our own identity to him, so that we are both watcher and performer. But that isn’t actually how it is for me in these things.”
It only feels to him, he says, as though he is the man desperately trying to outrun the rising tide, that he is the tottering trembler on the tightrope, that he is the panicky zigzagger darting between the traffic on that steep urban boulevard. In fact he has come to realize, as his analysis of the material proceeds, that he is merely looking on from one side, a witness to the sufferings of someone else.
Charlie is doubtful. Charlie still believes that when we dream, we dream about ourselves, even though we may think we are dreaming about someone else. For a man who has blown off Freud as not knowing jack, Charlie suddenly starts to seem very conventional indeed in his theory of dreams.
He decides not to argue the point. Let Charlie believe whatever he wants to believe. He has faith in his own analysis, and that faith grows stronger the longer he works with the material.
Of course there is no way for him to re-experience any one dream. None of the nightmares ever recurs in identical form; there is always a fresh one to torment him by night. But they remain with him as memories, all-too-vivid memories, and as he sets down synopses of them in his growing diary he starts to become more convinced than ever that his presence in each dream is in the role of an onlooker rather than a participant.
He was not the tightrope-walker; he may have been the man who shouts distractingly from the rooftop. He was not the man burned at the stake; he was somewhere in the midst of that jeering mob. He was not the drowning swimmer lost in the pathless expanse of a cold ocean; he was an observer floating somewhere high overhead, watching that bobbing head amongst the waves. In each dream the true protagonist is someone else, a hapless prisoner trapped in some extreme and frightening circumstance, and he himself is merely looking on.
Does that matter? The dreams are terrifying whether or not he perceives them as being about someone else’s travail. The man in the dreams may be suffering terrible torment, but he is the one who awakens shaking with fear.
The days go by, and the nights, and nothing changes for the better. The man in the dreams has died a hundred
horrible deaths, but is always restored to life in time for the next night’s pitiless horrors.
He—or is it the unknown he?—is in a tiny stone-walled prison chamber in which he can neither sit nor lie down nor stand, but must remain in a sort of half-crouch against the rough clammy wall, his frozen knees screaming, his knotted back writhing perpetually in pain, and here he must huddle, month after month, year after year, with no hope of release.
He is in the intensive care unit, with a feeding tube in his stomach and a mechanical ventilator operating his lungs, and he is surrounded by a webwork of intravenous piping that feeds him sedatives, narcotics, anesthetics. The glittering-eyed diabolical nurse is ratcheting the flow higher, higher, higher. His brain is swimming in a chemical bath. His mind is starting to blur. He lifts one hand—struggles feebly to signal for help—
He is in the most comfortable of beds in the most luxurious of hotels. But as he awaits sleep the bedclothes turn into writhing tentacles and wrap themselves around his wrists and ankles, pinning him down. He lies there spread-eagled, helpless, and the ceiling slowly begins to descend. He tries to scream, but no sound will emerge, and all he can do is wait, eyes ablaze with dread, as that inexorable mass glides serenely down to crush him.
He is driving swiftly up a freeway entrance ramp, with another car beside him to the right, and a third car materializes abruptly, coming down the freeway ramp toward them both. The third car is moving swiftly, but nevertheless it takes hours for it to descend the ramp, the cars unable to turn from their courses, each driver looking at the other two in a sort of stasis, until at last there is the screech of brakes and the immense sound of metal hitting metal in the moment of impact.
All about him are the low squalid buildings of some medieval city. A scaffold has been erected against a rough brick wall at one side of a great public square. An expectant crowd watches as he ascends the scaffold, kneels, fights off the moment of panic that rises suddenly within him, sweeps his long hair back, and places his head on the block. The headsman lifts his shining axe—
A new theme now emerges. The man is not only in some horrible peril; he is calling actively for help. There comes a dream in which he—or he—is hurrying down the platform of a railway station toward a waiting train, and the train’s door closes in his face just as he reaches it, and he thrusts his hand through the door, trying to wrench it apart again. And he is caught, trapped, and as the train begins to move he is carried along down the platform, unable to pull his arm free; and as he comes to comprehend his predicament and looks about him in shock, crying out to the others on the platform for aid, another man in a red sweatshirt appears from somewhere and runs alongside him, tugging at his arm, trying to help. But there is nothing he can do and at the platform’s end he steps sadly back, watching in dull shock as the figure caught in the door is swept away to be battered to death against the walls of the railway tunnel a few hundred yards down the track.
He recognizes that red sweatshirt. It belongs to him, an old and familiar garment.
Then, another night, he sees a figure standing on a narrow ledge that runs along the outer wall of a lofty apartment building. Somehow the man has gone out on the ledge and now is trying to find his way back inside, but all the windows are closed to him, and he edges slowly along, clutching the brickwork with his fingertips to support himself and shunting his feet sideways inch by inch, moving along the building’s facade, going to window after window, apartment after apartment, and suddenly they are looking at each other, face to face, the man on the ledge outside and the man within, and the eyes of the man outside are wide with terror and in them can be seen the mute appeal, Help me, help me, help me.
It is his own apartment building. Just such a ledge runs the length of the building on the sixth floor. But he is not the man outside. He is the onlooker within.
And on still another night the dream-figure is stranded on the icy white slope of a vast mountain, some Alp, some Himalayan peak, with a giant crevasse yawning behind him and another beginning to open just ahead, and the ice rumbling and cracking almost beneath his feet, and the first hints of an impending avalanche overhead; and he looks imploringly across the crevasse, gesturing toward someone who perhaps can toss him a rope, but who is either unable or unwilling to do it. And also he is looking back across that crevasse from the other side.
There is no mistaking that pleading look. He has seen it three times, at least, now. Quite probably he has failed to see it in earlier visitations, but it was there. He is certain now that the man in the dream is looking outward toward him across the wall of sleep, to him specifically, begging for rescue.
Help me. Help me. Help me.
“What can I do?” he asks Charlie. “How can I help him?”
But Charlie is beginning to lose interest in the whole problem. “You can’t,” he says, dismissively. “He doesn’t exist. He’s just a projection of yourself. In these dreams you’ve simply divided yourself in two, a watcher and a sufferer, but they’re both the same person.”
“I don’t think so.”
“What can I say? These are your dreams. He’s a figment of your imagination. You want to believe he’s someone else, well, okay, then he’s somebody else. If you want to help him, reach in and pull him out, okay?”
The dreams do not let up. And he begins to understand that the world of dreams is another world, one that exists beside our own—a world where nothing is real and everything is possible. He has been staring into that world every night of his life without knowing what it is.
He is certain now, with the sort of strange certainty that comes in dreams, that the man in the dreams is a real person, trapped in that other world the way one of the dream-figures had become trapped on the ledge of that building, the way another had been seized by the door of that train. And he is sending messages asking for help.
How could he ignore that call? He sees that it is his task to reach into the other world and pull that poor sufferer forth, just as Charlie had jokingly suggested, or he will never have a night’s peace again himself.
Mon semblable,—mon frère!
He had never been a particularly compassionate man—that may have been one of the reasons for the breakup of his marriage—but, chilly and aloof though he often was, he had never refused aid to someone in trouble. It was his saving grace.
He will not refuse now. He will offer help.
But how? How?
He tells himself, as he makes ready for bed, that when that night’s dreams come, he will do everything he can to initiate contact, to extend a hand across the border between the one world and the other.
Tonight the dream-figure is stumbling across an endless Sahara, tongue thick and blackened with thirst, eyes wild. He is plainly at the end of his endurance. Just beyond the next dune lies a fertile green oasis, but he lacks the strength to get there.
Keep going! Come on—come on—just a little way more!
No use. The man staggers, stumbles, falls face-forward into the hot sands.
And on another night he is lost in a city where the streets melt and flow before him as he walks, substantial avenues turning to water, great thoroughfares becoming flaccid ropy masses of dough. He knows he must get to the other side of the city before nightfall—the welfare of someone precious to him depends on it—but he can make no progress; all is fluid and indeterminate. He pauses, contemplating the possibility of some more stable route that would take him to his goal, and indeed the dreaming observer knows that there is such a route, just a few blocks ahead, but when he calls out to tell him that, the words are swept away by the wind. And as he stands there the pavement begins to move beneath his feet and he is swept backward as though by a relentless river. Darkness begins to descend; the city vanishes; he is swept by the wildest terror.
His real life, such as it had been, has nearly vanished altogether. He rises at the same hour as always, but instead of looking at the newspaper or watching the morning news he transcribes his notes on the night�
�s dreams. He eats the same breakfast as ever, without tasting his food. He goes to the office by the usual route and does his work mechanically, competently, no more and no less engaged with it than he had ever been. During the lunch break he generally stays at his desk and eats a sandwich. He has almost no contact with his fellow workers. Charlie, plainly aware that something is amiss, comes over to inquire about the state of his health, but he replies with a shrug and a vague smile.
“Still having nightmares?” Charlie asks.
“Sometimes,” he says.
He has stopped calling the few women he had been seeing. None of them call him. Just as well: Even though he no longer awakens screaming from his darker dreams, now that they have become such a customary part of his existence, it would be a distraction to have someone lying beside him in bed at night. He wants to focus all his attention on the dreams themselves.
The thing to do, he has decided, is to try to re-dream one of the dreams he has already had, particularly one in which the dream-figure is obviously pleading for help. Since the scenario of the dream is already known to him, like the plot of some movie he has seen before, he believes that he will be able to intervene sooner, at some point where the situation has not yet become irrevocably catastrophic, and offer the dream-figure the succor he needs. The window-ledge dream, he thinks, would be a particularly fruitful one to employ. To be able to go immediately to the right window, to open it, to pull the man through to safety.
But deliberately to recapitulate some already dreamed dream is not such an easy thing to accomplish. In the hour before bedtime he lets his mind dwell on the images he hopes to conjure up; he goes to his own window-ledge, runs his hand along it, measures its width, imagines what it would be like to climb out onto it right now and sidle along the face of the building. Then, closing his eyes, he pictures the tormented figure he had seen out there, the frightened man despairingly struggling to keep his balance as he inches along. The picture is a vivid one. He can almost even make out the features of the man’s face, something that he has not really succeeded in doing before: He thinks he has an idea of what the dream-figure’s face looks like, he is certain that it is the same man in each and every dream, but the specific details elude him when he tries to describe them to himself. He could not have drawn a sketch of his face, nor even responded usefully to the expert questions of some police-department artist trying to guide him toward a description. Yet in these rehearsals for sleep it seems to him that he has envisioned the face in essence if not in specifics, that with only a little more effort he could come to see it clearly.
The Millennium Express - 1995-2009 - The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg Volume Nine Page 55