From Where You Dream

by Robert Olen Butler

  Brandy: My legs are straight out in front of me. The seat is hard wood, the paint is slick, so at the top I'm almost sliding forward.

  ROB: Where do you feel that?

  Brandy: On the back of my thighs the paint chips dig in a little bit. And on the sides I can feel the handle that I'm also grabbing onto.

  ROB: Let's put your hands on the handle. What does that feel like?

  Brandy: It's hot metal, worn smooth on top.

  ROB: Glance off—where are you looking? What do you

  see?

  Brandy: Trees to my right.

  ROB: You just summarized that for me. See the tree. I turn my eyes to the right and . . . what've you got?

  Brandy: The leaves are brown and crusty, but it's still pretty full, and I can't see all the branches.

  ROB: That's what you can't see. I don't have a shape yet to that tree. You're a little girl. You're on a seesaw. You're up high, and when you go up high you love to let your gaze travel out to the world from a height that you're rarely at. And there's a tree. So let me see the tree through your eyes.

  Brandy: The first thing I see is the leaves.

  ROB: You just generalized that for me. I doubt if the first thing you see is the leaves unless the tree is at arm's length. What kind of tree is it?

  Brandy: It's an oak tree.

  ROB: Yes, oak tree's good; that's a concrete detail. What is the configuration of the great branches on this oak tree? An oak tree doesn't grab you first by its leaves, does it?

  Brandy: Knobby branches?

  ROB: You saw this wonderful tree and you want to tell me about this tree. I think you're just a little bit spooked now. It's really simple. Just think of the most beautiful, wonderful oak tree you've ever seen and let that be growing off to your right when you're at the height of this seesaw. You've just lifted and your thighs are prickled by the paint chips and your hands are warmed by the metal handle that you're grasping tightly and you lift your face and turn your eyes and what do you see? [Silence.] OK, let the tree go. Look down the seesaw at your brother. Let me see your brother through your eyes as you're at the apogee of your seesawing.

  Brandy: He has tight brown curls of hair, his mouth is

  open.

  ROB: How so?

  Brandy: Like he's going to scream or yell. It's like he's taking a big breath.

  ROB: What's in his eyes? What are his eyes like?

  Brandy: They're brown and very wide-open. He looks very excited.

  ROB: "Excited" is an abstraction. But OK. He's just flexed his legs, he's pushed off, and you begin to fall. Tell me what you feel.

  Brandy: My stomach jumps to my throat. I feel kind of like I'm lifted off the seat for a minute.

  ROB: It's like you're lifted off the seat for a minute— that's kind of generalized. Let's feel that sensation with you. In fact you are lifted off, aren't you? And how do you feel that letting go? Where in your body do you feel the lift.

  Brandy: My legs kind of unstick. ROB: Good, OK.

  Brandy: And it's cooler, like there's air.

  ROB: A sudden rush of coolness on your thighs as you lift off, right? The prickles are gone and the air replaces them, yes? Where else in your body?

  Brandy: My hands are kind of pulled away. They're not gripping as tight, they're pulled to the fingers.

  ROB: What do you smell? Do you smell sweat?

  Brandy: Yeah.

  ROB: What else?

  Brandy: A metallic smell.

  ROB: What do you hear? What's the sound in your ears?

  Brandy: Like a wind or a breath, or ...

  ROB: OK, thank you, Brandy. Even if we're not fighting off serious emotion, this is still tough, isn't it? There were some very good things coming there.

  All right, Leslie, let's send you out into the field. You're following your brother into the field. Give us that moment.

  Leslie: Let me just say my brother's name is Prince. It's a family name.

  ROB: The brother formerly known as Prince. [Laughter.] Or actually known as Prince. Say anything you want to after approaching the bales.

  Leslie: The grass is deep and wet and grainy with seeds and Prince's head and arms rise up against the white sky washed with red, black as if he were part of the hill beyond.

  ROB: How's he moving?

  Leslie: The rows of hay bales like a row of animals against the sky. Prince wades through the grass with his arms outstretched as if he were walking through deep water.

  ROB: What part of your own body are you most aware of at the moment?

  Leslie: The dampness from the tall grass has wet my legs and shorts, but the cold rises up my stomach like a button being pulled on a drawstring from my sacrum up into the center of my chest, and I shiver. ROB: Where?

  Leslie: Pulling my arms into the sleeves of my T-shirt, wrapping them around my chest as I jump over the grass to catch up to him.

  ROB: A flash of memory now.

  Leslie: But he's running too fast. And in the darkness I imagine that if I were to catch him and grab the back of his T-shirt something frightening would happen.

  ROB: You're starting to analyze too much for this exercise, OK? Frightening is also being abstract. You've just shivered, trying to keep up, and you see him quite wonderfully, vividly before you, and the rows of bales like animals are out there. Just go straight to another concrete moment in the past like this. It could be the distant past. Just something comes to you, OK?

  Leslie: I found the puppy on the hilltop beyond the hay bale . . .

  ROB: Don't summarize, OK? Let's see the very moment you see the puppy.

  Leslie: In a swirl of grass, as if it had bedded down as it squirmed to move, its legs broken, flies swarming in its ears and eyes . . .

  ROB: Let's look at the leg more closely. See, you've analyzed the leg for me. I want to see the leg with you. In the very moment you perceive it's broken, I want to see it.

  Leslie: Against the orange fur there was a deeper red, a black hole, where the puppy had been ...

  ROB: Don't analyze it, that's enough. What part of your own body are you conscious of now, seeing that puppy?

  Leslie: The breath rushes out of me, and I stumble back so that the puppy is lost in the grass.

  ROB: Link that to a parent, an image of a parent.

  Leslie: My mother's eyes looked dark in the shape of fish with streaks running out of them down her cheeks.

  ROB: Where are you? Look around. Look away from your mother's face and see something.

  Leslie: In the rick of rotted pine beside the back door we heard the cat weeping. She, my mother, stepped down the concrete steps and reached for one silver stick of wood as if she were afraid it would collapse when she moved one piece.

  ROB: That's a little bit of an analysis. Show me her body and her body language; have them reveal that she's afraid. Tell me how you perceive in the moment through the senses.

  Leslie: She bends and leans, swaying on the edge of the step, touching the rough corner of the stick with just her forefinger, testing its balance in the pile.

  ROB: What part of your body are you most aware of

  now?

  Leslie: My feet seem a long way away from me, as if I were very tall, but my head feels heavy.

  ROB: Hear the cat again. Hear it more clearly in an extended way.

  Leslie: The noise seems to come from inside the ribs, just a handful of ribs, a small noise that seems torn, already broken beyond repair.

  ROB: Now what part of your body are you feeling?

  Leslie: It's as if I swallow something sharp. I swallow and swallow and it won't go down.

  ROB: Come back to your brother now. He does something; let's see him do a specific different thing now.

  Leslie: Prince runs into the bale, digs his foot just above the coiled center, launches up onto the top as if he were running against the sky, his arms spread out, his thin hair wisp-ing around his head, each finger spread like a feather.

  ROB: Let him turn and face yo
u; see his face.

  Leslie: It's too dark to see his face, but the sunset is reddish on the side of his cheek.

  ROB: Red like what? [Long pause.] Reincorporate. Red like what?

  Leslie: Red like blood in a sink.

  ROB: OK. Thank you, Leslie.

  That was very good, thank you, Leslie. This is what I'm getting at. Couldn't have planned it better. [Laughter.] Look, if it didn't work for you tonight, don't feel bad about it. This is really tough. You're approaching an awareness that you haven't been led to before but that is an essential basic skill. You must be masters of the sensual moment. These questions I've asked—when, in fact, you can range anywhere—are much less demanding than the questions your work will ask of you under similar circumstances. You must move your characters from here to there. They have to be in the moment, and they have to look into a face and see something, and you cannot analyze it, and you cannot abstract it. You're in the sensibility of the character, and you must be in the moment in terms of that character, and also there in terms of the rest of the piece. But what we've done tonight is artificial in many ways, and if it didn't work for you, don't feel bad about it. Just open up the negotiations between you and your unconscious and your computer. You'll make a lot of mistakes, and that's OK. It's part of the process of getting to where you want to go.

  Actually, all of you had very good moments. None of you was up here without at least a few very good moments, and I hope you felt what you tapped into briefly when you were inventing, recombining, in the sensual moment.

  Tonight we're going to do on the page exactly what we did last week orally; that is, to write moment by moment through the senses only. This will be a coached writing exercise in seven stages. I'll give you the first stage and you'll begin to write; then I'll drop in six more times, each time to give you another step. It's important not to go beyond the parameters of what I tell you to do. When I describe a new stage, if you've not finished the previous one, note the new instructions in the margin, then go back to where you were, pick that up, and move as quickly as you can to the new stage.

  Don't run ahead, though. Stay within the boundaries of each instruction. Once again: no abstraction, no generalization, no summary, no analysis, no interpretation. Force yourself to write moment to moment through the senses only. Don't hassle your style at this point, don't agonize over just the right word; just keep the flow of it through the senses—

  flowing, flowing, flowing. Don't think, don't think. Senses, senses, senses. If you really do that rigorously, you'll find yourself flowing right down—at least into the foyer of—this great house that is your unconscious.

  I want you to write in the first person. When I say "you," I am referring to your character.

  Now, about the character. If you have a character you're working with closely, you may write from the viewpoint of that character, but I'm reluctant to encourage this, because if that character happens to be one you're willing into being, then the exercise will not be very useful to you. In the absence of any character you feel a desperate need to get in touch with, I urge you to write through a character with demographics very similar to your own. This is not you, this is not autobiography, but unless you've got a really burning character that you need to explore, then the character you choose needs to be very close to you in age, gender, ethnicity, and so forth.

  If you get to the end of a stage before I come in, don't write ahead, and don't go back and start rewriting; just put your pen down and meditate. I'll notice if there are a lot of pens down, and I'll jump in. It's likely, though, that if you finish these stages before I get to the next, you're not giving it enough intense moment-to-moment attention. In that case, try to focus more intently on the next stage.

  When you finish the piece and feel done, just close your notebook and pick up your pen and go away. At some point if there are only a few of you left we may decide that you need to take your piece home and finish it later. I wouldn't think

  that you'd be able to bear spending more than an hour and a half on this, if you do it as intensely as you should. Let's start. Here's your first stage. [Editor's note: what follows are the seven stages of the exercise, succeeded by three examples of the results from the class on the evening when the exercise was recorded.] The seven stages:

  1. You awake abruptly, though it isn't morning, and you're not in a bed. But you are in the place where you live. The room where you awake is rich in objects and their associations. You are breathless and anxious from a dream you can't, and won't, remember. You look around the room, everything in it shaped by an unspecified anxiety. Let's see the room, in the moment, through the senses.

  2. One object in particular catches your attention and suggests a strong connection to your anxiety. Move toward that object; touch it; experience it sensually.

  3. The object evokes a memory as vivid as a dream but not the one you woke from. It is a real memory, one based on wanting, desiring something. But this is a surface thing you want—an object, a gesture, a touch, whatever. Focus on the moment-to-moment, specific memory of desiring this thing, which, nevertheless, carries an intimation of deeper yearning. But don't go to that deeper desire yet. Experience the surface thing through your character's sensibility.

  4. Now let the memory of this want include a moment when a second memory is evoked. This second memory

  involves another object, different from the one you are touching in the present time but similar to it in its basic sensual pattern. This second memory surprises you. You deeply connect it to the first. And the wanting suddenly goes deeper, into a state of being, a state of self. Don't label it. Play it out in the moment through the senses.

  5. In that second memory you are moved to an action, driven by your yearning. Let the action happen moment to moment.

  6. Some part of the action will bring you back to the present, to an awareness of the first object. Reexperience the object. Your sensual perception of it is altered, re-shaped by the emotion and yearning you have experienced in these two linked memories.

  7. Now, back in the present, in the light of all this, you take an action.

  The examples:

  Rita Mae Reese

  Magnets

  A small spot of the green Formica table and the left corner of my mouth is slick with my warm drool. What woke me up? How did I fall asleep here? Outside the kitchen window is just darkness crouching and I can hear the hum of the little fluorescent light twitching over the sink, full of dirty dishes, but nothing else. There is no other sound in the house. The round white clock's hands say 5:16 but its battery ran out weeks ago. 1 look at the microwave but it isn't programmed. I'm sweating, my mouth is horrible, like I've been siphoning gasoline with it. I push the chair away from the table, noticing the letter I'd pushed to the other side before falling asleep. The white paper with its rows of neat black ink strains up from its creases like a tired child unwilling to go to sleep.

  I ignore it and walk across the sticky linoleum. Had I spilled something? I open the fridge door and the light is too bright even in this brightly lit room. My heart kicks and I can almost see a scene—something slithers from the back of my neck, through my throat, and stops at my larynx. My mind struggles to see—some dream fragment, repulsive and indistinct. I stare at the carton of milk, the cartons of leftovers, and the little round jar of horseradish. What had I dreamed? I felt like I'd missed something important, the bus back home or a lover's last call. Is that what I'd dreamed?

  I grab the carton of milk and it slips from my hands, the white ghostness of it splashing on my legs and over the dirty yellow linoleum. I bite my lip. I will not cry. I shut the door a little too forcefully and Jill's picture that she'd drawn of me and Sam slides with its magnet down and flutters into the milk. I crouch down and put the drawing on the table, after blotting it against my dress.

  I pick the carton of milk up—there is still some inside— and put it back in the fridge. I wipe up the milk with paper towels and as I stand up to go to the tr
ash can, my bare foot comes down on something cold and hard. It is the magnet. I pick it up and instead of just putting it back on the fridge, I sit down with it still in my hand. I hear the neighbor's dog bark, twice. I lift my head and listen but the house is still quiet. The magnet is an old-fashioned valentine, fifties-style cornball romance, a smiling orange saying "Orange you glad you're mine, valentine?" on metal, heavily laminated.

  Sam had been on a magnet-making kick, and took anything she got her hands on—old stamps, postcards, cards, pictures—and turned them into an endless stream of magnets. Sam was with Diana then and I remember seeing them in their kitchen together, Diana was doing the dishes and Sam leaned into her in a way that made my own back feel cold and exposed. I thought of what it would be like to have Sam's lips on my neck, warm, laughing into my skin over some private joke. I pretended to look at the books on their shelves in the dining room, a good fifty square feet of shelving displaying Foxfire books, Marion Zimmer Bradley's entire body of work, and a lot of Quality Paperback selections. I was going to ask Diana if she wanted help washing up from the dinner they'd made for me, the new single girl at work. Diana at work is perfect and I admit I'd sort of hoped her home life was different but it was worse. Her girlfriend Sam was beautiful and handsome, with olive skin, an aquiline nose, and eyes that really looked at a person. She repeated my name when we were introduced and asked me what I thought of St. Petersburg. She looked in my eyes as I stumbled over the answer, revising it for her approval as I went along. I looked down, just to avoid her eyes, and saw the best mouth I'd ever stared at—a little smirk, with the lightest laugh line on the left. I thought of kissing her then but told myself that I'd been without a girlfriend for too long.

  Holding the magnet, so square and so dense, a nice hard weight in the center of my palm now. Sam's mother had a laugh line just like hers in that little picture, the only picture, Sam had of her. I remember going to Sam's apartment after she'd moved out of Diana's, the sparseness of the furnishings— a rocker, a table and chairs, a dresser, a bed, a stereo, and one set of bookshelves. She kept her books boxed up by the wall next to the front door. On her dresser she had a photo of Diana (it hurt me every time I saw it but I'd never asked her to take it down) and the tiny photo in the metal frame of her mother. I'd picked it up while she was in the kitchen, making us dinner. I'd gone to the bathroom and since her bedroom door was open, I stepped inside, amazed at the austerity of the room— the unmade bed, the clean floor, the bare walls, the dresser with its two pictures. I'd lifted the picture of her mother, cupped it in my hands and lifted it to my face as if I were smelling it. I have no idea why. "That's my mother," her voice came over my shoulder and I jerked, put it back on the dresser, nearly knocking over the picture of Diana. Sam reached her arm around me and picked it up.