The Somnambulist's Dreams

by Lars Jerlach

  He put the salted pork in the pot. The pot was quite small and the pork stuck out over the top like a fleshy sprig.

  He fished out the can opener from the drawer and removed the tins from his pockets and opened them on the stove top.

  He removed the pork from the pan and again held it between his teeth, while he emptied the contents of each can into the pan. He shook them briskly to make sure that they were empty, before discarding them.

  They made a metallic clamour as they landed in the waste basket by the stove.

  He got out his pocketknife and proceeded to cut little slivers off the sprig of meat. He watched them as they dropped in the pan. He thought they looked like small pink worms on the surface of wet soil.

  He finished cutting the pork, put the last piece in his mouth and chewed it, as he looked for a lid.

  While he waited he thought of Soule’s recent dream.

  It was amazing, that the human mind could call forth such fantastical images.

  He had no doubt in Soule’s faithful descriptions of his somnambular events. He was after all a lighthouse keeper and as such a level headed man. Furthermore, it was obvious that he took an active part in the narrative and believed himself transformed.

  However, he wasn’t sure if Soule believed the phenomenon to be dreams or some form of vision or transposed premonition.

  As unlikely as it had been for Soule to be present on the ice in the Antarctic, it was equally impossible for him to have encountered the poet, while inhabiting the body of a raven.

  Although he was convinced that the dreams were just remarkable intuitive fantasies, there was something about the fact that Soule himself was questioning the substance of the events, that troubled him. He considered whether Soule’s mind or his nightly escapades could somehow put him in harm's way. He knew from experience that a simple misstep could have serious implications and that a major misstep could be fatal.

  He removed the lid and found the short wooden spoon that he used to stir the food. It wasn’t hot yet.

  He checked his watch. Twenty-two minutes.

  However, he didn’t believe that Soule was losing his mind.

  As a matter of fact, he found the wording of his descriptions both intelligible and, besides the fancifulness of the narrative, free of mental derangements.

  So far Soule seemed to be perfectly lucid when he wrote about what happened to him when he was dreaming; he fully understood how improbable the events would appear to anybody else. The contents of the pan began to simmer and the distinctive aroma of beans filled the room.

  He found a dinged white metal bowl with a dark blue rim in the cupboard.

  It was cold, so he poured a bit of warm water from the kettle into it. He swished the water around a couple of times and returned it to the kettle. He poured the contents of the pan into the preheated bowl and started eating.

  He used the wooden spoon and ate standing up, leaning against the end of the stove.

  Even though he ate the same meal at least four or five times a week, he never tired of the repetition.

  He genuinely enjoyed the taste and savoured the hot salty tanginess on his tongue.

  When he finished eating, he left the bowl and the spoon in the sink, picked up the lamp and the almost empty water bucket and went downstairs. It was dark and damp in the lower regions of the tower and the raw stones looked as if they were perspiring. Their sudoriferous surfaces glistened like a collection of static but living organisms and he quickly refilled the bucket with water from the water reserve and carried it back upstairs.

  He checked the time.

  Twelve minutes.

  He poured some of the water over the dishes in the sink and some into the kettle and put it back on the stove. He then grabbed two of the stones and put them in his pockets and walked back upstairs unwittingly counting the steps.

  He closed his hands around the warm stones in his pockets and looked out at the sea.

  The night was clear and the enduring fixture of the Big Dipper was hanging, only slightly askew, low in the horizon in the in firmament above.

  Although there had been no noticeable change in the weather, he sensed the powerful movement of the ocean beneath him.

  It was like a massive untamed beast lying in wait, patiently preparing for the onslaught.

  He checked his watch. Three minutes.

  He wound up the mechanism and walked to the table, pulled out the chair and sat down.

  He picked up a piece of paper from the pile.

  The Musician

  I was standing opposite a young man, who was sitting cross-legged in the middle of a wooden floor. He was in the center of what I first assumed were the petals of a large elaborate flower, that spread out on the floor around him. However, when I looked closer, I saw that the petals were in fact pieces of paper.

  They were of differing sizes and all had words printed on them.

  I couldn’t see all the way around me, because I was looking out from a peculiar helmet with a dark yet transparent visor. The helmet seemed to be connected to a somewhat bulgy grey uniform that covered the rest of my body. I had on a pair of large grey boots and my hands were enclosed in a pair of enormous grey gloves.

  I was in a fairly large room with two massive arched windows. The sun showered the space in a generous benevolent light, in which a cascade of minute particles were floating. Music was playing and I recognized the first movement from the Great Mass in C Minor coming from a record turning on an unusual looking black gramophone, standing on a low dark wooden cabinet.

  Next to the gramophone was a large white marble sculpture of Pallas and the Raven. The raven had its neck outstretched and its beak open, silently calling.

  I was in fact surrounded by a large number of peculiar objects.

  Standing in one corner, there were a couple of odd looking guitars leaning on their stands next to a number of large black boxes with the name Fender and a row of small silver coloured dials at the top. I reckoned they must be some kind of large radios or loudspeakers.

  A Moroccan puff and some low pieces of furniture in wood and leather, of a design that I had never before encountered, were placed around a small table that looked like it was made of a thick layer of dark glass. A large crystal ashtray, a package of cigarettes, some small brown packages, a silver spoon and a syringe were turbulently spread across its surface.

  There were some large, extremely colourful prints on the walls. A couple of them were merely presenting an arrangement of lines or shapes, others were bizarre smeary portraits of women, conspicuously reminding me of clowns.

  On my irregular visits to the museum of art, I had never seen anything like it, and I couldn’t think of a living artist, who could have produced work such as these.

  However, I did recognize a large print of a Campbell's Soup can.

  I looked at it for some time and found it odd that somebody would display an advertisement for soup in their home.

  I turned to look at the young man in front of me.

  He was tall and skinny with long limbs and delicate hands.

  He was dressed in a crumpled, loose fitting white shirt, with rolled up sleeves and a pair of deep purple wide cotton pants.

  His feet were bare.

  His elongated, slightly asymmetrical face had fairly high cheekbones and a straight, rather slim nose. His eyebrows formed a low arch over his large eyes. His full lips downturned at the sides, giving him a somewhat inquiring look, and his wavy blond hair, almost covering his face, was long and unruly.

  He gazed in my direction, although I don’t believe he actually saw me.

  I noticed that his eyes were of different colours.

  His left eye appeared much darker than that of the right, which was of a light blue colour, suggestive of the submerged part of an iceberg. I had seen this anomaly in animals before, but never in another human being.

  It was curiously mesmerizing.

  He kept gazing at me with his dual coloured eyes.
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  “You are here?” he finally said in a slow baritone voice, when he at last brought me into focus. “When did you arrive?”

  “Just now,” I said, “were you expecting me?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, pushing his hair behind his ear. “For some reason I’ve been thinking about you a lot lately and I’ve just started putting some words together about your trip.” He gestured to pieces of paper on the floor around him.

  I looked at the words covering the floor and turned my head to read them. Although it was difficult to ascertain any particular meaning in the chaos, I believe one of the string of words closest to him read:

  ‘I am floating in a most peculiar way’ and another to the left of him read: ‘planet earth is blue’.

  I looked at him.

  “Where am I supposed to go?” I asked.

  “You don’t have a specific destination,” he said moving the word ‘ground’ closer to ‘control’. “I think you’re just destined to be free from your anxieties on earth.”

  “But if I have no destination, how can I be free?” I asked. “And where

  exactly do I go, if I have no destination? Might I not be better off staying right here?”

  “I am sure you’ll have a very different perspective when you’re floating in space,” he said smiling.

  “Why would I be floating in space?” I asked.

  “Because that’s where I’m sending you,” he replied. He stood up and walked over to the table and picked up the pack of cigarettes. He lit one with a silver lighter that he fished out from his trouser pocket and blew the smoke into the curtain of light, where it hovered aimlessly before slowly dispersing.

  He picked up the ashtray and sat back down in the center of the words.

  “How do I get up there?” I asked, when he was again sitting on the floor.

  “In a spaceship,” he said, pulling on the cigarette. “You fly into space and then you leave the spaceship and float away.”

  “That’s not possible,” I said. “You can’t send people into space.

  That’s merely a fantasy.”

  “I agree that sending you into space is indeed a fantasy,” he said, fiddling with the word ‘capsule’, that he pushed closer to the word ‘dare’. “I’m attempting to bring you to the highest point possible, but keep you connected to earth.”

  He reached behind him to pick up a small box with a flat shiny surface that he began pressing with a small pin that was attached to the box with a small wire.

  A strange haunting sound came out of the box. It was like nothing I have ever heard before, like the sound of a drawn out metallic harpsichord.

  The man began humming some of the words in front of him: “I am sitting in a tin can, far above the world. Planet earth is blue...hmmm hmmm.”

  “Why are you sending me?” I asked. “Are you afraid of taking the trip yourself?”

  He stopped humming and looked at me.

  “I am taking the trip myself,” he said, moving the word ‘stars’ next to ‘different’.

  “How can you be taking the trip?” I asked. “Didn’t you just say that you’re sending me into space to float away?”

  “Yes,” he said and looked at me intently, “but I am you, and you are me.”

  “That cannot be,” I said.

  “I know better than anybody who you are,” he said and moved ‘check’ next to ‘ignition’. “I created you.”

  “How can I be you then?” I asked irritably.

  “That’s just the way it is,” he answered casually, brushing his hair away from his forehead, picking up the word ‘moon’. “We are one and the same.”

  “I don’t believe you,” I said, shaking my head. “That’s pure madness.”

  “It might be madness, but that’s the way it is.” He put ‘moon’ down next to ‘above’.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “What is the meaning of this?”

  “You’ll discover that soon enough,” he said.

  He got up and walked over to the table and knelt down.

  He picked up one of the small bags, shook it slightly and poured a fine light brown powder into the silver spoon. He then pulled out the lighter and held the flame underneath the head of the spoon until the spoon turned black and the content inside liquefied and began to froth.

  He put the lighter down on the table top and picked up the small syringe. He held the spoon by the very end of its handle, put the needle into the hollow of the spoon and pulled a clear golden liquid into the chamber of the syringe.

  He put the spoon and the syringe down on the table and removed a piece of white cloth from his shirt pocket. He skillfully tied the strip of cloth to his right arm just above the elbow and tightened it by gripping one end of the strip between his fairly large, somewhat uneven, teeth. As he stretched out his arm, I noticed a series of small dark marks near the elbow joint. He opened and closed his hand a couple of times before he carefully inserted the needle into an extended vein in his arm.

  He looked at me while he slowly injected the content of the syringe.

  In an all-encompassing deracination I felt an incredibly blinding rush.

  The room was suddenly incredibly bright and everything around me subtracted expeditiously, until I was suspended in a vertiginous colourless space.

  A man in a peculiar grey outfit was floating in space across from me. He was wearing a helmet with a dark shiny visor. The name tag on the right side of his chest said Major Tom.

  I saw my own reflection as I reached out my arms, and with my long delicate hands, slowly lifted the auburn coloured visor and looked at his face.

  He had different coloured eyes.

  “Do you know who I am?” He asked, before dissolving in a plurality of minuscule flecks.

  I was floating in perpetuity.

  When I woke up, I was standing in the middle of the watch room with my legs spread out and my arms away from my body. It was very bright in the room and I was wearing my boots and my coveralls and I had my hands in a pair of work gloves. Most peculiarly, one of the large steel bowls from the galley was covering the top my head.

  I do not know how to describe what happened to me in the dream or who the young man might have been. I believe he was a poet of some kind or perhaps a musician and certainly an habituated user of diamorphine.

  However, I have not the slightest idea of who he was. I am not familiar with the words he was singing nor with the sounds he was producing. I am confounded as much by the narrative in the dream, as the images or objects that surrounded me, none of which were familiar.

  As to the man in the uniform floating in space, I cannot say. Attempting to explain this supermundane event is beyond my capabilities.

  You might think I am losing my mind, however I can assure you, that I am but a receptacle with no command over what is spilled into me.

  He put down the page on top of the pile.

  He pushed the chair away from the table and stood up.

  While holding onto his hands, he turned his shoulders and stretched his arms above his head. He ached from the hunched position and he felt a sharp pain somewhere deep in his neck as he rotated the shoulder.

  He walked over to the window to perform his natatorial duties.

  He gazed into the night and scanned the horizon.

  He noticed a slight movement to the right and grabbed the binoculars.

  In the clear moonlit night, he could make out the silhouette of a three master schooner bark. He calculated it was about half a nautical mile out. The sea was relatively calm and he didn’t believe the schooner was in any trouble.

  He watched until it slowly disappeared in the obscurityof the sea. He flipped open his log and noted the description and position of the vessel. He then looked at his watch and added the time to the column on the right. Thirty five minutes until the next rewind.

  He put the log back in his pocket and picked up the lamp from the table and made his way downstairs. As he replaced the cold st
ones on the stove and began the preparations for a fresh pot of tea, he thought of the dream he had just read.

  It was unbelievably bizarre.

  Although he believed he understood the conversation that had happened between Soule and the young musician, he couldn’t fathom the objective. Nor could he make sense of the other individual. What was he supposed to be? Had Soule imagined himself as a spaceman in the body of the young man? And who was Major Tom? It sounded like the ravings of an entirely deluded individual.

  When he was young he had of course read the fantastical moon navigation tales by Jules Verne and The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells. He was also familiar with the tales of travel into space and had once, long ago, watched the movie A Trip to the Moon in the movie theater.

  However, he had never heard of anybody flying into space, leaving their spaceship and floating away in space. Surely this was undeniable proof that Soule’s dreams were mere fantasies produced by an increasingly unbalanced mind.

  He scratched his head and looked at the white painted walls while he waited for the water to boil. This coming spring he had to repaint the outside of the tower. The two red warning stripes were bleached by the constant onslaught of the elements and the white paint had etiolated so much that the original stone shone through underneath. In a couple of years he would probably have to do the inside as well. He looked at the cracks in the plastered ceiling above and sighed.

  He checked his watch. Twenty two minutes.

  He was wondering what had happened when the young man had injected himself with the narcotic substance. The way that Soule had described it, it was as if he himself had had a euphoric episode in his dream state, much like he had been dreaming in his dream. It also seemed like he had experienced, not only a reversal of the self of the spaceman and the young musician, but concurrently a singularity of the two.

  He ran his forefinger and thumb across his brow.