Overheard in a Dream

by Torey Hayden

  “During one of these post-coital thinking periods when I was mulling over the possibility that sex wasn’t ever going to be a way I could truly share myself with Alec, I started to wonder if there was some other means of achieving that level of intimacy. I genuinely did want to experience closeness with someone. That’s when I realized that there was one thing that was that intimate: Torgon.”

  “This was a hard decision. How could I share Torgon? Here I am, a twenty-three-year-old med student, and I still have an imaginary companion. Would Alec think I was nuts? Would he be repulsed and never want to see me again? Or be afraid of me, because I was hearing voices? Then I thought, there’d never really be any way to share myself deeply with another person without sharing Torgon too.

  “It took me about six weeks to screw up the courage. It was late autumn. The rain was beating hard against the windows. We had a huge fire roaring in the fireplace. Elgar was playing on the stereo and we were drinking steaming mugs of mulled wine. I wasn’t drunk precisely, but the wine had smoothed away all my rougher edges. I hadn’t been able to bring myself to actually talk about Torgon, but I offered Alec a couple of stories and let him read them while I lay snuggled against him and watched the fire.

  “‘Wow!’ Alec said when he’d finished. He sounded amazed ‘You’re really a good writer! This is brilliant, Laura. You make this place and these people jump right off the page. This woman lives. I read it and she’s just there, in front of me.’

  “‘Really? You think so?’ I said, profoundly flattered.

  “‘It’s amazing. How did you think all of this up?’ he asked.

  “The wine had taken its toll by then. I told him the whole story, right from the start, all about how Torgon had come to me, everything about the Forest and her complex society with its rigid social hierarchy, religion and laws.

  “Alec was spellbound. The more I talked, the more eager he became. He asked me lots of questions about how I’d interpreted the experience. Had I thought of it in terms of my own life? What had I learned from it? Had it made me a better person? That kind of thing.

  “I’d had quite a lot to drink by then, and it was getting really late, so my tongue was going without my brain in gear. I told him about how I had become a doctor for Torgon, to acquire knowledge I knew she needed, because in some strange way it made me feel like I was giving it to her.

  “Alec’s expression was starry-eyed with awe. He said, ‘You are just so lucky.’

  “I agreed, because I knew I was.

  “Then he said, ‘Do you think if I asked her something, she’d talk to me?’

  “I said, ‘Huh?’

  “‘Would she talk to me?’ he repeated with slow, precise diction, as if I had a hearing disability. ‘On one of those occasions when you have her coming through.’

  “‘Talk to you? How ever could she talk to you? Alec, she’s in my imagination.’

  “‘Don’t you realize this is trance channelling?’

  “I thought he’d said ‘trans-channelling’ and was madly trying to puzzle out the direction the conversation was taking by decoding the Latin prefix.

  “‘I have some friends you’ve simply got to meet, Laura. When they hear about Torgon, it’s just going to blow them away.’

  “‘Friends?’ I said with alarm. ‘Alec, listen, don’t tell anybody else about this. This is private, for goodness sake. You don’t understand. It took me ages just to screw up the courage to tell you.’

  “‘No, it’s you who doesn’t understand, Laura. Torgon is real. She’s coming through to you from a higher plane of enlightenment and giving you all this insight and self-knowledge. That’s how you’ve gotten to such a brilliant place so easily. And you don’t even realize what’s happening to you. That’s what’s so mind-bending about all of this. You must have the most incredible gift for channelling! Once you open yourself up, you’re going to be another … well, I don’t know … probably like another Siddhartha. So believe me, I know people who are so going to want to meet you.’

  “I knew Alec dabbled in New Age stuff. What I’d first experienced as a wonderful openness to his feelings was, I later discovered, one of Alec’s ways of coping with a rather fragile personality. But never in a million years would I have guessed that he’d assume Torgon was a real person. What I’d wanted from the evening was simply to share my colourful, complex imagination. What Alec wanted was a medium.

  Laura paused. She looked down at her hands folded in her lap.

  “You know how life has these turning points?” she murmured softly. “Those ‘sliding door’ moments where you realize if you had made one single choice differently, it would have meant a whole different life …?”

  Again a pause. It lingered.

  “That was one of them. In that moment, I saw Alec for what he was. A loser, talking bullshit. Even so … I just ignored it. I let him talk me into going to meet these ‘friends’. In fact, I have to admit, it didn’t take a lot of persuasion.”

  Intrigued, James looked over at her. Laura had slid down into the enveloping closeness of the chair. Her arms were protectively across her body, which made James think she felt in danger.

  “Why do you suppose that was?” he asked. “You believe completely that Torgon is just part of your imagination. You’re almost mocking what Alec believed. Yet it was easy to be talked into seeing his friends?”

  “That’s the question I always come back to,” she said softly. “Why didn’t I just say no?”

  Silence drifted in and James allowed it to settle because it was more a thinking silence than a silence of reticence.

  “The truth, I guess, is that I wanted so badly to feel special,” she said at last. “I wanted to be that wonderful, magical person Alec believed I was. A part of me did think it was wrong – deceptive – but, still, it seemed harmless. And okay to do because the initiative was coming from him, not me. Like how it happens with Father Christmas when you’re a kid. How you know he’s not real, but it doesn’t hurt to pretend. And other people – important people to you, like your parents – want it that way too. So it creates a kind of conspiracy, this sense that if you all believe something together that makes everybody happy, somehow that cancels out the fact that it’s a lie.”

  “On the surface Alec’s group of friends were much like me. They were all young, middle class, well-educated. But whereas I’d turned inward to cope with the problems in my life, they had all turned outward to seek answers. Their weekly discussions covered a whole patchwork of things – New Age stuff, Eastern philosophy, imagined religions like druidism, alien intervention, visitation from angels.

  “Alec had told them about me before I got there, so when I did come, it wasn’t at all like walking into a crowd of strangers. They greeted me very warmly and … well, reverently. They’d shake my hand, holding it a moment, and gaze into my eyes as if they were meeting a celebrity.

  “Everyone seemed to go along with Alec’s theory that Torgon was some external spirit from a higher realm who had chosen to come and personally guide me towards my own enlightenment. They found it amusing when Alec told them how persistent Torgon had had to be in leading me to them and how even now I was reluctantly ‘being dragged kicking and screaming into the Light’, as he put it. Torgon took on such a wise and charming personality in the way Alec presented her. I remember feeling all warm and fuzzy, knowing she ‘belonged’ to me. It was nice too, in its way, to imagine that Torgon actually did think about me occasionally, not just the other way around.

  “When we broke for refreshments, a young woman came up to me and asked me how it all started, how it had felt when I’d first experienced Torgon. A man appeared beside her and he asked me if I’d actually seen Torgon with my eyes. Pretty soon other people came. I sat down on the arm of an easy chair and before I realized it, everyone in the group had clustered around my feet.

  “I’m not someone who speaks easily in public. Even now. But that night was different. I found it unexpectedly effortless to talk
to them. They weren’t like the Loony Tunes I’d expected them to be. They were sincere and open and just wanted to know what my experiences had felt like. No analysis. No judgement. No denigration for having this impossible thing in my head. They just wanted to understand what it had been like for me, my emotions, my insights. Any worry I’d had about being deceptive passed away over the course of that conversation, because what I was telling them was the truth. These were my feelings and my observations. I’d spent my whole life trying to hide Torgon. For the first time people responded to me as if I had something of value. I felt good. I felt relief.”

  “I went back to the Tuesday night group the next week. In fact, I started going regularly with Alec. It had genuinely never occurred to me that I was lonely. I’d never thought I was. I’d believed I was really happy with my life of writing and studying. The truth is, however, I’d really, really wanted friends. I had just never dared let myself think about how much, so the Tuesday night group opened a whole new world up for me.” Laura laughed in a self-deprecating way. “Except, of course, the truth was that none of these people actually wanted me. They wanted Torgon.

  “At first, I found it weird how everyone would talk about Torgon as if she were a person there in the room with us – it was like reinventing Dena’s and my childhood game – but after a while, I managed to quell the vague feeling that I was somehow demeaning the real Torgon. That was a silly idea. Torgon was nothing more than a creation of my own imagination, so how could I demean her? Right?

  “So …” Laura hesitated. She looked over at James, made momentary eye contact, looked away and gave an embarrassed smile. “So, that’s how I started channelling.”

  “Meaning?” James asked.

  “Meaning that pretty soon I was saying stuff like ‘Torgon tells me such and such.’”

  “So Torgon transitioned from an imaginary experience to a public figure?”

  Laura gave a self-conscious nod. “I wish I could say I felt bad about it or that it caused me to think lots of deep, philosophical thoughts about the consequences of deception, but I put a different slant on it. I didn’t see myself as taking advantage of them. They were all vulnerable people in one way or another and I genuinely wanted to help them. Coping with life seemed to come a lot more naturally to me than to anyone else there. All I really did was make common-sense suggestions. But if it had just been me saying this stuff, no one would have paid any attention. If I said Torgon thought they should try something, however, people always took the suggestions seriously. And the suggestions did help. I really was doing something positive.”

  “So you felt that using Torgon in this way was beneficial to others? Were any other factors influencing your decision to do this, do you think?” James asked.

  Laura grimaced. “Yes. I enjoyed being liked. Being special.” She grew tearful.

  “That brings up strong feelings?” James asked gently.

  “It’s hard to convey how important that felt,” she said softly. “It sounds like such a selfish reason for doing something so deceptive … But it was like being back with Pamela in fourth grade. Only I got to be Pamela this time around. That felt so good.”

  “It’s understandable.”

  “Once I started, though, I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t just decide the next week I didn’t want to talk about Torgon. So it was only a matter of weeks before the Tuesday night group metamorphosed into my group – ‘Laura’s group’ – people actually called it that. New people started coming just to see me. I loved it. I kept thinking: ‘What difference does it make if I say the advice comes from Torgon?’ I was Torgon, so it wasn’t as if I were taking credit for something that wasn’t mine. And I was helping people. I wasn’t even charging them any money. That felt noble … sort of …

  “My relationship with Alec got weird, though. He was totally caught up in the whole spirit-guide thing. He was obsessed with Torgon to the point of talking about her continually as though she was actually with us, and adopting all the reverential terminology and postures that the people in Torgon’s world used towards her. Honestly, he came across as a lunatic. We broke up, finally, much to the relief of both us, I suspect, because what he really wanted was Torgon and not me. This way he could just be one of the group and talk only to her.”

  “What about the ‘real’ Torgon?” James asked. “Were you still experiencing the original Torgon while Torgon-the-spirit-guide was coming into being?”

  Laura leaned back into the chair and for a long moment was pensive. “I can see now that the Torgon who had sustained me for so long was starting to recede at about that point,” she said. “Only very subtly. I could only see it in retrospect. But as I became more and more involved with the Tuesday night group, the genuine Torgon did become less vivid.”

  “Then there was a new turn of events. About two months after I’d started with the Tuesday night group, a member called Robin, an artist, asked me to lunch at her place the following Saturday. She told me all about her own spirit guide, some character with a horsy-sounding name like ‘Dobbin’. She wanted my advice on making his messages more coherent, because from what she was telling me, they sounded like they mostly came off a Magic 8 ball.

  “Then out of the blue, she said, ‘Has Alec arranged for you to meet the Prophet?’

  “Alec had never said anything to me about any prophets. When I said no, she replied enigmatically, ‘I’ve no doubt you’ll get the call soon.’

  “Up to that point, I had never heard of this person, but you know how it is once you become aware of something. Suddenly everyone is mentioning him.

  “His name was Fergus McIndoe but no one ever called him by his name. He was just ‘the Prophet’. The story went that in his early twenties, he’d dropped out of university and gone off to ‘find himself’ in India. There, with all the mystics and yogis and whatnot, he learned to ‘open his consciousness’ and channel an assortment of higher beings, who, as they were pure energy and past the need for physical bodies, came to him only aurally. So he referred to them as ‘the Voices’. When he returned to the Boston area, he established himself as a very successful psychic and had since devoted his life to passing on the Voices’ wisdom.

  “I was fascinated to meet him. Knowing that my own ‘abilities’ were gentle fakery, I was highly curious about his. I was equally interested to find out if he’d be able to detect what I was doing. Would we call each other’s bluff? Or was there a kind of Magic Circle for psychics like there is for magicians, where you never told how tricks were done?

  “But this guy wasn’t simply someone making a few bucks off the gullible. He had also predicted a great human conflict in which only the most highly evolved beings would survive. The Voices, naturally, knew who the select would be, and they had decreed that the Prophet had been chosen to be the new spiritual leader in North America who would provide guidance to people through the dark time. Eventually he would lead them to create a new world, known as the New Atlantis.”

  Laura laughed good-naturedly. “I know it sounds ridiculous. But you know how these cults can start. All you need is one charismatic nutter preaching the end is nigh, and there you are.

  “Anyway, it didn’t bother me at all that the Prophet had these weird, grandiose ideas. If anything, it made him seem exotic and enigmatic, more like someone from Torgon’s world than our own. I very much wanted to meet him. I also knew that eventually I would need his endorsement if I was to continue using my own ‘powers’ with the group.

  “Despite Robin’s prediction, however, the Prophet never made any effort to contact me. According to people in the Tuesday night group, he tended to just drop in on them unannounced occasionally and that was no doubt what would happen, but I had been going for almost three months by that point and he had still never shown up. Nor did he make himself known to me in any other way. There wasn’t the slightest indication that he was even aware of my existence.

  “In the end I decided that if the mountain wouldn’t come to Mohammed, then
Mohammed was just going to have to go to the mountain. After a bit of investigation, I discovered the Prophet used a private room at an exclusive health club near the city centre to give psychic readings. So I called for an appointment. There was a three-week waiting list. Moreover, what he charged for a fifteen-minute reading would have bought my groceries for two weeks.

  “I didn’t want anyone in the Tuesday night group to know what I was planning to do, certainly not Alec, and I didn’t want to give the Prophet any advantage, so I made the booking in Tiffany’s name instead of my own. Then I waited, curious. And curiously excited.

  When I got to the health club, I remember being greeted very courteously by this young woman at the front desk. I can even recall what she was wearing – this blue and white outfit that made her look like a stewardess. She led me through the area where all the weight equipment was and then opened a door to a staircase. ‘That way,’ she said and pointed downward while remaining on the landing herself. I remember feeling unexpectedly nervous and wishing she’d come with me.

  “At the foot of the stairs there was a very large room with a low ceiling and stucco-textured walls. The floor was covered with a deep shag pile carpet in the most startling St Patrick’s Day green. The health club was built on a slope, so despite the fact that I had entered at street-level upstairs and come downstairs, this room was at ground level in the back. Early evening sunlight was slanting in through floor-to-ceiling windows on that side and it gave the carpet a vibrant aliveness, as if it were real grass, but at the same time, it made the rest of the room feel squashed because of the low ceiling. The entire room was completely empty except for the far corner, distant from the windows. There the Prophet sat behind a flimsy-looking table. The only other piece of furniture was a chair opposite him for the client.