Dream Catcher: A Memoir

by Salinger, Margaret A.

  I did not see Catholic depictions of naked, tortured bodies in purgatory or hell (as in that Bosch painting—you know the one—with a devil sticking a bunch of flowers up somebody’s backside in a diorama of the tortures of hell) until I was beyond the primal-terror stage: they were somebody else’s bogeymen, someone else’s bad dream. As a child, when my mother would read the Christmas story to me each Christmas Eve—the flight out of Egypt, the birth in a manger, the star in the east, incense, frankincense, and myrrh—I thought every child in the world heard the same story about that special night that happened so long ago. The story wasn’t religion, it was history, and thrilling, and even tonight, the miracle of Santa Claus would fill my stocking without fail and take a bite out of the sandwich I left for him. I had no idea Christmas had anything to do with being Jewish or Catholic and bad things happening to you. My mother never read any stories about bad things happening to Jesus, just the lovely gifts he received from the Magi. I was successfully steered away from images of crucifixion at the Metropolitan Museum. Easter was strictly about coloring eggs and a candy hunt.

  Religion, for me, was something my parents said I could choose when I was older, if I had any interest. My mother, I knew, had chosen not to be a Catholic anymore when she grew up. But there was no equivalent choice about the existence of the Jewish blood that was inside of me, about the fact I qualifed for extermination in Germany, or about a documentary photograph of living, or half-living, persons on their way to death.

  Try as I might in my teens, when I chose to become a Christian, hoping somehow to be adopted by the Holy Family, I never could quite believe in them with the same depth of faith that I believed in Nazis, or my mother believed in devils as a child. Nazis, not devils, were my bogeymen.3

  IT WAS AROUND THIS TIME that I began to have problems with the alligators. The ones that lived under my bed. For the longest time, all I had to do to stay out of harm’s way was to make sure I didn’t dangle any bait over the edge. Arms and legs were held close to my body, tightly under the covers. No child I knew was foolish enough to dangle an arm over the edge even in the hottest weather. But around this time those alligators began to act up. At bedtime, I had to run on tiptoe across my bedroom floor, risking as few steps as possible, and leap into bed. After a few nights, they were onto this game. To keep one step ahead of them, I learned to long jump. After brushing my teeth and having one last pee, I’d whisper, “Ready . . . set . . . go!” and spring from the bathroom door; gathering speed as I ran across the hallway, I’d leap from the transom some four feet through the air, clear the footboard, and plunk onto my bed.

  Daddy didn’t try to talk me out of the alligators; instead, he turned his attention to my breathing. He’d place his hand on my belly to check to see if I was chest-breathing, shallow, tense, and unhealthy, or stomach-breathing, deep and healthful. He taught me the same breathing techniques that young Seymour teaches his family in “Hapworth”: you breathe through the left nostril while covering the right nostril for one breath, then switch sides for the next breath. He also suggested that before I fell asleep at night I should say, or think, the word hong on the in breath and sha on the out breath. Alternatively, I could say, or think, om for the entire breath cycle.4

  Relaxation and breathing exercises might have helped if my problem had been in falling asleep. I had little trouble with that because, for much of the year, the evening sounds of the field and forest sang me to sleep. The most beautiful of all was hearing the cows from Day’s farm driven home for their evening milking. As they walked, single file, along the path, I could identify each one as it passed, for the metal cowbells that hung from an old leather strap around the neck had been hammered, by hand, each to a slightly different pitch from the others; and finally, I’d hear the whole glorious symphony as they made their way into the distance toward hay barn and home.

  My secret problem was that once I fell asleep and began dreaming, I became caught in the web it spun, and I couldn’t escape and find my way back to consciousness and home. The harder I struggled, the more entangled I became. This was something that so terrified me I’m still not at all comfortable writing about it. I’d always had terrible nightmares, but even worse than the content of the dreams was what began to happen to the structure of them around this time. The boundary between dream and awake, once a firm door I could shut behind me, was becoming grotesquely elastic.5 I entered my own internecine Battle of the Bulge as I began to become trapped in my dreams. I’d be in the midst of a terrifying, often physically excruciating nightmare and then find myself wide-awake, or so I thought, lying in my bed, damp hair sticking to my neck like seaweed to the drowned, thankful it was morning and the nightmare was over. After a few minutes, I’d notice something subtle was out of place, something was wrong. Then to my horror, I’d realize I was still dreaming. This hell could go on for five or six or seven permutations; sometimes I’d even brush my teeth and get to the breakfast table before I realized I was still dreaming and the terror would begin again. And again.

  My dream life was the Alice-like mirror image of what was happening to me in my waking life. In the face of overwhelming assault, the child, like a good fighting combat unit, jettisons a piece or pieces of the self to save the rest. Some develop full-blown multiple personalities. Others have a collection of fragments, or “shard people” as I call mine, split off from the main body. Apparently, parts of me, little encapsulated personalities jettisoned during retreat, may well have died or are, at least, lost forever. Some of these parts of me died in exile, each on some desolate island since childhood. Some are alive but missing in action. I have spent years, with doctor and friends beside me, cruising the archipelago, calling out, “All-y all-y in come free.”

  The clue, that there were dead to be identified and mourned, as well as missing survivors out there, came to me in a dream—their message in a bottle, as it were. In my late twenties, not only was I caught in the dream web as I so often had been as a child, but now, for the first time, I actually died. This was quite a shock to me, having heard somewhere, and taken it as an article of faith, that dreamers don’t die in dreams, they always wake up before hitting the bottom of the cliff as it were.6 Not so. I was tied to a stake by Nazis who then lit the wood pile underneath my feet. I felt my flesh burning7; excruciating, terrible agony—words fail me here—as the flames burned my legs, higher and higher. When the flames reached my genitals, I smoothly left my body. It was not a traumatic jerk or the kind of wrenching separation one might imagine. It was like swimming in a lake. I glided above my body and watched it burn. I knew I was dead. When I woke up, it seemed so real that I wondered whether some past-life experience, if such a thing exists, had intruded upon the present.

  The next time I died in a dream, I was clearly myself even in the dream, and not some “character” from a past life. This convinced me to search my own life for an explanation and for help. I was terrified. I’m captured by two huge metallic beings. They say nothing. They just line up all the humans they’ve captured, and we walk and walk until we arrive at the top of a hill, and I can see a sawmill poised at the edge of a cliff. The humans are floated in a stream through the mill, end to end like logs, until they reach the edge of the falls where two of the metallic beings operate a whirling saw that decapitates each human in turn. The body drops over the edge, down the flume, and floats out of sight. When I reach the saw blade, I feel it cut my throat all the way through, and as I fall over the edge, I feel the whirly stomach you get on an amusement park ride or drunk in bed when the room starts to swim. As I hit the bottom, my consciousness begins to fade smoothly, slowly, as I float down the stream. I see the surface of the water recede as I sink gently as stars fade at dawn, into nothingness.

  * * *

  1. I often reflect on the chasm that exists between what my urban Democratic friends think is politics—a sort of an extended Meet the Press, or Firing Line—a basically cerebral if banal activity, and the primal arousal of a crowd at a cockfight, o
r perhaps the crowd at the Colosseum watching slaves and Christians fight to the death, that arises when people talk about niggers and Jews and Communists. The mob passion these little kids tapped into was and is something not to be underestimated.

  2. The Glass family apartment was across the street from an exclusive school for girls.

  3. I have a private theory that a person’s background and deep identity can be determined most accurately by one simple question: When you were growing up, who was your bogeyman? I asked a friend I’ve known most of my life, who is half-Indian and half-Jewish, but who identifies himself as Indian, about his bogeyman. On the Canadian reservation of his tribe, parents (then as now) warned their children, “Watch out, the Mounties will get you!” Though most of the children had never seen a Mountie, the mere word struck dread in their hearts.

  4. These were probably the “hong sau” and “Aum” techniques in Yogananda’s book on Kriya yoga.

  5. A psychiatrist once told me that this is indicative of one’s ego boundaries breaking down, the next stage being psychosis, where ego and id, dream and reality, form a tidal wave breaking up all semblance of structure and function of anything in its path. I think I prefer my father’s words in his story “For Esmé” where he likens his character’s mind to unstable luggage “teetering off the overhead rack” on a train.

  6. I asked my shrink, a psychoanalyst and medical school lecturer who specializes in such things, and was told that it was, indeed, extremely uncommon, in the general population, even of therapy patients, for a dreamer to die in a dream. However, among a subgroup of persons who were subjected to repeated and severe trauma as infants or young children, it is quite common. This is not to say the physical intensity of the punishments has to have been extreme. I did not go to school with bruises and whip marks as did a number of my classmates. In fact, I used to wish I had scars to point to on my arms or legs to explain, to vouch for the impact on me. I still find it troubling that my psychological symptoms mirror, or are, in some cases, worse than those of friends of mine who suffered broken bones at the hands of their parents. I know, intellectually at least, that the effect of terror does not reside in blows alone, but it’s something I struggle with especially when I’m beating myself up—no one used a cattle prod on me, why can’t I just straighten up and fly right, and so on. Well, I’m trying my best—no excuses. I’m asking questions to get some terra firma beneath my feet, not for some distant object at which to point my finger, or to have some name to yell like a rock thrown into an abyss.

  7. It was also put forth to me that babies left too long in urine-soaked diapers do, in actuality, experience severe blistering and burns on the genitals and down the legs.

  11

  “However Innumerable Beings Are, I Vow to Save Them”1

  IN DECEMBER OF ’63, I had my eighth birthday. All I can say is, winter birthdays in New Hampshire are really crummy. Viola’s is May 11 and there were picnics and games in the field. In December, the few kids whose parents were able to make it up the steep road in the snow played in our garage. It was heated, sort of, but it was no one’s idea of a picnic. I don’t remember who came, except Viola of course, and the rest of the kids did not notice when I slipped away. I sat at the top of the stairs to my father’s garage apartment, and after a while, Viola came and sat with me. I was feeling sick and strange.

  Viola went and got my mother, and the next thing I knew I was in a hospital bed in Windsor, Vermont, and told I had bubbles in my ears. I was there for several days, including my real birthday. I vaguely remember opening a present on my hospital bed, but that is all. I specifically remember no pain, but rather a feeling of unreality, as in the dreams I had that mimicked reality and went on forever without escape, like the TV show The Prisoner. I would have done much better with a proper explanation; it would have grounded me, feverish and all, in a world of biology like the ponds I loved. Bubbles in my ears; I floated away until, I suppose, they faded into iridescence and popped.

  I don’t remember coming home from the hospital. It is hard in the best of times to get a firm grip on the earth in the midst of northern December snow and its perpetual twilight of grays and whites and electric lights turned on shortly after lunch and school beginning and ending in darkness. My mind scattered in dry snowflakes; puffs of air blew the light powder across the hard crust of ice that formed over the packed snow several feet deep on the lawn. Someone may have shown up at school and sat in my seat; perhaps my shadow played in the faded-winter-light recess. Under aging banks of fluorescent lights, the fragments of dancing, twitching glare make my brain feel as if it’s skittering even now.

  Hibernation. I lay in a liminal state, like a fish in the mud at the bottom of a frozen pond, through the long months of January and February and into March. Then, the world beyond my eyes became a speck of blue frozen light in the distance of a long, long tunnel. Gradually I became aware of a certain dampness. I was awakened by smells of wet wool and deep brown mud.

  As the snow melted, I felt an acute sense of urgency, for where there is life, as opposed to suspended animation, there is the specter of death. “However innumerable beings are, I vow to save them.” Each spring, Viola and I took up our glass jars and did battle with the grim reaper, that harvester of stranded worms on pavement, fallen birds, caterpillars crossing the road, and frog eggs foolishly laid in drying puddles.

  My mother was wonderfully helpful with our rescue missions. She gave us old shoe boxes to make houses for our worms and let us dig up from her garden some dark, rich earth that, for some reason, smelled like coffee grounds. When we brought home a cocoon some boy had broken off a tree, she showed us how to make a home for it. We took an old honey jar, poked holes in the top for air, put green blotter paper on the bottom, dampened it, and put in the stick and cocoon. When we were finished, Viola and I decided to walk up the hill to see what was doing in our secret pond this year. It was now our pond, not Day’s pond. Mr. Day, the farmer down the road, had died and somebody had threatened to build a trailer park on the land. My father mortgaged everything we owned and bought it, so we now owned over 450 acres. A walk to the pond was not a casual stroll, but a half-hour climb. We had discovered the pond the previous year while following the trail of an apparition. It first appeared as we walked up the hill, mist rising from the patches of snow under the shade of the juniper bushes, which were always the last to melt. There, in the mist, stood a thick white horse, matted and muddy, and next to him a small brown donkey. They stood still, frozen against the sharp-smelling spruce trees and deep green pines, the only sound the droplets of melting snow dripping off the ends of the pine needles as the sun warmed the numbed, cold bark. I wasn’t sure whether the two beasts were real. I looked and could see that Viola saw them too, so we were either both dreaming or both awake. Steam rose from the nostrils of the donkey, and I let out my breath in response, automatically, like catching a yawn, unaware I’d been holding it. If they had walked slowly off a cliff, I’m not sure I’d have awakened. Following them, we stumbled across the secret pond where they stopped to drink.

  This year we didn’t see the horse and donkey, but I doubt they could have taken a clear drink from the pond this late in the spring. The pond water was way below last year’s level, so low in fact that it seemed to be less liquid than alive, teeming with wriggling life. It was too full of things even to wade in. (And we weren’t squeamish girls. Behind Viola’s house we had swum happily in the forbidden stream reputed to be full of bloodsuckers.) Masses and masses of frog eggs, clear jelly with tiny black dots, were engaged in a life-or-death race against the receding water as they clung to the weeds near the bank. In one tangle of weeds we spotted some exposed, greenish masses with fat red dots that we’d never seen before. We took some of each and put them in our jars, taking care not to tear apart the jelly mass. In another jar, we caught seven newts and brought them home.

  I got to keep the eggs and the newts at my house, I think, because my mother didn’t mind; Viola�
��s was a bit more squeamish. We set up an aquarium with water and some stones in case the newts needed to get out and turn into red salamanders later. They survived for several months until one morning I came downstairs and saw a dead newt floating at the surface of the water. The next morning, another. The following morning I got up earlier than usual and caught the murderer red-handed. One of my newts, the skinniest one in the tank, had gone mental. He had his back legs wrapped around the neck of a bigger newt and was slowly strangling him to death. I tried, but I could not pry his legs off the other one’s neck. Even flicking his head rather sharply with my fingers didn’t do it. Squeezing that slimy flesh to the mushing point was something I was incapable of doing. Finally I held his head out of the water for what seemed like hours and he let go. The other newt was staggering—if you can believe a newt can stagger—but alive. I netted the remaining newts, put them in a jar, and carried them back up the hill to release them into the pond. I kept “Killer” in a tank by himself rather than release the Cornish strangler into the wild. He lived an unconscionably long life.