When, after a couple months, it emerged that his mother was pregnant, the power of her miracle doubled and the weeks were counted down to the big event. The TV news devoted a special segment to his mother (and to him), every day, after the weather report, a contest was organized to come up with a name for him, and pretty soon his first ultrasounds were broadcast live and direct.
There he was, dreaming inside his dreaming mother. Sharing her dreams, feeding off them, dreams that weren’t like the dreams of people who dream only a few hours of the day with the rapid movement of their eyes under the soft and nearly translucent sheets of their lids.
No: his mother’s dreams stared, and they were staring at him.
And all around and outside her, multitudes assembled to pray. * (They prayed not in the name of the resurrected though as-if-half-asleep Lazarus of Bethany—whose figure was complicated and volatile, because it competed with that of the Messiah and for that reason the wise men decided to assassinate him a few days after his return, and dismember his body and spread it across the world—but in the name of the lesser-known Daughter of Jairus, whom Jesus awakens from a deep sleep with an Aramaic and commanding “Talitha Koum,” meaning “Little girl, I say to you, get up.”)
Miracle.
He was born in the middle of a winter night.
Lightning and thunder.
Dogs barking and cats meowing and one of the nurses starting to speak in tongues and astrological conjunctions. Many wonders. All the typical clichés of the atypical.
His mother gave birth to him and then sank forever into the darkness, perhaps, though he couldn’t understand it at the time, saying goodbye in her dreams with an “I’ll only be gone for a while,” with that oh so studied style of those who leave and never come back, and—as that other song explains—that’s why God made the movies.
His grandmother—who’d always studied the world of dreams with the devotion with which others study the twists and turns of telenovelas or the ups and downs of their finances—told him that his mother opened her eyes when she died, that she died with her eyes open, that she woke up to die, but before she did, she saw him. And she smiled one last and perfect smile; because his mother knew that not only had her dream become reality but that, in addition, now, reality was part of her dream.
He writes all of this—not his book of dreams but his series of dreams, numbered and addending and always following a †—in one of his biji notebooks. * (The biji—筆記—is a genre of classic Chinese literature that appeared for the first time during the Wei and Jin dynasties, and reached peak maturity during the Tang and Song dynasties. “Biji” can be translated, roughly yet more or less faithfully, as “notebook.” The different items in a biji can be numbered, but, also, can be read without following any order, making your own way, starting at any point and jumping back and forth or up and down or side to side. Beginning at the end and ending at the beginning. And a biji can contain curious anecdotes, nearly blind quotations, random musings, philosophical speculations, private theories regarding private matters, criticism of other works, and anything its owner and author deems appropriate. Example:
† Always put in a book—though not always on the first page—the completely unnecessary and simultaneously indispensable inscription: “Any similarities to reality in what is described or in descriptions of an individual or in individual descriptions in this book are purely coincidental.”)
He writes that and can’t help but feel moved by all those oneiric obsessives who sleep with notebook and pen beside the bed. And who (because the recommended average of eight hours already passed, because somebody turned on a light, because they were stabbed by the stinger of a nightmare and the flash of their own scream woke them) write it all down as soon as they wake up, frantic. Scribbling a murky chronicle of what happened to them but never took place on the other side; feeling how, as the seconds pass, the light material of their dreams dissolves and all that’s left is the somnambulant and imprecise memory and confused reading of what they dreamed. Night after night until—like he read in a book, in the first book of a last youth—they reach the climax of a dream in which they appear reading a notebook containing their own dreams. Those dreams that surround this brief life and that, for many, are an important though not entirely visible part of it. The dream like the tip of the theoretical iceberg. That which some will recite imperfectly, like a poorly learned lesson, to a psychoanalyst who will apply general notions and statistics to something unique and irrepeatable. While the patient, there, on the divan, sleeping awake and needing so badly to believe in the trance of absolute truth or of that which, the patient supposes, should be absolutely true. Something like that.
And he’s said it before, thought it before * (those dreamed repetitions, those refrains so characteristic of dreams), but now he writes it down:
Dreams are the fingerprints of the brain.
Dreams are the pupil of the unconscious.
Dreams are the lobe of the ear of DNA.
Someone said it before, someone talking in their sleep: no two dreams are the same. And so—though classic motifs repeat on more than on occasion, again, greatest hits like falling from the sky, walking naked through the street, teeth falling out in public—there are, in the event that dreams might have some meaning, no two dreams that end up making the same meaning of the same thing. Just like—depending on the reader—no two David Copperfields or Martin Edens or Dick Divers or Hugh Persons are the same.
He finds it hard to believe.
He finds it hard to believe anyone believes in that.
He finds it even harder to believe anyone could end up believing it’s possible to make some kind of believable message about why you should believe in all that; but it’s also true that people believe in the whole no two people in the universe have the same fingerprints or the same eye pattern and color or the same earlobe shape, without wondering how such a certainty was arrived at, how it was proven. Or does anyone really have the power to crosscheck the fingerprints and pupils and ears of everyone who lived or lives or will live?
Dreams, on the other hand, never resemble each other and are hard pressed to repeat. So-called recurrent dreams * (he’ll get back to those later on) are nothing but the increasingly diffuse echo of the first and original aria of a dream we refuse to let go of or (his case) the stage with fixed scenography for performances with no fixed lines.
Dreams, for the majority of people, are nothing but the tatters of a fallen flag, flapping in the wind just before being lowered and—among all the theories impossible to elevate to theorems and, as such, inapplicable to his situation—is left with that which postulates hypotheses regarding how these loose threads of conversations and landscapes and moments are nothing more than the way the brain self-regulates, eliminating all that which serves nothing, which upsets, which takes up too much space, which sullies. Extra pieces of the puzzle of puzzled brains, white noise or that ghost sound that—if you listened carefully—you could hear, between one song and the next, in the deepest grooves of those old LPs. Others, on the other hand, are inclined to think dreams are life itself: that in dreams fantasies are realized, that you are there and you live and you think the way nobody dares to think and to be here.
His dreams, on the other hand, are something else.
His dreams are different dreams.
His dreams are laser and digitalized.
His dreams have the precision of something unforgettable. They aren’t dreams like everyone else has. They aren’t mute and wavering sequences that can make enormous plot leaps, moving from a house to an airplane, from a mattress to a gallows, from a relative to a monster, always in black and white * (and to be honest he never really understood how anyone could ever specify something like “Dreams are in black and white”).
Could it be that once movies started getting made in color, black and white was relegated to the realm of dreams and memories?
Are memories in black and white?
Remember: in
films someone dreams and the red is black and the yellow is white. He doesn’t know, it doesn’t seem like the most solid of claims.
In any case, his dreams are in color and in CinemaScope.
And their plotlines are linear and clear.
Nothing of passing through Z after leaving A and before arriving to B.
His life is—as, if you think about it a little, everyone’s life is—much more digressive than any of his dreams. And so, arriving to this point and before moving on—continuing the waking dream—he should insert a small clarification.
In color or in black and white.
Either way.
And here it is: the woman of his dreams is not his mother; even though once, long ago, for nine months, they dreamed exactly the same dream, and her dreams were his and his dreams were hers.
The woman of his dreams is Ella.
And every time Ella appears in his dreams (in his sleeping dreams, he means) he wakes up, he manages to wake up, forces himself to wake up. It’s been a long and arduous training, like that of an Olympic athlete or, better, an oneiric athlete. Waking up—every time Ella appears—is to reach the goal interrupting the race, thinking that thing about “I’ll never know you, but I’m going to love you all the same,” something like that. The guarantee that what’s interrupted turns into a constant (to be continued …) that guarantees he’ll dream again of Ella and wake up when he sees her and …
And so Ella signifies his sleeping dreams are drawing to an end so his waking dreams can begin.
And he’s going to say it now and quickly and without overthinking to avoid having time or space to regret it.
He has the power to make his dreams not come true.
He’ll get back to all this later on.
And something else that always intrigued him: that whole thing where people count sheep or lambs to fall sleep. Why count? And why lambs or sheep. It’s obvious there’s a relationship between sleep and counting: the countdown of hypnotists sinking their volunteers into the most docile of somnolence. Not a comma but an ellipsis where the will is suspended and surrenders to the dictums of the magician: “Now you’re a sheep, one of those sheep someone counts so they can fall asleep.” And off that poor guy goes * (like Uncle Hey Walrus, more details coming up). Hopping across the stage while in the audience everyone laughs and some wonder, for a few seconds, whether they’ve been hypnotized for years or minutes, in a trance they understand as their lives. Whether their entire lives, poor dreamers, are but the hypnotic command of the illusionist. An illusionist who at any moment will snap his fingers and humankind will discover that, in reality, they were nothing but an ancient and dreamed fiction.
He, to get to sleep, counts and recounts dreams.
“Tell a dream, lose a reader,” warned * (how could he forget it’d been he who’d said it? symptoms of a lack of nocturnal life? liquefaction of memory due to a lack of dreams?) the writer Henry James.
He hopes it isn’t true and this dictum isn’t operating in these pages.
Because he has several dreams to tell.
He can’t not do it.
Dreams within dreams, as well.
Chinese boxes in the hands of Russian dolls facing the abyss.
Dreams are an inextricable part of his waking life and—at the indivisible nucleus of them all—of the life of the woman of his dreams.
Of Ella’s life.
Yesterday he saw her again.
Ella works in a bookstore (there’s no profession he finds more attractive in a woman) and in addition she’s the most beautiful woman in the world. He doesn’t know if she thinks the same thing concerning his beauty, as he learned in another song, which would require an understanding of what he is. No mean feat. And he’s not entirely sure she intuits that. But it seems she suspects something. What he’s sure of is Ella is sure she’s not really interested in the fact that he thinks she’s the most beautiful woman in the world. There are beautiful women—like Ella—who figure out how to put their beauty in the eyes of their beholders. They know, they intuit, that an awareness of their own beauty would be too great a burden to bear and so—rationally and intuitively—they decide it would be best for everyone else to bear it, that weight. Maybe that’s why Ella has that tattoo on her forehead, right where her third eye should open. But no. Ella’s tattoo looks like something designed to shut that supposed third eye and to enhance the power of her other two eyes. Something that might be a cross or a sword and that looks like this † and that, he thinks, Ella had tattooed on her to distract a little from her beauty, for all those who stare at her and can’t stop staring at her eyes. That † like a lightning rod and a shield and a mirror that deflects adoring and uncomfortable looks. That † like an evasive maneuver that, at least for a few seconds, makes you wonder what it might mean instead of wondering where a woman like that has come from.
Yes: there are women enslaved to their beauty and there are women who, with their beauty, enslave everyone else.
And Ella doesn’t want to be either.
And there are days when, for this slave, Ella’s beauty becomes indomitable and dominant and, looking at her, he wants to fall to his knees, to sleep, and to dream that he wakes up and she is still there.
Now it’s one of those first afternoons of autumn when it seems the whole world is a half-finished drama or a comedy, and everything has the look and feel of an intermission between one act and the next. And when, as the actors return to their places, it will become apparent—with little surprise—that it’s a different show now, that what’s happening now has nothing of the look and sound of everything that came before.
In the first moments of bygone autumns, people dreamed more because their dreams were changing wardrobe. And, in the mornings, when the sun no longer rises so early and so quickly, when everyone emerges onto the streets bleary and fresh out of bed, he can still see the remnants of dreams wrapped around their necks like scarves, covering their mouths, refusing to release their possessed masters.
The beginning of autumn is his favorite time of year and, also, the season when he feels best in bookstores, the perfect climate for spending hours standing around, there, inside.
He enters the bookstore.
One of those bookstores that used to be just a bookstore but recently has been mutating and, like the mythic creatures from ancient bestiaries, combining the features of multiple species * (if there’s something more interesting than a lion it’s a lion with wings and the face of a woman and questions in its mouth and delusions of divine grandeur) and this one is a bookstore-café-record store.
He pretends to look for something: Todavía Estamos Aquí, the latest album from Los Dinosaurious Inextinguibles, for example. Or some edition of The Glass Key by Dashiell Hammett, so he can read again its soothing ending—after all that betrayal and death and revelation—where a girl recounts a dream. One of the endings and one of the dreams he likes best in the history of literature, in a detective novel that, along with Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, can be read like a daydreamed variation of The Great Gatsby, that almost-detective novel and … Oh, the things he thinks about in bookstores in general and that one in particular to keep from thinking about Ella.
The bookstore belongs to a man named Homero.
No, he’s not blind and, yes, he is Ella’s father.
And one night, to his immense displeasure, he dreamed Homero was his own lost father, who had once driven a car blindfolded, and he woke up with a smile of relief: no, Ella was not his sister.
He opens and closes books. He reads random words that, always, refer to the same thing: “Writing is nothing more than a guided dream,” “Dreams are the genus; nightmares the species,” “Dreams are an aesthetic work, perhaps the earliest aesthetic expression,” “We have these two ideas: the belief that dreams are part of waking, and the other, the splendid one, the belief of the poets: that all waking is a dream,” “If we think of the dream as a work of fiction—I think it is—it may be that we cont
inue to spin tales when we wake and later when we recount them,” “We don’t know exactly what happens in dreams” * (Jorge Luis Borges; he still remembers that name, luckily; who knows how much longer he will, how many nights he has left before that prison he writes in fills up with sand that, grain by grain, covers and chokes and buries and erases him).
Annoyed, he closes the book that—as everyone knows happens in dreams, this is one of the quickest and most efficient ways to know you are dreaming—changes title and subject and genre because dreams are not attentive readers and their capacity for concentration is minimal. The speed of dreams is greater than the speed of sight. And so, putting the book down to one side, he nullifies his desire to have it in his dreams, and slips—without losing sight of Ella, behind the counter—into territories he feels are safer. He takes the long way around to avoid getting anywhere near the esotericism section * (where there abound those absurd dictionaries of oneiric interpretation and all of that) and shudders a little as he passes the self-help section (and wonders the same thing as always: how are there people desperate and deluded enough to believe in the efficacy of those manuals; how can those people who can’t help anyone think they can help themselves by following the instructions of something written by people they don’t know, whom they know little or nothing about, and who don’t know them and who are, inevitably, as in-need of help as they are, and who can’t help themselves except by writing these books). So he stops in the comics section. * (Do those DC-variety comics still exist that, when he was a kid, produced in him a combination of fascination and disdain? The ones that announced themselves as belonging to those “imaginary adventures” that toyed with impossibilities like Superman dying or Batman retiring—with things that ended up really happening so many years later—that at the time could only be understood as waking dreams?). He’ll be safe there and, also, have a good view of her.
The Dreamed Part Page 3