Dreams like fractured highways intersecting without stoplights or road signs indicating the answer to that perpetual are we there yet of the most miraculous children, in the backseat, but knowing that, if there’s any justice, they’ll arrive long before and far ahead of their drivers.
And he has also read dream books and journals, trying to find an explanation for what happened to him. * (But he never found anything resembling his own dreams in the dreams of Emanuel Swedenborg, Franz Kafka [who never got around to telling us what Gregor Samsa’s “disturbing” dreams were about before he wakes up and discovers that his life is a nightmare], Graham Green, Jack Kerouac, Federico Fellini, Georges Perec, or Bruno Schulz, where no one ever says it’s all just a dream and yet …)
His dreams seem, always, suspiciously related to his own and respective books, functioning as a kind of occupational annex or attic. More or less unhinged architecture that, nevertheless, isn’t too out of sync with the main floors. Only the words of William S. Burroughs moved him: in an introductory fragment to his book of dreams, My Education, where he also offers a recipe for “making botulism” that “was used with conspicuous success by Pancho Villa.”
*(Here it is: “For years I have wondered why dreams are often so dull when related, and this morning I find the answer, which is very simple—like most answers you have always known: No context … like a stuffed animal set on the floor of a bank.”)
No context.
Burroughs was right.
But what Burroughs—who fired his first pistol when he was eight, who was convinced he gave off ultraviolet infrared rays that turned him into “el hombre invisible” * (just so, in Spanish); who said he’d crashed a passenger plane with the power of his mind; who with his sharp and jagged cut-ups of words believed he was shaping extra-dimensional and talismanic structures of language; who killed off his enemies in his novels; who was convinced if we didn’t dream we would die, because our brains need diversion and get bored of waking life and let go—he didn’t or couldn’t know that dreams can, if trained and strengthened, first modify their context to later be transformed into the context themselves.
He does know that. And so—his case, his life—hundreds of stuffed animals on the floor of a bank nobody considers a bank anymore, but the maddest warehouse of stuffed animals, where feeding those clawed and fanged mummies isn’t permitted.
And he’s the guardian of that warehouse of stuffed animals that was never a bank but a bookstore. He strolls through it every night, when nothing is moving, when all the stuffed animals have gone to sleep, and he, asleep, takes aim at one of them * (he feels a special predilection for the elephants, an animal that has always seemed to him the most oneiric of all and he just remembers, dreaming, something he read once in deluded monastery manuals or something like that about elephants disappearing from Europe during the Middle Ages and turning back into fantastical animals) with the beam of his flashlight and moves toward Ella. And his steps are interrupted so that another dream—another version of his dream—starts over and, once again, the speed of things is altered. And so, suddenly, there are too many glass keys and too few steel keys and so little time to try to open that thin yet invulnerable door that separates wakefulness from sleep.
He already said it: his metaphors are few but rustproof.
And, ah, that song, that song …
A song that—like a lullaby rocking itself never to sleep but forever awake—seems to go on and on and on, as if you were running shirtless across the rooftop of a hotel in Avignon where you slept with but didn’t sleep with Ella. A song that seems to always be rising, as if seeking a refrain that’s ever higher, higher still.
The long and sinuous climb that leads to the edifice of the Onirium is not exactly a climb. The climb that leads to the edifice of the Onirium * (a chaos of stairways as if bursting out of one of the M. C. Escher prints that tended to adorn the walls of his adolescence, where the steps appear to lead nowhere and everywhere at the same time) is long and tiring, but at no time does it give you the feeling of climbing, but, rather, of ascending. As if you were floating. The way you float in dreams. And he wonders if that might not be the idea: that the journey here is tiring, exhausting, producing the need to sleep and the desire, perchance, to dream.
He’s not the only one. There are multitudes here. A long and serpentine line that starts at the edges of the city, passes through the residential neighborhoods, skirts around a ring of barracks whose diameter grows by the day, until at last it reaches the first stairway at the base of the hill.
They are many, yes, but fewer all the time; because those in charge of buying dreams, the Onirium scientists, have gotten better and better at identifying the mythomaniacs and the fraudsters and even those who’ve convinced themselves they’re still dreaming when actually they’re just sleeping.
That’s not his case.
He is authentic and true and legitimate.
One of the few Morpheus Pluses.
And, of course, what certifies him as such isn’t anything as banal as a falsifiable and losable and thievable piece of plastic: it’s his palm print when he sets it atop a laser/digital scanner at the gates to the Onirium.
Being a Morpheus Plus gives him the ability to avoid the whole process of the climbing up to the edifice and grants him the privilege of entering through a special door for the chosen few. For the subjects who have special value to the Onirium and to all humanity. The Morpheus Pluses are the select bearers and dreamers of recurrent dreams. The few who remain, the ever fewer, the now you see them, now you don’t. The abracadabras! and the prestos! And the thing is that the magic of the recurrent dream—those who run the Onirium have come to understand—is what keeps them dreaming. The recurrent dream that withstands and resists The White Plague. The recurrent dream that immunizes you to the vapors and desert breath of the White Plague that prevent all possibility of precipitations of dreams. The personal and unique and exclusive recurring dream: a recurring dream that has nothing to do and nothing to dream with the recurring dreams everyone has. It’s been said, been enumerated before, here are some more: the menacing banality of being hunted by people you don’t know or running away from ones you do, your teeth falling out in public (for Sigmund Freud the equivalent of the desire to get pregnant in women or the terror of castration in men), the inability to get your house in order or discovering new rooms inside it or not knowing where the bathroom is or not being able to turn on the lights in the place you live and sleep (the home as the body, Freud again), finding lost objects, losing control of a vehicle, being swept away by a tornado or a huge wave or of drowning. All manifestations of anxiety or posttraumatic stress or some obsessive disorder of neurotic and repetitious compulsions or (Carl Jung now) some other factor contributing to the integration of the psyche. * (Or, why not, a sleeping form of the constant rewriting writers endure while awake: a dose/free sample of the torment they all suffer so that those lucky enough to be just readers are given a brief awareness of everything they’ve saved themselves by being simply devoted to the blessing of reading those letters, recurring but always in a different arrangement, arranged by others who those letters—though they may appear to—never entirely obey.)
None of that applies to him or his thing.
To what is his. To his recurrent dream.
But the truth is he prefers to blend in with that whole ebbing flood of mendacious riffraff, desperate individuals who invent dreams or who’re awake and dreaming they’re asleep and dreaming. All of them make him feel—for once in his life—like a successful person.
Someone who has succeeded in life.
Someone—never put better—whose dreams have come true and whose personal success has been the unexpected consequence of a cosmic failure.
Someone surrounded by beings whose dreams will never come true because—though they want to convince the authorities of the Onirium to the contrary—they can’t and won’t ever be able to dream.
Does that make him a mea
n-spirited person?
Probably.
But he never was, nor claimed, nor pretended to be what’s called and known as “a good person.”
And the truth is that until the outbreak of The White Plague, he’d been an outcast with no real value. All his endeavors—all his waking dreams—had failed. And the only one of them he could consider a success was the one that led him to meet Ella and …
Now—surrounded by losers, many of whom knew success in many fields and professions before The White Plague—he feels like a winner. And it’s clear that it’s not due to merit. That he did nothing to distinguish himself and to be recognized. And, yes, there are many among those who line up and ascend the hill to the Onirium who recognize him and reach out touch him with the tips of their fingers and worship him with beatific devotion; awake and dreaming that merely coming into contact with him will bring them close to his greatness and maybe he’ll infect them and, for a night or two, give them back the ability to dream. Or that, at least, he’ll lie and tell them it won’t be long now, that soon they’ll be able to dream again.
No: all he did to stand out and become one of the select members of Morpheus Plus (the most exclusive club on the planet, the best and greatest accumulators of frequent-dreamer miles; someone in the Onirium said in a very low voice there were barely more than a dozen) was to not do something. To not do something not because he didn’t want to do it, but because—to go against the grain; because going against the grain was the only triumphant gesture left for a loser like him—there was nothing easier than not doing it.
Like this, to simply close his eyes on everything and everyone.
To deny the real world and affirm the world of dreams.
And to dream.
To be one of the select and exclusive and very few who keep on dreaming and on whom depends and in whom resides, they tell him, the increasingly faint hope that the human race will dream again, will have dreams again. And that from that material, the stuff of dreams, they can once again dream realities. And make them reality, make them come true.
And so—he admits, vanity of vanities—though he could utilize the benefit of a direct and exclusive heli-transfer to the Onirium’s rooftop, he continues to opt and still enjoys ascending like everyone else. Like the thousands of normal people who come here—never put better, ha ha ha?—in search of a dream.
He could, as he already pointed out, make a triumphal and conquering and almost messianic entrance. Descend from the skies in a helicopter, the reflectors of the Onirium illuminating him like a movie star on opening night, to be worshipped by spectating and expectant mortals, eclipsed and dazzled by his fame’s brilliance. Or, at the very least, he could make use of the network of secret tunnels that lead to the Onirium and where the people who work there move, coming and going. Sleepless. The inexact scientists who study the inexact science of dreams. The people who committed the dark error that awoke The White Plague.
And Ella is one of them.
Ella and her recurrent and true dream.
Ella, like another one of those guilty insects that know, if they were identified as such on the surface, they would be squashed like cockroaches.
All of them with their heads bowed except Ella, who, whenever he sees her, retains that same pride she always had and that led them to have long conversations/discussions over breakfast, in a world that no longer exists, a world where the possibility of dreaming of other worlds still fit. A world that more and more resembles a dream and in which the glaciers melt and the honey runs out and sperm move ever slower and ever weaker and ova become increasingly inhospitable and monsters die of starvation. Because nobody dreams of the cold and of bees and of butterflies and of the birth of children and of creatures with hundreds of eyes or a single eye that arrive here through the doors of majestic wardrobes or prefabricated closets in search of fuel, refined from childhood fears, for their city anymore. And what doesn’t get dreamed gets turned into a waking dream on this side: into something that ceases to be real because nobody dreams of it anymore. Into something that disappears as if by the art of dreaming.
Now, everything is calculated, everything troubles and disturbs and he supposes his attitude of not worrying about what might happen to him as he climbs the stairs that lead to the Onirium has to do with the immature impulse of not settling for the unpredictable, for the accidental, for letting someone else’s dream turn into his nightmare; who knows.
Or maybe it’s nothing more than another of his many unseemly and self-destructive characteristics and gestures. A way of flirting with his own suicide, disguised as murder at the hands of others.
Those in charge of the Onirium (concerned that something will happen to him or that the others will attack him and rip his head open with their teeth trying to discover or perhaps even devour the secret mechanism of his secret) have begged him more than once to give up this little farce of ascending alone and of his own accord without any kind of security. Though he could swear there are snipers on the rooftops of the Onirium tracking his movements and incognito bodyguards watching over his passage, ready to open automatic-fire or break bones by hand in the event of the slightest risk to his person. Let them do as they will. Their problem. He, as long as he’s able (and, ha, there’s so little time, almost no time, until he won’t be able to; until the pool from which they extract his dreams dries up completely and he’s just one more among those who now venerate him), he prefers to go on like this, here. He prefers to blend in with the starving and desperate and insomniac masses. To ascend with them to this Mecca. To let them think he’s one of them, that he’s like them and, at the same time, like Jesus entering Jerusalem, irreconcilably different, and denying them the hope of his miracle.
And, of course, to enjoy the landscape and those who inhabit it.
The empty buildings, the full streets. The whispers and the screams and the map-less and plan-less war of those who don’t sleep in peace because they can’t even dream of things that diffuse and abstract. * (If they were able to dream, they sob, they would like to dream of a favorite picture, of that girl from long ago they never got up the nerve to talk to, of making the decisive move in the decisive game of a sport they never played.)
The bonfires burning not for heat but so they can try to see something in their flames while he watches them burn, feverish, awake and dreaming they’re asleep and dreaming.
Here they are, all those who in the first dreamless days, desperate, emerged naked into the streets or plummeted from tall buildings or threw themselves onto the objects and individuals of their desire, trying to bring to the waking side of life something of that sleeping side they no longer had access to.
Here they all are, having made it through that first confusing time, seeking some kind of structure, and dividing themselves up into genres and races and categories and—unlike all the dreams or the lack thereof that confront and unite them—so far removed from any possible interpretation.
Here they are, opposite yet complementary and, beyond all battle and duel, without truce or peace, united by the inability to dream.
Here are the men who’re called the Sheep Counters * (who simply count aloud until they collapse, wrecked throats and vacant eyes) who are locked in eternal combat with the women known as the Mares of the Night (who keep nightmares confined to the forest of the nocturnal, when everyone knows that daymares also abound, that, as the years pass, nightmares are becoming increasingly diurnal), their eyelids shut forever, stitched with fishing line; and atop those eyelids there are tattoos of eyes, wide open and blue, in whose center, microscopic, you can perceive ink and multi-color figures: the dreams they long for and the dreams they don’t and won’t ever have.
Here are the factions of technology facing off: the Cathode Ray Tubes * (who recall having always dreamed in black and white and of primitive images distorted by ghosts and problems of transmission, reception, and antenna) versus the Plasma Screens * (who champion perfect resolution, freeze-frame and fast-forward and re
wind, picture-in-picture, and 3-D), but both coinciding on the fact that—as recent studies show—modern man slept and dreamed, when he dreamed and slept, pretty much just like ancient man; and so there’s no reason to go around blaming innocent electricity and its multiplicity of applications.
Here are, onomatopoetic, the silent ZZZZs and the snoring JJRRRRRs … ! both wearing those absurd and antiquated sleeping caps; and he always wondered why it was that, at some time, people put on hats to sleep * (what was the point? so dreams didn’t escape in the same way that, out the top of the head, body heat escapes?).
Here are the Sand Men * (always trying to push the powders of a “new and revolutionary drug,” a substance made of light, consumed through increasingly dilated pupils and that today might be called Electron Blue and tomorrow who knows, and that will give you back the innocent dreams of childhood, products of reading fairy tales, witch tales) opposing the naturalist and anti-artificial-substance ART/REMs * (who keep the dream alive that, while dreaming, without chemical additives, profound miracles can be illuminated, like that of Dante Alighieri dreaming his Divine Comedy one Good Friday; or that of Samuel Taylor Coleridge dreaming “Kubla Khan” and bringing here a flower from the other side; or that of Robert Louis Stevenson dreaming The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde [and then writing it with the help of his brownies or “little people”]; or that of Mary Shelley dreaming Frankenstein; or those of Lewis Carroll inspiring his mathematic and chess-master marvels; or that of Gérard de Nerval dreaming Aurélia ou le Réve et la Vie; or that of Stephen King dreaming Misery; or that of James Cameron dreaming Terminator; but, careful, among sweet dreams spinning round bitter dreams, nightmares like Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull or Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight can also be illuminated).
The Dreamed Part Page 5