Some resist and, as they’re dragged toward the doors and shoved down the hill, they desperately recite rants from dream dictionaries or swear to have received prophetic and dormant symbols that would end up unmaking History. And, oh, how was it there were so many people (many more than the passengers on board) who swore they hadn’t boarded the Titanic at the last minute because of a warning that’d come to them in a dream. And the same thing happens with that arrogant waking dream of reincarnation: how is it everyone remembers perfectly having been Galileo Galilee in another life, and why was and is and will it be that nobody ever claims to have descended in soul but not body from that anonymous Greek astrologist, expelled by Archimedes from the planetarium for his habit of drawing mice dressed as sorcerers in the margins of his parchment, and whose only particularity worth remembering was that of suffering some cosmically painful αἱμορροΐς in his black hole. And yet, maybe to forget the fleeting and trivial nature of waking life, they insist—like how they claim to have been someone famous in another life—on the certainty, between tragic and comic, of being someone when they sleep. A singular receiver of fragments of triumphal or catastrophic warnings. Random pieces of destinies or origins of movements that would change the face of the world with laughter or tears or nervous tics taken from the most well-know plots of sacred texts written by prophetic dreamers. * (Because, hey, if it happened to Nebuchadnezzar and Agamemnon and Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great and Marie Antoinette and Frederick II and Abraham Lincoln and Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill and J. Robert Oppenheimer and Marilyn Monroe and those three pre-cogs floating in the prediction of crimes yet to be committed, why couldn’t it happen to them, right? Why can’t they feel historic and hysteric, dreaming of silver and bronze statues that fall before them; of a “pernicious dream” commanding the conquest of Troy; of holding bodies drenched in blood in their arms; of a reverential satyr saying “Tyros is yours”; of walls ablaze in the rising sun and heads severed from bodies; of stars leaping down from the sky and laying waste to the earth all throughout the night of the day of Napoleon Bonaparte’s birth; of hallways in the White House adorned with black mourning bows, where the body of the dreamer who walks with somnambulant steps is wide awake; of the deafening voice that tells you “Get up and get out of here” and you wake up and escape that trench seconds before the mortar falls; of sitting and sketching a portrait of your own deceased father who gives you strategic advice from his armchair; of numbers that reveal to you an error in the calculations that days later will be transformed into Shiva the Destroyer of Worlds; of going into a cathedral and walking slowly down the central aisle and feeling how everyone turns to look at you and worship you with toothy smiles; of a hand that points out the book you’re looking for on your shelf; and of receiving visions of how the Roman Empire never ended while counting electric sheep to wake yourself up.)
Poor fools.
Is there anything sadder than inventing dreams the way realities were once invented?
He’s surprised to discover * (he’s not that surprised, it was clear this moment was coming) he’s the only person granted access to the second level. He walks down white hallways—ceilings and floors and walls all white, like the air—every now and then interrupted by reproductions of paintings. * (Sleeping Nude Woman by Courbet, The Nightmare by Fuseli—also the painter of the lesser known Midnight, in which two men speak from one bed to another, far from sleep and dreams—which Mary Shelley mentions in Frankenstein, Edgar Allan Poe alludes to in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and Sigmund Freud had a reproduction of in his studio in Vienna; The Knight’s Dream by Antonio de Pereda, The Dream by Henri Rousseau, the annunciating and angelic dreams of Giotto di Bondone, and all those diurnal nocturnal paintings by René Magritte.) And he arrives to the elevators that descend to the basements where the dreams are extracted. He gets on the elevator and hears the music. And there’s something fun and perverse in the song selection. Anthology of songs for torture by sleep deprivation. Songs about dreaming to keep you awake until you confessed everything you dreamed. * (Dream songs to be listed: the list is the literary genre of not sleeping and not dreaming and he always starts making lists when there’s nothing else he can do, when all he can do is enumerate. He knows some of them because he never sang them, some he forgets now, when he thinks of them for the last time. He remembers them because he sang them all the time and now bids them farewell. Songs that might be “Mr. Sandman (Bring Me a Dream),” made popular by The Chordettes and used in many movies, always in supposedly tranquil and sleepy scenes ready for the fury and the nightmare and so here comes “Enter Sandman” by Metallica. Or “I’ve Got Dreams to Remember” by Otis Redding, or “In Dreams” by Roy Orbison, or “Moonage Daydream” or “When I Live My Dream” by David Bowie, or “Dreamer” by Supertramp, or “All I Have to Do Is Dream” by the Everly Brothers, or “California Dreamin’” by The Mamas and The Papas, or “The Dreaming” and “Army Dreamers” by Kate Bush, or “Dream Police” by Cheap Trick, or “Runnin’ Down a Dream” by Tom Petty, or “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac, or “Dreams” by The Cranberries, or “Dreaming of Me” by Depeche Mode, or “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” by Eurythmics, or “Goodbye Sweet Dreams” by Roky Erickson, or “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream” by Ed McCurdy, or “Last Night I Dreamt that Somebody Loved Me” by The Smiths, or “Last Night I Had a Dream” by Randy Newman, or “I Could Be Dreaming” and “Judy and the Dream of Horses” by Belle And Sebastian, or “I’ll See You in My Dreams” in the sonorous voice of Frank Sinatra, or “I Have a Dream” floating in the syrupy voices of ABBA, or “Don’t Dream It’s Over” and “Recurring Dream” by Crowded House, or “I Often Dream of Trains” by Robyn Hitchcock, or “Sleep, Don’t Weep” by Damien Rice, or “Sleepwalker” or “I Go to Sleep” by The Kinks, or “Like Dreamers Do” by The Beatles, or “Stewart’s Coat” by Rickie Lee Jones, or “Lost in the Dream” by The War on Drugs, or “Behold! The Night Mare” by The Smashing Pumpkins. Or “Daysleeper” and “Get Up” and “I Don’t Sleep, I Dream” and “We All Go Back Where We Belong,” the farewell single [in whose one of two videos John Giorno appears, the sleeping “protagonist” of the five hours and twenty minutes of the somniferous Sleep by Andy Warhol] of that oneiric band, R.E.M.—“That was just a dream … That was just a dream …”—where, as a sort of goodbye, they advise “write about dreams and triumphs.” And, also, all those other songs and music not about dreams but dreamed, sung or performed for the first time in dreams: “Yesterday” and “Sun King” by The Beatles, or “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” by The Rolling Stones, or “The Man Comes Around” by Johnny Cash, or “Five Years” by David Bowie, or “Here Comes the Flood” and “Red Rain” by Peter Gabriel, or “Infinity” by [again] Rickie Lee Jones, or “Photographs (You Are Taking Now)” by Damon Albarn, or “Purple Haze” by Jimi Hendrix, or “Pesadi ¡Ya!” by La Roca Argentina, or “Everybody Understands Me” by Federico Esperanto, or “Il Trillo del Diavolo” dreamed by Giuseppe Tartini—like Beethoven and Stravinsky and Wagner also dreamed sounds—after Mephistopheles appears to him in his dreams, playing violin with a never-before-heard mastery, at the foot of his bed, after making a deal for the soul of the composer who, when he woke up, said he was just copying what he’d heard and it was, he always complained, the best he’d ever turned into a score and, oh, larghetto affettuoso, allegro moderato … Or, affectionate and moderately happy, the one that, no doubt, is the best song about dreaming in the history of the world, the one that best describes today for nostalgics what it once was to dream, what that was like: that song whose title and voice he can’t identify anymore, because he already remembered it for the last time. The song he heard walking to the Onirium and also in that dreamed bookstore where he walks toward Ella and his steps are interrupted, but the song keeps playing and begins like the chug of a distant locomotive approaching. And so, until he reaches the station in flames where that voice—for many, a nightmare voice—does nothing but launch ra
ndom images at us, slides on a carrousel, of someone who was now “just thinking of a series of dreams” and “I was just thinking of a series of dreams / Where nothing comes up to the top / Everything stays down where it’s wounded / And comes to a permanent stop.” It’s the voice, he remembers, that’d already sung other dreams. A dream where it saw, from a train, reunited with the voices of childhood friends in a cabin by an old wooden stove and laughing and singing old songs while outside a storm raged out of tune; a dream about walking through the organized chaos of a World War Three and ending up proclaiming that everyone is having crazy dreams where they see themselves walking around with no one else and offering an “I’ll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours”; one of those dreams that make you laugh in your sleep and take you floating to sail aboard the Mayflower and to discover America with Captain Ahab at the helm; a dream dreamed by the lookout on the Titanic who falls asleep at his post and dreams the Titanic sinks; a dream with miserable St. Augustine wearing a coat of solid gold and ordering kings and queens to listen to his sad complaint and ends up waking himself up terrified and bowing his head and crying and looking out a window with a view of nowhere. Here, now, tonight, another voice, that of the oneiric imaginer John Lennon (he thinks and forgets his name), repeats over and over that senseless thing he heard for the first time in his sleep and that is “Ah! Böwakawa poussé, poussé” in the sensual “#9 Dream,” but that, for him, faithfully reproduces the stiff diction of dreams: the turbid and disturbing voice of those who speak so deeply asleep to those who listen, beside them, and so wide awake in that place where they used to go and where now nobody, except him, goes. And, again, he remembers he has to remember to mention to the guardians in charge of the music, those dreamer DJs of the Onirium, to, please, include “City of Dreams” or, better, “Dream Operator” by Talking Heads, his other favorite song out of all the songs about dreams, he thinks, he barely remembers it, but he’s sure that it reminds him a lot of his sister. So he has made an important effort to hang onto it, to not let it go. A kind of languid waltz, no? yes?)
He’s alone in the elevator as it descends.
And then, suddenly, there she is.
He always sees her, like he saw her the first time.
And Ella sees him as if it were the first time, because she can no longer remember the first time she saw him. All that’s left of Ella’s insomniac memory, in a race against the clock, is now exclusively devoted to the attempt to recover the ability to dream for all humanity, expelled from the Eden of dreams. Ella’s mission is to find the pathways and signs that lead back home through a fierce forest, like the forest in those stories that were anything but tranquil and relaxing, and that parents read to their children before surrendering them to the world of dreams, and that function as the inspirational fuel for oneiric adventures and terrors.
Ella looks at him without seeing him. Like how you look not a person but at a specimen. And it’s fine. He can’t complain. Better this—with Ella—than nothing.
And he looks at Ella and it’s not love at first sight, no.
It’s love at thousandth sight; but as if it were first.
Every time he sees her, he sees again how he falls in love, how he stays in love, how he’ll love her until the end of his dreams, until the end of the last dream he has left.
Every time he sees her, he closes his eyes and sees her with his eyes closed.
And he opens them again.
And—no, it wasn’t a dream—there is Ella.
In the corner.
His head full of cables and electrodes, the little nocturnal music of the monitors, “Good Night” by—now he remembers and knows—The Beatles in his ears. His mouth still full of the taste of the psychotropic drug that puts you in an intermediate state between wakefulness and trance. And him on the cot, and Ella on top of him.
But, ah, not on top of him like Ella was on top of him so many times in bed, but, now, rather like someone tending to something with extreme care, with a different form of love; with a love that, perhaps, is somewhere between the love of geishas and the love of beginners of any kind of hobby. A solitary activity where the other is indispensable, but always the other. Something outside and to which you devote an absolute yet dispassionate interest and care. Discipline and not sentiment.
But maybe it isn’t so.
Maybe the unforgettable memory he’s now starting to forget—of how Ella once was with him; of how they were together, the one with the other, the other with the one—obscures and distorts his perception of that other kind of love Ella feels for him now. A love less passionate and physical but far greater and more generous: because through his person, with these electrodes and cables Ella sticks and pins and plants on his head like flowers in a garden, Ella loves the whole human race. And, most loving of lovers, all Ella wants is to give the love of dreams back to humankind.
The lost and, it’s known now, essential to life, ability to dream.
Dreams turned out to be the foundation of reality and, though the poets and oracles and mystics have been saying and reciting and prophesying it for millennia, Ella and the brains of the Onirium paid them no mind.
And so it was that they awoke the now-impossible-to-put-back-to-sleep monster. The nightmare of an always-awake monster that you’re no longer afraid of dreaming of because it’s already here, awake and keeping everyone else awake.
The White Plague.
And that is why Ella, why none of them—shut inside this edifice—sleep anymore, seeking a solution to the problem they created themselves. Yes: those who now desperately seek the solution to the problem were the ones who caused the problem when they were seeking the solution to another problem and …
The history of humanity, and even the great scientific advances, is overrun with episodes and errors like this. But none of them was as important and decisive as the one they caused with their triumphant defeat. And unlike what happened on other occasions—no serendipity here—it wasn’t by seeking something miraculous they found something else more or less marvelous. Penicillin or LSD or the color magenta or that spring that slinks down stairs or the pacemaker or Post-its or Velcro or Cellophane. No. A dead-end alleyway with no way out. Nothing good—and everything bad, really bad, the worst—came of turning on the lights of The White Plague.
Something horrible was unleashed.
Something was unleashed that could not be put back.
If sleep deprivation is a direct route to psychosis, then dream deprivation …
They dreamed of something impossible and the only thing they got was the impossibility of dreaming. They wanted not that dreams might come true but that dreams did come true. They wanted to know everything about dreams—theretofore a subject as inexact as meteorological forecasts or stock market predictions—and they achieved the absolute exactitude of nothingness. And, along with it, the progressive and in the end total disappearance of memory.
And the appearance of desperation and madness and living as if in a trance. All day long. Like in those moments when we wake up or can’t fall asleep.
And goodbye to saying that thing about “I had a dream that, I hope, someday will come true.”
And the end of that trope that was so infuriating when everyone dreamed: a story being told that, in the end, was revealed to be a dream of the protagonist and, as such, a deception.
Now everyone would give anything for it all to be a dream or for their dreams never to be made reality. Anything would be better than sleepwalking all night long, like balancing on the least tight of ropes, like occupying a borderland that comes from nowhere and leads nowhere, intoning a countdown without bottom or zero, jumping with ever greater effort over a fence, like sheep bound for the slaughterhouse.
He’d come to the Onirium for the first time before it was a cult and pilgrimage site, a magnet for liars and the delusional. Then—not that long ago, but in another age—the Onirium was, merely, an institute devoted to researching the world of dreams. A luxury and lat
est-generation laboratory funded by a magnate who, in a dream, had been presented with the winning lottery number or with the premonition that an illness was growing in the intestines of his young son, which he was able to eradicate before the doctors could even detect it.
Something like that, something of that style.
He doesn’t remember well.
And he’d come to the Onirium not to be treated but to do research.
He was a writer, which is to say, a screenwriter for movies and, as such, now, a screenwriter for TV series in the so-called golden age of television. * (He’d been a writer, but one thing led to another and now it was so easy to describe something in writing so that someone else could film it, so much easier than writing something where the letters themselves had to do the showing, and so much more profitable in every sense. And yet, he always wrote down “writer” when filling out “profession” on forms, because he felt not doing so was a lie.)
The Dreamed Part Page 7