The Dreamed Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  And his new project had to do with the world of dreams.

  And he’d always been bothered by the issue of filming a sleeping dream, of how to illustrate and represent it to those who are awake.

  So he’d come to talk to Ella about it. So Ella could explain it to him. So Ella could provide him with scientific evidence and the latest findings and precise data that later he would betray without guilt and with great pleasure and enthusiasm.

  And, of course, he had a dream to tell Ella.

  Something to give her, to give the scientists and researchers running the Onirium, in exchange for what Ella and what they would give him.

  A dream that’d pursued and caught him for as long as he could remember in which there appeared—at different times and moments—a woman.

  The woman of his dreams.

  And should he mention now that he was surprised to find that the woman of his dreams was Ella and that Ella was identical to the woman of his dreams?

  Yes.

  And no.

  Because artists—who are nothing but vocational dreamers—are used to the fact that such things, such supposed coincidences, exist. And that they are like the ropes that keep the idea and events of the day-to-day tightly bound together. And their gift is knowing how to see them and detect them and look for them and find them and even domesticate them; while everyone else is limited to experiencing them now and again and being occasionally touched by the wind of wonder.

  And so he saw her and he loved her because he already loved her.

  And it’s easy for him to think—and they talked about this the next morning, at their first breakfast together—Ella felt something too. A certain recognition of the unknown. That model of a waking-dream souvenir, like an echo, known as déjà vu. Or something like that. He likes to think Ella felt something. And then, in her role as woman of science and hostess, Ella took it upon herself to dissimulate and hide it all. A strange tremor she’d never felt before and, confused, attempted to conceal under mountains of information.

  And, oh, Ella spoke to him of so many things and didn’t speak of so many others.

  She didn’t speak to him (a more than telltale omission) or make any allusion to William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream. But she did tell him about the dense roots of the Latin word somnus; about electroencephalograms and about electrooculograms and about electromyograms; about the different stages of sleep; about the encephalon and the hypothalamus and the basal prosencephalon and the mesencephalon and the cholinergic neurons; about the mysteries of the naps of earliest infancy and those you reencounter in late old age; about rapid and slow ocular movements and about the reticular activation system; about sleep spindles; about apnea and insomnia and narcolepsy; about dreams of animals and about cats who spend seventy percent of their lives dreaming (and maybe that’s why they regard everything with that air of knowing it all, smiling in the branches of a tree) and about horses who sleep standing up like equestrian statues; about sleep as purge and great eliminator of the brain’s “cellular waste” and about sleep as an entity fundamental for fixing knowledge and memory.

  But don’t fool yourself, quit dreaming: nobody really knew what dreams were for and, maybe, he thought while listening to her, their ultimate and true function is to ask what they’re for and how they function and never receive an answer. A mystery. And from this constant questioning of something you don’t see because you’re asleep spring stories and landscapes and books and paintings and wars and loves on this side, to keep us so awake and alert and dreamers forever.

  In the end—because she was a scientist and he a romantic—Ella showed him what he was most interested in: the few worthwhile films they’d been able to make of dreams.

  And he pretended to listen to her and to watch them (and Ella lowered her eyes when she saw how he looked at her), but really all he was doing was daydreaming about her. Happy because—unlike his recurrent dream of Ella—nobody and nothing could wake him up now. He would no longer feel that sadness when he opened his eyes. That melancholy of wondering how much time would pass before their next meeting in his dreams.

  Now Ella was there, on this side of things, awake and talking nonstop, beside him.

  And now the thing—at last, the time had come—was how to keep from falling back asleep.

  But the one who is totally and completely and absolutely awake now is Ella.

  And, of course, there have been some advances.

  The confused filmings of the first dreams (a gray fog that reminded him of the fog that pulsated behind the thick screens of the televisions of his childhood) were now precise and detailed. Sometimes in color and sometimes in black and white, depending on the dreamer.

  But also, now it was much sadder to see there, on those almost-liquid plasma screens, how the recently extracted dreams lasted almost no time at all after being excised. Seeing those dreams produced the same stunned sadness as those accelerated filmings of the sun furrowing the sky of one day at top speed, of a flower sprouting and withering with an opening and closing of petals, of an army of worms invading a dead animal until nothing was left but the bones of what it once was.

  Yes, the dreams were over far too quickly.

  Seconds. A minute, if they were lucky.

  With that invertebrate elasticity of dreamed time that never corresponds to real time.

  Not enough time to clone them. Or to transplant them, as if the dream were an organ. Or to distill them into the fluid of a magic vaccine that would give the ability to dream back to humanity.

  But now his moment had arrived.

  The moment to donate his last dream to science, the way one donates a lung so others might breathe.

  His Ella dream.

  His dream of Ella.

  The dream that brought them together and now pushes them apart because, once they remove it, he’ll have forgotten her.

  But that’s what he prefers.

  It’s not some kind of heroic gesture on his part.

  He could care less about everyone else.

  The only thing he cares about is Ella and he cares about Ella so much that—tired of so much dreaming and dreaming of her—he would rather forget her the way Ella forgot him. To lose the only dream he has left and thereby to lose her, but to immediately forget he lost her. Better that way, he tells himself. To be like one of those foxes that chew off their own paw to escape the jaws of that snare that’s trapped them and won’t let go. To get away from there, hobbling, leaving behind a bloody trail.

  And now a buzzing in his head and the feeling of someone sucking in the floors of his mind and a vibrating of cables and, suddenly, Ella’s face on the screen of the monitor. Perfectly defined. Like when he saw her, in his dreams, for the first time, in that bookstore, walking toward her and his steps being interrupted. And Ella looks at the screen without comprehension and, maybe, as he begins to forget her, Ella begins to remember something.

  And the images are downloaded one by one. Precise and gleaming.

  And the minutes pass and something happens. Something unexpected. His dream doesn’t die. His dream survives and stays alive and dreaming.

  And everyone in the laboratory embraces. They embrace him.

  They shed all those tears they’ve not shed for so long.

  And he stares at the screen and sees his dream and then, from overhead, from the surface of the Onirium, comes a descending sound. A sound like a single scream made up of many screams, a sound like one of those giant waves everyone has dreamed at one time or another.

  * (“To dream of giant waves is a very disturbing thing and is full of meaning. To dream of giant waves that sweep us out and drown us conceals a sense of foreboding, possibly brought on by a change in your daily life … To dream of waves that are too big and stormy warns us we are making bad decisions based on our most impulsive instincts—‘control yourself!!!’ dream dictionaries seem to favor a style of emphatic exclamation and one rarely agrees with another— … But if the waves ar
e very calm, the news is worse: you’re doing nothing and just letting yourself be rocked, waiting for the miracle of happiness ‘that may never come!!!’ … If you’re able to walk on waves, that’s an excellent omen: ‘we’ll become super-powerful and nothing will depress us in the future!!!’.” Dream dictionaries said things like that, so badly written, back in days when people dreamed of everything.)

  Here and now * (when those dream dictionaries are like compilations of improbable legends!!!), his dream smiles, there, on the screen. His dream has survived and is still dreaming. That cliché with the affectation and solidity of clichés that have to do so, so much work to become clichés again: “A dream of hope.”

  But now that noise and roar approaches and is already reaching them—curling and liquid and blue and its mouth full of foam—and something tells him they won’t be able to surf or walk on that wave.

  And everyone comes in, howling their waking and unveiled nightmares. Reclaiming that brand, well-worn yet eternally-new in its contradiction and absurdity, for themselves: dreams of freedom, the freedom to dream again, freedom like something that can only be dreamed, the dream like the thing that frees you from reality, but it’s only a dream and all of that.

  Like a torrent, dancing that variation of the Watusi that is the tsunami, the Sheep Counters and the Mares of the Night, and the Cathode Ray Tubes and the Plasma Screens, the silent ZZZZs and the snoring JJRRRRRs … !, the Tense Sheets and the Blanket Kickers and the Nibelung Eiderdowns and the Banzai Futons, the Sandmen and the ART/REMs, the Dreams of Reason and the Produced Monsters all come in. And with all of them, in the lead, that old man with short pants and hat and butterfly net, howling in multiple languages simultaneously.

  And “Molotov!” he remembers him all of a sudden, as if in the center of an explosion. The name of that man with the butterfly net leaps to his mouth and from his mouth. But no, that’s not his name exactly. That is, merely, the snoozing sound of the name of that man who once specialized in the playful deformation of words, in the way that always-wide-awake words are deformed when you talk in your sleep, in the language in which always-wide-awake words sleep. And, all of a sudden, an adjective that doesn’t appear in any dictionary but comes from somewhere far from there, far away, in the childhood of his waking life: “Everything is so yuckicky,” he remembers and thinks.

  And the sudden memory is like a door slamming shut.

  A door that’ll never open again.

  And the invaders, the barbarians, lay waste to everything in their path.

  And they shatter his dream. The dream that could’ve been for all of them, the seed of future dreams, the chance, now forever lost, to dream again. They pull his dream out by the roots and stomp on it, and everything is sound and fury and short-circuit and he—it’ll be a relief to not be able to remember it, it’ll be a dream to never dream it again—dreams his recurrent dream, one last time.

  Time passes slowly when you’re lost in a dream, because the very idea of time has about it something of a dream. In what time do dreams live? In the present, in the past, or in the future? In all times at the same time? Or in a fourth time, a time that belongs to them alone?

  “Out of the processes of dreams, man trains for life,” wrote someone who wasn’t him, and whose name he doesn’t remember but is certain wasn’t his. “Night is the factory of tomorrow and the museum of yesterday,” someone else wrote, and yes, he does remember that that someone is and was him. The line, that he reaches for as if it were a piece of wood to cling to, as if he were the survivor of a shipwreck at high sea, gives him a strange joy. Yes: it’s a good line.

  And if museums are the place where infinity goes up on trial and factories the place where the present is continuous and assembled in a line, then dreams—what’s produced and revealed in them—are a mixed product: functional works of art difficult to catalogue and classify according to technique and style and school, though in the late days of dreaming there already existed a whole critical school of dreams that calibrated their narrative tempo and flow and symbolic potential and …

  Los sueños, sueños son; but no, dreams are not only dreams, not what they once were.

  The thing from before, the thing about the experiment, the thing about the Onirium.

  Something went wrong there.

  Something was set adrift, floating in the waves, into a nightmare with no land in sight where it could open its eyes.

  In any case, everything that has happened or ceased to happen to dreams * (a “universal catastrophe of yet impossible-to-determine consequences,” according to the newspapers) doesn’t really matter to him. What matters to him, and a great deal, is that, at least, he continues to dream.

  Still. For the time being.

  Knock on wood. Knock on the headboard with the head.

  Strange and complex and restless and flashback and fast-forward dreams that are, for him, now, the closest thing to what it once was to write. The stuff of dreams, they say, tends to produce reasonable, reasoned monsters. Few things are more open to interpretation by self and others when we’re awake than dreams. And when we sleep, when we dream the dreams, even more so: because within them we move in both first and third person, we see and see ourselves, we write and write ourselves, we are authors and protagonists, story and novel. All at the same time and in an elastic time where the minutes seem to stretch out and live entire lives. It’s in dreams that we’re the closest we’ll ever be to gods, capable of contemplating and controlling all their creation, or to extraterrestrials who’ve developed the technology to make all stories happen at the same time.

  * (Again, just in case, is there anybody out there? How many possible readers has he already lost, having written all this like he did back in days when he wrote and slept and dreamed of writing and, each morning, after a cup of coffee, that dream came true? He asks because of that aforementioned rule, “Tell a dream, lose a reader,” declaimed by Henry James. And that’s all he had to say about that. Henry James considered those words more than sufficient when it came to removing the temptation to put into writing what one cannot read because, supposedly, obviously, one’s eyes are shut. But why such a categorical assertion? Other quotes engage the previous quote and might offer some insight. To wit, counting quotes jumping over a fence: “Are not the sane and the insane equal at night as the sane lie a dreaming?,” Charles Dickens. And one of his favorite texts by Dickens is titled “Gone Astray,” a brief essay, early yet seminal, in which the author recalls a time he got lost as a boy, in the somber and already Dickensian slums of St. Giles. And then, between anguish and wonder, to distract himself from the fact of his being lost, he stopped and sat down to think in a doorway—to daydream like a sane-insane person—about all the possibilities for his life from that moment on, astray. To think about everything he might have ended up becoming and wouldn’t become now or maybe he would, who knows. Until, at a certain point, the boy gets bored and stands up decisively and finds his way home, no problem; choosing the fate of becoming Charles Dickens, which is no more than the fate of becoming everything he could become and, becoming a writer, will be to create so many characters. And “The study of dreams presents a special difficulty: the fact that we cannot examine dreams directly. We can only examine or talk about the memory of dreams. And it’s possible that the memory of dreams does not correspond directly to the dreams,” Jorge Luis Borges, again, maybe because the blind have a special affection for and preoccupation with dreams, when they dream, when they see again. The two quotes point in different directions, but, to tell the truth, they hit the same target: dreams are not to be trusted. Dreams are a more or less controlled manifestation of the irrational part of us and their story, back in the waking world, is always partial and uncertain. And what happens if—correcting Borges—there’s really nothing else to remember but those never-finished sketches? And if dreams are nothing but swirling tatters in the wind of memory? Dreams like those little eddies of dry leaves in the autumn air? Something you remember pe
rfectly but never ends up coming together, and then you invent some partial forgotten thing to endure the lack of connection, the absence of the mechanism’s missing gears that were never there and never will be? It’s no coincidence that in antiquity dreams were understood as interference from the conversations of the gods or the dead; something off the human frequency, but fragmentarily audible at night. Something like what happened with those primitive telephones, when you picked up the receiver and, wires crossed, heard two strangers having the most absurd and boring and terrifying of conversations. And then people tried to decode all those murmurings, sleeping beside the statues of their divinities or the tombs of their loved ones, so they would function like antennas and reward them with the gift of better reception. True, it’s possible dreams are mankind’s first aesthetic manifestation, but—as much in Artimodorus of Daldis’s Oneirocritica as in Aristotle’s Parva Naturalia or in Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams—even now there’s no certainty as to whether dreams’ functioning, dreams’ style, is abstract or figurative or, merely, surrealist. And, true, something else Henry James most certainly didn’t like either and that lost more than one reader or spectator: that aforementioned and condemned gimmick whereby, right at the end of the story, it’s revealed that it was all a dream, that the dead are alive, that the bad guys are good guys, that everything is in order and where it belongs within the supposedly realist logic of reality, but that, as it concerns art, is never plausible. Nothing is less realistic than the clearly marked trajectories of Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary or Jane Eyre. Real life isn’t like that. Real life isn’t so wide-awake. Real life has an imprecise flow much closer to that of dreams. Much closer to the plausible irrealism of Tender Is the Night or Wuthering Heights where nothing is fully explained or understood. Real life is the bud that cocoons around a man who plucks a flower in Heaven to bring it to this side, or around a butterfly and a man wondering who dreams whom. And so—with all of that pretty much cleared up, never trust a dream—it makes sense to move along a bit, as much as we can. And he’s never been all that advanced when it comes to technical things. Should a dream be told in first or third person singular? It’s clear that, when you tell a dream, you always do so with shock or fear or a smile or a burst of laughter whereby you reclaim the leading role of narrator. You remember everything, everything you can remember, yes, with a constant “… and then I …” But while the dream is happening—and on those rare occasions when you open your eyes and for a minute or two evoke everything perfectly and you wonder if it might not make sense to turn on a light and write it all down in random scribbles that, in a matter of hours you’ll reread and not understand anything of what it says there that was supposedly so clear and precise in the moment you wrote it all down—you feel and seem to be there and, at the same time, not to be. And how to write a dream to later capture it on film? How to combine its disordered but steady pacing? And he—every time he wakes up, every time he emerges from a dream—was always intrigued not by how to tell what he’d just experienced with his eyes closed, but by how to translate it into images and sounds after putting it in words. In color or black and white? How long to make it last? How to turn dreams’ liquid structures, which resist any and all storyboard ideas, into something solid? He always had the uncertain certainty that a dream should look and sound like certain music videos from the golden age of MTV. Or something like that. Mixed techniques, diverse photography, sounds and noises. Now, until a short time ago, the advanced technological instrumentation of the burning Onirium had solved the problem and cleared up all doubts. Being able to see his dream—as if it were a TV show—he marveled again at how old dreams look. The image had an astonishing clarity, yes; but the texture was more or less the same as the footage of impossible beings like Yeti or Nessie or Bigfoot and had nothing of the eloquent screenings of Hans Castorp and Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. And it all had that timeless air, yet at the same time, seemed much older than it was and when it took place. Like footage of World War II, like soccer games from a few years back, and like a fair number of movies filmed in the 70s, where the washed-out colors of American streets give you an automatic desire to return to the black and white of German expressionism, please, right? Dreams—maybe because of their nocturnal and lunatic condition—seem transmitted from the moon. A small step for the unconscious of one man, a great leap for nobody else, in space no one can hear you snore … Or maybe someone can.)