The Dreamed Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  In any case, to those in charge of the Onirium, the idea of being able to examine the recurrent dream up close had seemed a good offer. He would arrive there, describe his dream, the possibility of further study of his dream would be calibrated, and, in exchange, they would give him a consult in “oneiric visualization” and the most useful way to “portray” a dream in an episode of the project he was working on.

  The idea had come to him after reading a text by another of his favorite writers * (is he still unable or unwilling to remember his name, could it be because he doesn’t want to forget it?). A handful of not particularly well-known pages where that writer recalled the recurrence of a dream. A dream about a young woman whose ghost, more and more alive, had followed him since his adolescence. A chance encounter that—like a stone thrown into a pool—kept expanding, in waves, across the years. The girl had appeared to that writer for the first time on a bridge in his dreams, crossing a river. And ever since, she appeared again and again. In different places and under different names. But it was always her.

  The text had made an impression because the same thing had happened to him. Once. In his adolescence. At a dance. At one of those dances where he never danced. But that night he did. In the dream, he danced. Because—even though his dreams were never spectacular, their special effects always pretty low budget—the truth is they never disappointed him when it came to correcting and improving on reality.

  In reality, he’d arrived to that party uninvited and stayed on the edges of the dance for a while. Watching * (that was him in the corner, “that’s me in the corner”) everything and everyone as if from the shore of a lake he didn’t dare dive into. And Ella was at the center of all of it. Dancing alone. At those young dances, a boy dancing by himself is a sad and desperate sight. Whereas a girl dancing by herself is a perfect love letter, a seductive neon sign, blinking, beckoning. Seeing a girl dancing by herself always makes you daydream she could be dancing with you, he thought then, as if in a dream. And, there, he couldn’t stop reading her, watching her. Ella danced alone, at the edge of a swimming pool, and in a strange moment, as if in a dream, she dove into the pool. More than dive, she did something far more elegant: Ella let herself fall. And then she got out of the pool and kept dancing. Alone. Her wet dream that was his. And was she a succubus * (succubus, from the Latin succuba, from succubare, “lie under”; according to Western medieval legends—in times when it was thought dreams had their origin in the stomach and they rose from there like bewitching gases until they reached, following the dictates of Greek texts, “the most profound regions of the body”—is a demon that takes the form of an attractive woman in order to seduce men, above all adolescents and monks [monks who pray “Deliver me from the dreams and the ghosts of the night”], slipping into their fantasies, more awake than ever, as they sleep. In general they are women of great sensuality and extreme incandescent beauty. The myth of the succubus may have arisen as an explanation of the phenomenon of nocturnal emissions and dream paralysis. Looked at another way, experiences of obvious supernatural visits can take place at night in the form of hypnagogic hallucination). Or was it he who watched her like an incubus (incubus, from the Latin incubo, from incubare, “to lie upon”; is a masculine demon—the opposite sex from the succubus—in the belief and popular mythology of the Middle Ages that, supposedly, settles atop the female victim and has sexual relations with her while she lies there sleeping, according to a broad quantity of mythological and legendary traditions. An incubus might seek to have sex with a woman in order to father a special child, like in the legend of Merlin. Some sources suggest an incubus can be identified by its unnaturally large or frigid penis. Religious tradition maintains that having sexual relations with an incubus or a succubus can cause a decline in health or, even, death. Then, the victims live their dying moments and death as if it were a dream they can’t wake up from)? Either way, he watched her. And Ella let him watch and danced hard and fast. And droplets of water flew off her body and her dress like diamonds suspended in the night air; like those diamonds that—he’d read somewhere—certain African deserts were known to perspire, and that people went out to gather by the light of the moon, the way people elsewhere gather strawberries or seashells. Or like what—streaks of water, a multidirectional rain—a wet dog in heat sends flying, centrifuging herself dry. And he doesn’t like to think like that: it’s not that it really makes him uncomfortable * (OK, yes, it makes him a little uncomfortable) thinking of her as a “dog” * (one of those svelte and languid dogs, dogs with the personality of cats); but that “multidirectional” and that “centrifuging herself” make him grind his teeth, sounding like bad science fiction: futuristic and spatial and operatic science fiction. And he asked himself if he could get up the nerve to approach Ella and answered himself, no, and so he went home.

  And that night, he dreamed of Ella for the first time.

  That was the first time he had his recurrent dream, which wasn’t recurrent until the second and third time he had it.

  And on like that ever since and until now.

  A recurrent dream that hadn’t come true, but that did come, two or three times a week, always the same, so that he saw it, dreamed it. Sometimes, even, interrupting another dream that had nothing to do with that one and coming on, suddenly and without warning, like when you change the channel and find yourself watching the best episode of your favorite show.

  A recurrent dream that was much more than a dream: it was the between-fragile-and-invulnerable version of a memory, of something that refused to be forgotten. It was a dream of the Based-on-a-True-Story variety and, as such, inspired by something that happened and, at the same time, offering the best version of what’d happened or, better, of what should’ve happened: a dream come true inside the dream itself.

  Those in charge of the Onirium—who delayed their work considering whether or not their salvation might lie in the resistance of recurrent dreams, dreams that in other times were considered symptoms of anxiety or obsession—had been in awe of his recurrent dream. They’d recorded it multiple times. And what made his dream unique was its implacable precision. His recurrent dream—the recurrent dream that always followed that other recurrent dream, always incomplete and variable and always taking place in a bookstore, where a song played that he knew but whose distinguishing features he couldn’t and didn’t want to remember—was always exactly the same, without any variation in time or density or plot. Nothing about it changed. His dream was like the inalterable record of a historical event. Like the footage of the head of a president riding in a convertible exploding in the air, like airplanes crashing into towers; but with a more intimate tragic element, because the catastrophe was external to the dream: he’d seen her, he’d loved her, he’d stopped seeing her, he kept loving her.

  In his dream they danced together, holding each other close, as if to keep from falling. The song they danced to was a modern but heartfelt waltz. He already mentioned it: “Dream Operator” by Talking Heads. With that voice between melancholic and euphoric of David Byrne that in the movie True Stories, directed by Byrne himself, was sung, off key but movingly, by a woman, as background music in a sequence at an absurd fashion show, with hallucinated and hallucinatory outfits, like the one Ella was wearing at that party in his dream * (“You wish you were me / I wish I was you / Now don’t you wake up / The dream will come true … / Every dream has a name / And names tell your story / This song is your dream / You’re the dream operator” … And what time was it and how long had they been dancing? “Shake-it-up Dream / Hi-di-ho Dream / Fixit-up Dream / Look at me Dream / I’ve been waiting so long / Now I am your dream”). And he always had felt an absurd pride that his dreams were so “economical”; that they were not pure “special effect” and impossibility. * (“Hard to forget / Hard to go on / When you fall asleep / You’re out on your own.”) His dreams had always been, yes, realistic. Only small details—if one looked for and found them carefully—made it apparent that it was a d
ream at all. * (“It’s bigger than life / You know it’s all me / My face is a book / But it’s not what it seems.”) In his dream of Ella at the party, for example, there was little or nothing dreamlike about it. Just the one detail that, as they danced, Ella’s dress changed color psychedelically and submarinely. That was it. And it wasn’t that disturbing, because there was that great doubt (and that was one of the things he had come to the Onirium to clarify) about whether or not dreams were dreamed in color and, maybe, there was an explanation for that color change: the strobe lights of the dance floor on the white fabric of her dress. And such a dream was simple and easy to interpret. * (“And you dreamed it all / And this is your story / Do you know who you are? / You’re the dream operator.”) In a way—their own way—his dreams were always dreams-come-true and that was why waking up was sometimes, almost always, so painful.

  But the deal was that, first, he had to give so later he could receive.

  And so there he was, at the Onirium: riddled with cables, for the first time, ready to dream without his dream being removed. Because it was still a time when everyone dreamed every night, and The White Plague—the real nightmare of living without dreams—had not yet awoken.

  So they told him to wait there, and the doctor would be with him shortly. And then Ella came in and * (yes, the not-so-imaginative cliché of pinching yourself to see if you’re dreaming, as if you could be dreaming you pinched yourself and you weren’t asleep) he knew she was the more-or-less-grownup and equally beautiful version of the girl he’d seen dancing alone that night, but who, for years, had danced so often in his dreams.

  His dream operator.

  Not the woman of his dreams, but something and someone far more valuable: the woman of his dream.

  And he watched her and couldn’t stop watching her.

  And when Ella looked up to see why he wasn’t answering her questions, he couldn’t help but recognize in her eyes a recognition similar to his own.

  Ella knew who he was. She had to.

  And he didn’t wonder if he was dreaming, because he knew he was awake.

  If midnight is the witching hour and three in the morning is the hour of the dark night of the soul, then breakfast time is the hour of the bewitched and of the luminous day of the body.

  The day of the morning-after breakfast at breakfast time.

  For him, always, the best place and best time of the day.

  The time and place invented so people would wake up ready to recount their dreams from the night before; to make dreamy lists of what they’d dreamed in exquisite notebooks of high-grade paper; or to read what they’d dreamed, like the dreams of a capricious deity, in pages of freshly printed newspapers: baking all night long in a party of inventiveness, news so different from the slower and heavier news of the dwindling afternoon newspapers (which he referred to, a bit humorously he thinks, as “afters”) that seem written as if mixed in the drool and sweat of long afternoon naps following heavy lunches.

  And that time, breakfast time, on that day, is even better now that he’s with Ella.

  And the rest of his life, of his previous life, all the past and not future time (he hopes) when Ella wasn’t there, now, takes on the vague and solvent texture of a dream.

  Breakfast time, on the other hand, is the most real time for him, though it all seems like a dream. This breakfast time. The best dream of all, one he doesn’t want to wake up from. The dream that follows that other dream, one of the most truly dreamlike and wakeful acts a human being can perform: to penetrate or to be penetrated in the name of something that’s so many different things at the same time. And that—lacking a better name to simplify its temporal parameters and spatial coordinates and emotional constants—has come to be known as “love.” That love made by making love.

  And, ah, few times has he had such conversant conversations at breakfast time, he says to himself. Especially with a woman. Women, in general, when he woke up next to them the morning after, had almost always seemed different to him than how he’d seen and desired them the night before. Not worse, but yes, inevitably, different.

  And, though they were there, present and tangible, right away he began to forget them.

  And another thing: women aren’t that great to talk to when they’ve just woken up. When just waking up, women barely offer stray syllables, grunts, grimaces, sometimes painfully eloquent silences. But always as if they weren’t yet entirely back online.

  None of that had happened with Ella.

  Ella woke up wide-awake.

  Ella was perfectly conscious of everything from the moment she opened her eyes.

  And it made no sense for him to remember how there’d been that moment of mutual recognition. Ella remembered him too, yes, of that he was certain. She had to remember him. And after he fell asleep among the machines * (and after Ella and the Onirium scientists verified, astonished, that his was the most stable recurrent dream they’d ever seen; and that it could only be the most significant and auspicious of coincidences that Ella herself, the doctor and head of the Onirium, appeared, inserted, so suddenly in his dream, not even suspecting that Ella had been living in that dream for years, that that dream was as much Ella’s as it was his) what follows is much easier to understand and accept with the spasmodic ellipses of dreams.

  You already know it: he’s lying on a gurney while a doctor, Ella, asks him questions and all of a sudden he’s in bed with that doctor who now is simply Ella and who, undressed, is dressed in nothing but a T-shirt that once was a man’s T-shirt but not anymore.

  And then he and Ella are talking about what they’d begun to talk about, still dressed, in the Onirium, the night before.

  And the conversation they have, just emerging from their dreams, is the one they interrupted yesterday and now take up again.

  Nobody talks like this when awake, true. More than dialogues, these are like recitations à deux. A minuet where, alternatingly, they offer bows and pirouettes. And between one spin and the next, exchange information, like those dances in Jane Austen novels, where one dances in order to say all the things frowned upon for men and women to say to each other when sitting, or standing, or lying down. A space and a time for seeking explanations based on definitions, with true encyclopedist pathology: using the solidity of the past and historical authentication to support the quicksand of an unprecedented present with no solid ground in sight.

  And this conversation is about dreams.

  And, he’s already pointed this out, he always looked down on using dialogue as a form and format for introducing great quantities of names and information. The use of dialogue—written dialogue, in literature—felt to him like a kind of cowardice elevated by many to the category of heroic achievement. Artificial flavor and coloring permitted. And that’s why he was never all that interested in Anton Chekhov * (though he does remember that story of his in which a nanny suffocates a child whose crying keeps her from sleeping), or any of his epigones * (especially those who make their characters speak with some phonetic particularity as a trait of their personality and even their way of acting in and relating to the world), or film in general, which he hoped to change with his literature * (with those conversations set up, apart from on a few masterful occasions, as calculated choreographies where nobody stepped on anybody else’s voice with their voice), or almost any theater * (especially those oh so artificial moments when someone spoke to someone else off stage; and he couldn’t help imagining that invisible being as wandering dazed through the ruins of bygone scenographies, responding automatically; while he also thought that the big difference between film and theater actors was that the latter spit when delivering their lines and you could see it even from the cheap seats). For him, dialogue—in those moments when people were speaking supposedly to communicate—was nothing but a stilted and dry interruption of the mysterious and far more fluid and liquid syntax of thought, of imagining symphonies in silence. That act was what distinguished human beings from the bleats and whinnies and bar
ks and buzzings and clucks and lows of animals * (many of them dreaming a great deal, asleep on their feet, Ella would say the platypus was the most REM animal of all) who, every so often, in books and movies, are given the stigma of human voices, with generally disastrous outcomes. There was, yes, one exception. Hemingway before he was Hemingwayesque * (the Hemingway of insomniac and battle-front traumatized stories like “Now I Lay Me,” where falling asleep might mean “my soul would go out of my body,” where he prays not to fall asleep); and the conversations in the books of some psychopaths of language—generally swampy southerners who would always hold the northern position in his sky—in which the dialogue was like thinking aloud, in an even louder voice. And, yes, again, that writer with the butterfly net whose name he doesn’t dare pronounce had something to say about this too, something with which he couldn’t help but agree. * (“Dialogue can be delightful if dramatically or comically stylized or artistically blended with descriptive prose; in other words, if it is a feature of style and structure in a given work. If not, then it is nothing but automatic typewriting, formless speeches filling page after page, over which the eye skims like a flying saucer over the Dust Bowl.”)