The Dreamed Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  But—as a kind of apology for his almost-zombielike artificiality—this is a dream conversation with a high informational content that more than one person will want to jump over, but, if you do so, jump over it the way you jump a fence with the smile of a sheep wearing the hide of a wolf. A conversation bursting with names and titles that he hopes he’ll be forgiven for here—could this be his apology and excuse?—by turning it into the longest footnote, scrambling up onto the shoulders of all of this and sitting down and leaning back resting its neck and falling asleep and dreaming.

  And you never decide how you dream what you dream. The style of dreams—feature-deformity, lunatic-encyclopedic, referential-maniac, blind-quoting—is never chosen by the dreamer, dreams choose the style of dreams. And so, again, you immediately forget a good part of what you dream, like how you forget a good part of what you see, along the side of the road, on a nighttime ride, out the rolled-up window of a car someone else is driving and …

  * (—I never really understood that thing about the stages of sleep and how it relates to dreams … —he says.

  —It’s not complicated. When you sleep and when you dream it’s like when you travel. You pass through different stages. Take-offs, turbulence, fastening of seatbelts, landings, sometimes emergency ones and sometimes perfect ones … —Ella says.

  —I hate perfect landings. No, I hate the people who applaud them, inside the airplanes, as if they were waking up relieved from a nightmare at 20,000 feet … Let’s see … Tell me a little. I’ll take notes.

  —It’s a little complicated to understand. And to explain … Okay … Sleep, the act of sleeping, is comprised of long- and short-wave cycles, and of what is known as paradoxical sleep. And these cycles can occur multiple times throughout one night. Four or five times. Like variations. Each one takes up about ninety minutes. Get it?

  —Ah-ha … Four or five … Ninety minutes …

  —The first stage might last an hour and a half. And it’s short wave. There’s somnolence, drowsiness. It’s the transition between wakefulness and sleep; so you might even hallucinate things with your eyes still open, going in and out of this stage … And, please, stop looking at me like that, okay? You’re making me nervous.

  —Okay. So, better, I’ll listen to you with my eyes closed, ha.

  —Yes, better … No don’t be silly … Open your eyes. Stop …

  —My eyes are open.

  —Okay, then, in the second stage, cardiac and respiratory rhythm slows and, as such, there is a shift in blood flow to the brain. And so brain activity increases or decreases with periods of calm or sudden activity. And so also, sometimes, as the brain is disconnected from the body, those sudden movements occur. Hypnic jerk or myoclonic jerk. The sensation of free fall, of letting go of a rope, of leaving the body and going somewhere else. Those kicks in bed are the brain’s way of reasserting contact with the body; to let you know that it’s still in charge and on top of everything. So you don’t forget about it. So the body doesn’t stop thinking in the brain.

  —Do you kick a lot in bed? I didn’t notice last night … I know you scream and scratch, but … do you kick? [And this type of humor is just what he detests in dialogue; but now that he’s here, it can’t really be avoided.]

  —Very funny … And while we’re on the subject: there are a lot of people who claim if you go to bed alone you sleep and dream better. And it turns out to be much healthier. Sleeping in pairs is a historic incoherence, a product and bad habit of times when multiple people slept together in the same room. It’s unnecessary. It doesn’t make sense. And by the way: you do kick a lot … And, better, let’s move on … By the way: researchers are postulating that people who kick a lot in bed might be foreshadowing, unconsciously, a preoccupying propensity for developing, over the years, Parkinson’s disease.

  —Uh …

  —Should I go on or not?

  —Please, Doctor, proceed.

  —The third stage is the transition toward deep sleep and not much happens there. It’s as if you’re moving down a passageway that’s two or three minutes long.

  —Okay. I get it.

  —The fourth stage is slow-wave sleep. Deep sleep. It lasts about twenty minutes and is very hard for us to come out of. When you can’t wake someone up, it’s because they’re in this stage. Really sleeping. Resting. There aren’t even dreams in this stage. Or they’re very minimal and very short … And then comes the REM stage, which was only just discovered in 1953 through the careful observation of the movements of sleeping eyes under the sheets of the eyelids … ah, it seems like I woke up a bit metaphoric today …

  —Or maybe it’s my bad influence …

  —Yes, that’s probably it. But as I was saying: the REM stage was “discovered” by those two, unknown to many, heroes and explorers of hitherto virgin territories: Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman. Eyes moving rapidly. With the brain at maximum sleeping activity and receiving more blood than at any other moment of the day. When you dream the most; but that doesn’t mean the sleeper stops taking in information from his or her surroundings. To the contrary: you can incorporate sounds and conversations and music from the world around you into your dreams. And brain activity is just as intense as when we’re awake. It’s been proven adult humans have REM dreams that last between ninety minutes and one hundred twenty minutes total. These dreams are episodic, starting out short and ending up long. They’ve also been able to determine that human fetuses have up to fifteen hours of REM sleep that, I suppose, might be like pure light and shadows and sound, as if filtered through very heavy curtains. And that newborn babies have eight hours of REM. Recent studies have suggested a correlation between age and amount of REM sleep, showing decreased quantity and occurrence as we age … Could it be that, unlike babies who spend a good part of their time there, old people dream less and more superficially because they have less waking life left to dream about? I suppose that’s the stage that interests you most, right? The stage when you dream best the best dreams … What’s wrong? What’re you thinking?

  —No, nothing … It occurred to me to see if the four stages of sleep aligned somehow with the experience of love. You know, cycles and curves and ups and downs and variations in intensity and ability to create or believe in stories in the name of love. Love, the perception of love, in it’s own way, is always a dream and …

  —Yes, but I’m afraid it’s not advisable to mix science and feelings. They’re two completely different languages. It doesn’t seem right to me to fuse or confuse the theory of one with the practice of the other. I think it would be a failed—not to mention dangerous—experiment and …

  —Okay, okay … But, really, I don’t mean to diminish its importance. How much do you all really know about what you’re claiming to know? Because it seems to me there’s something paradoxical in dream research: the more research you do, the less interesting they become, no?

  —No.

  —Yes, seriously, think about it: dreams were very important when they were magic and intangible objects. And that importance reaches its most profound peak with Freud and the “idea you only have once in your life, if you’re lucky” and the division of dreams into prophetic, visionary, or symbolic, and the need to interpret them. Dreaming as a language we all speak, but in which we don’t know how to express ourselves clearly. But starting in the 1920s, when it begins to be possible to trace a map of electrical brain activity, with the awakening of neuroscience, dreams lose rank and category and trustworthiness and interpretative exactitude, and Freud’s hypotheses fall out of favor and goodbye Oedipus as science and hello Oedipus as, again, a good story told by a good teller of fantastic stories. Dreams start to be understood, or not understood, as simple pollutions and babbling of the brain as it sleeps and not as doors to hysteria or psychosis of the repressed desires of infantilized infants. Dreams as something more or less interesting that happens when we sleep and think without any particular order about uninteresting things. The idea has pr
evailed that, since we don’t understand why we dream, dreams themselves are not worthy of attention. The conclusion has been reached, with a logic as crushing as it is dull, that “we dream because we are tired.” And so we think about dreams in the same way that we dream. Without much logical or memorable discourse and …

  —Thanks a lot …

  —No, no … Okay, from what I saw yesterday you’ve advanced a great deal with the whole filming of dreams, but … isn’t it like uncovering pyramids without really knowing how they were built?

  —No.

  —No?

  —No.

  —Oops. Are you upset?

  —No. It doesn’t upset me when someone who knows nothing about something I know a lot about comes and explains to me how I really know nothing about something he knows nothing about and I know a lot about.

  —Ah, our first argument … Now it’s a serious relationship …

  —Or it was just a one-night stand. A first and only and last one-night stand and …

  —Is it too late to apologize? Or to blame all of it on one of those incubi or succubi who possess you in your dreams?

  —Mmmmpff …

  —I assume that “Mmmmpff …” is the way the natives of the planet of the most beautiful women in the universe forgive you when they wake up and …

  —Right. Forgiven. But from now on nothing but intelligent questions and silence from you.

  —Yes, mistress.

  —And regarding how we know nothing about dreams … There are some things we do know.

  —I’m all ears and eyes.

  —We know everyone dreams. As I said: at least five dreams a night. Even babies, whose dreams are, it is thought, pure dreams: shapes and colors and sounds aboard cradles in rooms painted with that new unisex and politically and oneirically correct color, half pink and half blue, that is known as dreamtime color. Though there are some cases of people who don’t dream. Or who have lost the ability to dream. They suffer from something called Charcot-Wilbrand Syndrome. It was first diagnosed in 1880. Not dreaming can be a consequence of serious emotional problems … But there’s nothing completely proven to that end.

  —Noted.

  —We also know dreams are forgotten very quickly. And the statistics confirm that more creative people remember their dreams more and better than more rational and pragmatic people. And there are theories that hold that those who never remember their dreams are more likely to end up being, contrary to the depiction of them insisted on in movies, as visionaries, when they close their eyes, dangerous psychopaths, mad scientists, and serial killers, and …

  —Yes, but why do they forget? Are dreams made of the same stuff as jokes? Are dreams the kind of joke we never really get, but laugh at all the same to not look dumb in front of whoever tells it at a party? Why do we forget dreams and jokes?

  —I don’t know anything about jokes. Nor do I care.

  —Ha.

  —Yes, ha.

  —I can enlighten you there: I read somewhere we don’t remember the best jokes we’re told because they’re the ones whose punch line surprised us and we didn’t see coming. Whereas, because they’re predictable, it’s much easier to remember bad jokes and …

  —I said I didn’t care. But I am interested in the fact that we forget 95 percent of what we dream when we wake up. There are those who claim our most important dreams, the ones that could end up being useful during our conscious lives, are the ones we forget most often and most quickly …

  —Ah, just like good jokes.

  — … and maybe that’s why they can’t survive crossing the border between sleep and wakefulness.

  —Or maybe they’ve been confiscated at customs, right? Like dangerous cargo, like fire—and fury—arms. Anyway, all that hasn’t really left all those biblical and pharaonic dreamers and ladders ascended and descended by angels standing, more like knocked down, not to mention the interpretations of Sigmund Freud, right?

  —Right. Though you might argue that what Freud was interested in wasn’t what we dream, but what we think we remember or choose to remember of our dreams. That what was most interpretable and revealing was precisely that residue or what we wish we’d dreamed, convincing ourselves we have dreamed it.

  —But I still don’t understand why we forget. Is it a defense mechanism? Maybe, I insist, there’s something there, in our dreams, we cannot bring back to this side. Some information that’s denied us because it could be the cause of great catastrophes and … Good idea for a movie with a lot of special effects. I’m going to write it down to see if I can sell it to someone and …

  —Hello? Anybody home? Can we continue?

  —Yes, sorry. I wrote it down already.

  —Perfect. Happy to be so useful … Getting back to forgetting … One theory ventures that, when we dream, the brain lets the memory-making function rest. Pause. Others say the idea is, simply, not to remember anything. And dreams would be something like a solvent of useless accumulated information. And still others claim if our brain didn’t permit itself that kind of crazy truce of dreams, where it never reflects too much on what it does or doesn’t do and what it all means or on its almost-immediate and near-total oblivion, it would lose the capacity to faithfully remember what happens to us when we’re awake … To forget the irrational in order to remember the rational. Survival of the fittest. A Darwinian version of dreams. They also say increased magnetic activity produces more realistic dreams.

  —Ah, so dreams as a kind of laxative, for purging, for eliminating constipation …

  —Mmm … That’s one way of looking at it, I supposed. But you can also think of dreams as a kind of exaggerated and irreal simulation/training for situations we’ll confront in our daily life. Dreams like field tests for our avatar.

  —What else?

  —The thing about dreams in color and in black and white … Until recently it was thought we only dream in black and white. But it turns out that’s not the case. There are dreams in color. Almost all of them. We recall dreams in black and white because our memories of them are deficient, but we dream them in color. Not very bright colors. Pastel tonalities. And this part will interest you. A lot. There is a very recent theory that holds that, in the past, people dreamed only in black and white because the TV they watched was only in black and white. As soon as color arrived to the screen, people began to dream in color.

  —Ah, cool. Like an automatic association of film and television with the world of dreams, with what’s dreamed and what’s not reality. As if when we watch a movie we were dreaming. Hollywood like “The Dream Factory” … Fantastic!

  —That’s right. But that doesn’t keep the blind, even those born blind, from dreaming.

  —Really?

  —Yes. They dream of sounds and textures and smells and tastes …

  —Ah! So, for the blind, dreams can be truly sweet, right? Sweet dreams … Though, it seems to me dreams are never sweet. Because even those dreams that are supposedly sweetest turn bitter when you wake up, when they send us back to reality with a bad taste in our mouths and bad breath. That’s why we brush our teeth when we get up and …

  —Another very interesting thing. Based on surveys, it can now be said that men and women dream in different ways. Men’s dreams are more aggressive than women’s. Women’s are calmer and longer and have more “characters.” And men dream more about other men than about women.

  —Ah, that explains why those dreams are forgotten. Better, just in case, not to remember them …

  —While women dream about men as much as they dream about women. And they are better when it comes to remembering what they dream.

  —Good for them. And good for you. But I doubt you remember me better from your dreams than I remember you from mine.

  —Mmm … Another thing: it’s probable that animals dream too.

  —Was that a veiled insult? A way of calling me an animal? What do animals dream of? Of getting discovered and hired by Disney?