The Dreamed Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  —Okay. I get it now.

  —That’s why I can’t help feeling a certain pleasure every time it’s “discovered” that the universe is much bigger or older than was previously thought. Or when a supposedly infertile couple, after having passed through all the Stations of the Cross of those treatments and having given up, defeated, end up getting pregnant days after having adopted a faraway and probably intolerable baby. I love the way the professionals, confronted with “new evidence,” try to find explanations to keep from looking bad. They look like kids caught by their teachers making mischief and trying to blame the classmate at the next desk.

  —I see …

  —I see that it would be best to change the subject. Let’s see, I know. Scientists from the University of Oxford with too much time on their hands and yet ever so well remunerated have reached the conclusion that counting sheep doesn’t do any good at all and that, besides, “it’s too boring.” The best thing, apparently, what they recommend, is to imagine self-hypnotizing landscapes, relaxing and tranquil places. But to me, when it comes to postulating such things, I like what writers and poets, with more caution and less arrogance, propose better. The other day, I read one who ventured that in our dreams we assume the heavenly God gaze. Seeing everything at once and not occurring in succession. And in nightmares we are given a sort of preview of hell, like drops of liquid magma seeping through the cracks and rising to our surface. But could there be anything more hellish than the gift of seeing everything at once? Maybe that’s why we wake up. And, when we wake up, we forget almost everything we saw or experienced, and we struggle to give it some kind of narrative structure so we can pay exorbitant sums to recount it for our beloved psychologist. Or for our supposedly-more-beloved loved one sleeping beside us. You see, more assumptions …

  —Ah, I get it. All of this is your way of forcing me to defend myself. And to end up telling you what it is we do in the Onirium. And why we’re so interested in your recurrent dream where I, a me from years ago, appears and …

  —Yes; and getting really paranoid now, why they made you pretend you remembered me too and that you’ve been looking for me ever since, in order to seduce me and get me to voluntarily submit myself to an experiment that, supposedly, “will change the history of humanity” but whose unexpected and impossible-to-prevent “side effects” will …

  —I don’t find what you’re saying the least bit funny.

  —Which part? The thing about the side effects? Or that you were pretending to feel something for me?

  —All of it.

  —Ah, all of it.

  —Yes.

  —Oh. We’re having our second fight.

  —Indeed. Better not go there.

  —Better, indeed.

  — …

  — …

  — …

  — …

  — …

  —A cure for insomnia? Is that what you’re working on? The other day I learned that the Guinness Book of World Records has stopped accepting submissions for days without sleeping [eleven is the number to beat, apparently, a student in 1966], considering it too unhealthy. As if holding your breath in a bathtub full of spaghetti or jumping off a skyscraper astride a killer whale or trying to memorize the equally soporific and rousing Finnegans Wake and reading it aloud in reverse and without vowels weren’t unhealthy and … Ah, good, you’re smiling again. For a second there I thought the side effects of our fight had atrophied all the many muscles needed to achieve a smile and …

  —Stop.

  — … that it was my fault, and so I’d always be remembered as the man who forever deprived all humanity of such a heavenly vision and …

  —Stop! I know I’m laughing, but seriously …

  — … and I’d wander the world like a pariah. Stoned by men when I happened upon their town, spit on by women, mocked by children, and bitten by dogs, and …

  —Stop. I get it. You win. I’m going to tell you about what we’re working on … You’ll have to find out sooner or later anyway and sign some forms and …

  — … so I don’t guess at the malicious intentions of your superiors who want only to take my dream and …

  —I already told you not to go there.

  —Oops. Sorry. You’re right.

  —I mean it … Why are you smiling?

  —It’s just makes me smile the way you say, “I mean it.” But it’s not a mocking smile. It’s adorable.

  —You want me to tell you or not?

  —Go for it, please.

  —Well … You know, you’ve probably heard it a time or two, the thing about how we spend a third of our lives sleeping.

  —Uh-huh …

  —And how, of that third of our lives, it is about nine years that we spend dreaming.

  —That I didn’t know. I’d not made the calculation.

  —We don’t think of it as some big waste of time, but we do think it’s something we could take better advantage of.

  —I don’t get it.

  —What we want is to take advantage of our sleep and our dreams. Not to stop sleeping or dreaming. But for all that time to be more beneficial.

  —I still don’t get it.

  —What we’re after, what we’re seeking, is for our dreams to become practical and useful and, in a way, rational. So we could keep working in our dreams, so we could find practical and logical solutions in them. So, in a way, our dreams could be made reality because they are reality, they’re realistic. Logical. Going from A to B and not from C to X. And, of course, so we could remember them in their entirety upon waking. Down to the smallest details. And, yes, so we don’t wake up right at the best part. We’ve already made some advances.

  — …

  —What’s wrong now?

  — …

  —Right. You don’t like it …

  —It’s not that I don’t like it. But it seems to me some apparently irrational things are the foundations atop which reason is held up and erected and fortified. Maybe, as they say, when we dream, we let ourselves go mad for a while and that’s how we’re able to tolerate seeing ourselves forced to be sane so much of the time, the other two-thirds of our lives, right? I don’t know, I’m not really compelled by the idea of dreams being like domestic animals, like useless pets we force to be useful. I like wild dreams more than dreams in captivity. Dreams that run free in the open field and don’t stop to think about whether or not they’re dreams, lacking any of those tricks for figuring out if los sueños, sueños son, if it’s all just a dream. A dream that’s not even aware it’s dreaming.

  —What tricks?

  —The most popular is trying to count the fingers on your hand and not being able to do it. Or to read something somewhere and look away and then read it again only to discover what you read has changed … To realize what you read isn’t what you’re reading … To read that what you read no longer has anything to do or to read with what …

  —Okay. But your way of thinking isn’t very scientific.

  —No, agreed. It’s a post-scientific way of thinking. Like I said, it’s what scientists always think after an experiment comes out wrong or different and they wake up from their dream and discover that, indeed, “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.”

  —Ah, I see: the person talking now is the artist concerned with such transcendent issues as how best to film a dream …

  —No: the person talking now is the human being concerned because, when you wake up, the person you love says “Bet you don’t know what I dreamed last night” and you, automatically, say something like “I dreamed you had to take the car in for its annual checkup and, while you were there, you found out there’s a better priced insurance policy than the one we have” and …

  —Ah, I see …

  —You see.

  — …

  —And on the other hand … What makes you think people would like that? Why do you think people would sign up for such an experiment?

  —People will sign up for anyth
ing, will buy anything. People are addicted to the idea of the latest model, of novelty. People will even pay a great deal for it. The constantly unsatisfied desire for always-changing mobile phones has blazed the trail for any new idea, imposed or not. It’ll be like giving them a new app, a new fashion, a new function. They’ll be oh so happy …

  — …

  —So this is the moment when, so we can stop fighting, I have to ask you what you dreamed last night.

  —Correct.

  —Okay. What did you dream last night?

  —I dreamed something crazy, complete nonsense …

  —I can’t wait for you to tell me.

  —Well, in the dream I was ascending a slope toward a very strange edifice. With two immense eyes on its façade. The edifice was surrounded by screaming people. And then I was inside. And you appeared and you didn’t recognize me and they strapped me to a bed and connected me to cables and electrodes and after that I don’t really remember …

  —And then?

  —Then, luckily, as you know: suddenly, again, like so many other times, I was at a party, years ago, and I saw you dancing, and your dress changed colors, and I danced all night and I, knowing it was a dream, said to myself, “I hope this dream lasts forever and I never wake up.” And then I saw you in a bookstore where another song was playing, one of my favorites songs, that one called …

  —And then?

  —And then I woke up, then you woke me up.)

  Heraclitus postulated that the waking world was common to everyone while, in our dreams, we travel to our own nocturnal world in order to, there, work on understanding our diurnal life. Cervantes, to the contrary, thought we’re all the same when we sleep.

  In his dream, he’s not the one thing or the other. He advances as if balancing on a taught steel cable, as if the aisles between the rows of bookshelves were a high wire he’s walking, one foot in front of the other, an open umbrella to help keep him from falling into the void.

  He walks toward Ella and his steps are interrupted and Manga Boy and Freak Batman pull out pistols and tell Ella to give them all the money in the bookstore cash register. To one side, visible behind the counter, in a pool of blood, Homero’s legs protrude. He doesn’t know why, but the only thing he can focus on—the only thing that matters to him—is that the laces of his left shoe are untied—something there to be interpreted, no doubt * (dreaming of your shoelaces signifies you’re not ready to face a transcendent event. “Possible mishaps and unexpected risks!!!”).

  Ella trembles and he throws himself at them and a bullet pierces Ella’s heart.

  Ella trembles and he throws himself at them and gets a bullet in the brain and is left in a coma. And he stays like that until he dies a few days later without even getting to enjoy that right or privilege of seeing your whole life pass before your eyes in a matter of seconds. To fall into a coma is, also, to fall into the elastic time of dreams. And then he dreams—he remembers it—what his comatose mother dreamed, a series of dreams.

  Ella trembles and he throws himself at them and takes them down and the police arrive and then Ella comes up to him and puts her hand on his shoulder and he, like a sleepwalker, puts his hands around her throat and squeezes and squeezes until he feels something inside break.

  And he wakes up thinking he would like it if his dreams—the power of his dreams—could, just once, be narrated not as they’re narrated here, but with the precision and economy of one of those old and immortal moral tales, introduced, on the television of his childhood, by one Rod Serling, that ectoplasmatic host. Stories that, a little more than twenty minutes later, show us how, even within the strangest and most dreamlike plot, nests the seed of order and logic and true morality.

  Rod Serling saying something like, “Here we have a man with the power to make his dreams never come true.”

  And, then, his life story.

  In black and white.

  And waiting to find out—you don’t have to wait long, just over twenty minutes—if his story has a happy or a sad ending.

  Because in the twilight zone you can have sad endings or happy endings, but never an open ending—a sleeping ending—like this one …

  * (… after this quick commercial break, this message from our sponsor, this confession of a crime and admission of guilt: he doesn’t like any of this. Or, better, he likes it as scattered fragments, as pieces of a dream—dreams never work as a whole and only their best plots are remembered—as the debris of a shipwreck without bottom or shore, like footnotes leaving footprints where the sand ends and the water begins, where the sea ends so the forest can begin. Liquid ideas, somewhere to get lost. But it is what it is, what remains, what will last; what he can tell and share after so much time here inside, dreaming. Like what you retain when sand or water runs through your hands. Not much. And what’s left isn’t necessarily what’s important, what’s indispensable. What’s left is just what was left. A frustrated desire, knowing every dream is the paradox of something that only accepts itself as such once you wake up: every dream is the frustration of that same dream. The broken and not-entirely-rewritable formula of a failed experiment that ended up spawning a monster made of random and poorly put-together parts. The dreamed part, which is nothing without the part of those who dream it and without the part of the one who only dreams of dreaming and can no longer do it.

  We return now to central laboratories, where we continue our broadcast.)

  Yesterday, before closing his eyes to open them again—after the weatherman communicated the signs and symbols of that variation of a waking-dream diagnosis known as the “meteorological forecast,” which is nothing but the examination and symptomology of the brain waves of the climate across the crust of the skull of the planet—he heard that song again.

  It came from the open window of the guesthouse, on the other side of the garden. He stayed there, in his bed, until the song finished with an “I’ve already gone the distance / Just thinking of a series of dreams.”

  He copied down the verses on a piece of paper. Maybe he could find them floating in the collective and always-awake unconscious of the internet. Maybe finding them and identifying them would bring him face to face with the reality that that song changes nothing. Maybe better to keep believing in what he doesn’t know; to maintain the same illusion that’s worked so well for all the great religions for millennia.

  Tomorrow.

  Better tomorrow.

  When he wakes up.

  There’s time.

  There’s too much time.

  Then—context, at last—he closed the windows and lowered the blinds with the remote control, and turned off the light.

  And he walked toward Ella and nothing interrupted his steps and he lay down beside her and she was already sleeping, she always goes to sleep before him and always wakes up after him. Ella, like everyone, no longer dreams, no longer remembers, no longer remembers him or how he once dreamed her.

  And—having already gone the distance, thinking of a series of dreams—he closed his eyes and prepared himself, once again, for the joyous waking dream of thinking Ella hated him, only to realize it was all just a dream. And waking up, happy, just before Ella began to love him. To dream it, so that, please, one day or one night Ella might love him again as much as she once loved him and how once—with that voice only used to say things like that—she said she would love him forever, the way she loved him in the dreams she no longer has because she no longer dreams.

  Dreams in which Ella walks toward him.

  Dreams in which Ella approaches him, and comes close, and stops a step away from her mouth touching his, and—with one of those smiles that means just the opposite of what she says—smiles and says: “Don’t even dream of it.”

  * A footnote like this, right here right now, but not for long. A footnote that will be the only one so far down the page. And that is already preparing to leap—hooks and ropes and sails like sheets and asterisks like the emblem on the banner—and shout “All abo
ard!” A footnote that steps on the laces of its own sentences and trips and seems about to fall but keeps its balance and is followed, enthusiastically and obediently, by all the titles and names of its companions, stowaways, vagabonds, meddlers, misfits, wanderers. Encyclopedic and general and telegraphic and enumerative notes mingling with the personal and nontransferable winks and all of that. And he remembers that, when he was young, there was that book called The Book of Lists (in the library of the house of his summertime, end-of-the-world grandparents, edited, along with his children, by best-selling author Irving Wallace), which was nothing but absurd lists (“The Five Most Famous Prophetic Dreams” or “The Five Most Celebrated Insomniacs”) and whose principal charm was that you could pick and choose one or two here and there. Open the volume to any page and close it again convinced you’d learned a little bit of nothing (don’t forget that, around that time, there were also enumerative lists of sex positions and rankings of lovers and of different sizes to widen and moisten the eyes of that boy he once was and will forever be), like a primitive version with the traction of ink of floating around the Internet. A false and self-assured feeling of victory and accomplishment with minimal effort. Now, so long after, footnotes that are, actually, notes fallen to their knees, beaten, accumulations of data and lists of possible “things” to write that, if he goes on like this, his fire dwindling, will never be written. Notes about something you forget as soon as you remember it or as soon as you remember what you’re going to forget. Terminally ill notes of one who no longer counts or has anything to recount. Neither counting nor sheep, neither rabbit holes nor looking glasses to pass through, in the insomniac and dark night of the soul. In bed like a ship adrift and with no stars in the sky (concentrate specifically on that one, on the second star to the right) by which to regain direction and sanity and destiny. Broadcasting Last Footnotes of the World; and more sordid details coming up.

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