The Dreamed Part

by Rodrigo Fresán

  That’s what it is, that’s what it’s all about.

  But we’ve got a long way to go before that.

  In fact, it’s even possible that ending hasn’t been filmed yet.

  And there he is, unable to even call out “Action!” and finally bring it all to an end. He can’t look elsewhere, he can’t even shut his eyes and, much less sleep, fall asleep, send to bed without dessert everything knocking at the door of his eyelids, trying to kick them open, misbehaving.

  He’s tried it all.

  Nothing worked, nothing works.

  All the chemical variations and all the forms of mental relaxation or religious meditation or agnostic hypnosis. But—again, once more—nothing had worked. He thought, even, of converting to some religion in order to be able to pray to some god and ask him for the blessing of sleep and that he grant it and thereby prove his existence and power. But God didn’t exist or, at least, he was never given His phone number. Which didn’t keep him from believing he believed unbelievable things. Like—for a few nights—the hallucinated thesis of an acquaintance, also an insomniac, who’d confided in him that he’d been the happiest person in the world ever since he’d stopped being able to sleep. His reasoning was that daily life was unbearable. And that not sleeping at night amounted to the blessing of enjoying with full and even enhanced consciousness that handful of delicious hours in which you were alone and there was nobody to pester you with their spite or stupidity (the conversation had taken place many years before the new insomniacs took the Earth, those voluntary auto-insomniacs fixated on their telephones). The world was in suspension and you orbited around it, far away and outside it all, free of gravity and all things grave, his acquaintance rhapsodized. He listened to all of it amiably and, as tends to happen, remembered something when he was already back home: he told himself the next time he saw that man he would tell him about the happy dreamers of nightmares in Auschwitz. And, as also tends to happen, he never got the chance. The fact that that person was run over and killed by a car (witnesses of the accident stated the victim was singing, screaming, stuffed into an incandescent Hawaiian shirt, fruit and feathers and volcanoes and surfboards, on an afternoon of stoplights whose colors his pupils were no longer able to distinguish) didn’t give him a happy ending to all that sleepless ecstasy. In any case, at that point, it didn’t strike him that the irrational dead man had been right, of sound mind: just that he had lost it.

  And the possibility of sleep continued to be an impossible dream and, when it came to convincing himself of the existence of paradises, he sought artificial paradises with a bit of chemical backup. Causes that produced effects. Ambien and Damixan and Stilnoct and Norkotral and Halcion and Electron Blue, drugs that sounded like DC & Marvel superheroes (he chose them for the sound of their names; his favorites: Beneficat, Sucedal, Maleficet, Hypnogen, Sonata, Desirel, Circex, Stillyet) and that, in many cases, were just placebos. Bad idea, of course. He’d read their informational printouts as if they were horror novels that warned of possible hallucinations, paranoia, suicidal impulses, amnesia, criminal somnambulism (which, inevitably, led him to reread Vladimir Nabokov’s Transparent Things) and, perhaps, the performance of embarrassing acts, like regaining consciousness far from home, in a karaoke bar, surrounded by Japanese people who were applauding and even weeping at his rendition of that unsinkable Celine Dion song. But no, nothing so creative as all that. Consulting testimonies regarding the side effects of various hypnotics and sleeping pills on the web—yes, the Internet was useful for that: for capturing the twists and turns of the ways the masses express themselves—revealed, in most cases, everyone had the same chilling experience: obliviously sending (and not remembering doing so) text messages from their phones, that made barely less sense and might have had fewer orthographical and syntactical errors than the ones they wrote when they were supposedly lucid and conscious of doing it. Sign of bad times, indeed: human beings once drugged themselves to get closer to the gods, or to compose symphonies of ice or to set pages alight or to illuminate starry landscapes and cosmic horrors. Now, merely, under the influence, they devoted their trances to typing brief lines about longed-for meals or imaginary lovers or selfies with a pillow in the background, instead of great circumstantial works of art. Yes, pills like potions you swallow to be inhabited by your ghosts. But, at least in his case, they had little or no effect—no redactable impulse—with the exception that the dark of night took on a touch of gray and, once, there was the sound of a voice that asked him over and over “Are you asleep?” and that, no doubt, was his own.

  And, later, he downed liquors of varying density and proof and color and format in shiny bottles that—those who design and bottle them know it well, it’s all calculated—turn the bewitching and possessive spirits into an imminently collectable item and the liver into an album of trading cards to be completed (but alcohol had never been his thing, his resistance to intoxication was almost legendary, and the only thing he received in exchange for all that fiery liquor was a headache and shaky hands). And marijuana, which, in his case, only intensified his hunger for sleep and increased his visits to the frigid light of refrigerators in the middle of the night. And the exotic opium, chasing dragons that ate all those sheep. And he returned to the drugs of his youth when he’d been on the high wire and the hard line (luckily, at that point, cable TV had arrived to accompany him during all those white nights, because, if not, what would he have done, there, awake, like right now) to thereby feel, at least, that that was the reason he couldn’t sleep. He remembered with a little laugh (back then he had a mechanical typewriter, and he rewarded the nose of his brain with a line every time he reached the bottom of a page and after half a page and, one terrible and fantastic night, every time that little bell rang, as if for the end of a round or like a rifle reloading, when he came to the end of a line and oh, how fast he wrote back then and there was no blank page he didn’t make himself the center of) that someone, concerned about his addict-level consumption of cocaine, had even considered staging one of those interventions. But the idea was dismissed when it was discovered he didn’t have enough family or friends to attend it. He returned to those rousing powders that turned body and mind into something like an overly starched shirt, activating dormant areas in the gray matter (the so-called “reward centers”) and making you fantasize, with almost magical hope, that in the extreme of sleeplessness you would reach the edge of a cliff of fatigue off of which you could let yourself fall into unconsciousness. That didn’t work either. In the end, the obvious, the minimalist, the only thing left on the other side of everything. The natural way. So, saying goodbye to coffee and hello to chamomile tea and a glass of warm milk and the ommmm of burning lavender-scented incense, which many insomniacs, he was sure, had traded in for the not-at-all meditative commmment (another bad joke), for the sleepless impulse to have to say something. Not talking in their sleep, but, like somnambulists, writing directly online whatever came to mind. To emphatically state they dislike something they know nothing about or to post an automatic “RIP” at the end of any obituary, like those automatic weepers or cathartic drinkers slipping into the wakes of strangers always giving a thumbs-up.

  Actually, he envied them for being able to be like that. To fall asleep under the blue light of the screen and no more special mattresses and eyemasks and earplugs. But that wasn’t his case. His insomnia was a primitive, atavistic insomnia, more of the Age of the Rock-Hard Pillow than the Age of Silicon. So he’d sought intermediate solutions: the unplugged yet electronic, watching, along with millions of other non-sleepers, that, in its moment, quite popular too-many-hour-long video of the Bonet River in Ireland flowing under a wooden bridge. Or that website that offered the re-creation of the sinking of the Titanic in real time, which seemed like slow motion. Or the late nights of the History Channel, which he’d renamed the Hitlery Channel, with all those perfectly synchronized marches and oh so elegant uniforms and operatic torches in the Aryan night, which, actually, woke
him up and made him wonder how it was he never knew or allowed himself the sweet tribal relief of surrendering to a mass passion, political or sports or religious, to hide out there, to put himself to sleep, to close his eyes, to go through life as if asleep. And, later, those new-age recordings of hushed ancestral winds and whales singing in bubbling rushes and even those classic subliminal-Hollywood-sex images: a DVD with the sound and the image of logs crackling in a fireplace and of waves crashing into the rocks at the base of a cliff. He’d also listened to the somniferous CDs of the actor Jeff Bridges. An actor who had one of his favorite voices and, on those recordings, recited brief episodes, sixteen tracks of contemplative ambient-drone, while the actor strolled through Temescal Canyon under the light of a coyote moon, with an occasional drifting piano—nothing at all to do with the noise of The Intruders—or the sound of children at breakfast or the gurgling of the toilet tank refilling or the groan of Mrs. Bridges who seemed exceedingly tired of her husband not letting her get any sleep. And a closing moral/message, after forty-three minutes: “We’re all in this together and, well, maybe you’ve reached the end of this album and, hey, you’re not asleep yet. Well, what the hell, fire the thing up again.” And also the albums of the “post-minimalist” composer Max Richter (who, hence his initial distrust, had previously composed a series of ringtones and recomposed Vivaldi) and his eight-hour long opus called Sleep, composed with the help of neuroscientists so its sound synchronized with the different stages of sleep, resulting in a “personal lullaby for a frenetic world” and an “invitation to dream.” He’d liked Sleep a lot, but it’d had an undesired effect: not only had it not made him fall asleep, but, with its liquid beats and ascending and descending rhythmic sequences, it’d made him remember with perfect clarity everything that’d seemed lost forever. “Ah, yes: that’s what someone who dreams sounds like,” he said to himself, looking back, to the most distant past and beyond, moving out from the shoreline, ever further out to sea. Hearing it, he felt like one of those once-original science-fiction clichés: the lyrical-epiphanic extraterrestrial touched by the earthlings, by their feelings and their coffee makers and the shape of a table leg or a tree’s leaf or a bird’s feather, and saying things like “Ah, the dreams of you humans who sleep … On our planet we don’t sleep and, oh, how I would like to be able to sleep, just for a few minutes, to thereby be able to dream what you all dream.” Listening to that thing of Max Richter’s all throughout one night, he felt like, they say, those old Japanese men feel when they go lie down beside geishas without touching them, because it no longer makes any sense to do so.

  From there he traveled to the other extreme, to the beginning, to the childish “Once upon a time …”: he recorded himself reading (to listen to later, the way children once listened to their parents reading to them, with a voice between mellifluous and accelerated to bring the process to an end as quickly as possible) that book about that little bunny that wants to fall asleep, patented by a Swede, which proved to be a multimillion-dollar bestseller and successful tool for progenitors driven to desperation by their insomniac progeny. A little book in which the words “dream” and “sleep” are repeated over and over and that—its maker instructed—should be read aloud, punctuated by overly exaggerated yawns, huge and warm-hearted yawns, like when you do the voice of a fierce wolf or a fairy godmother. Nothing.

  He’d even wound up taking—before they were commercialized, for obvious reasons, and soon thereafter turned into a new form of E at clubs where they played music known as freeze-beat to stop people from dancing—pills containing splinters of the parasitic and African virus that caused encephalitis lethargica: something all the rage in the World War One trenches, where Siegfried Sassoon penned that poem with the line “Soldiers are dreamers,” and that, they say, turned you into something like those statues stretched out atop the slabs of Victorian and Edwardian tombs. And yet, again, nothing. The only thing he’d achieved, oh so awake, was an additional form of torment: a perfect evocation of past dreams but now with eyes open. Knowing perfectly well they were dreams, the majority neither fun nor interesting, until he reached the one he considered the first dream he could remember, his original dream: a nightmare with chimney sweeps chasing him, a three-year-old boy, across the rooftops of a city with a pop-gothic aesthetic and with vertiginous camera angles he would only encounter again many years later in the best and most personal of Tim Burton’s movies. After that primeval dream, even earlier on, the torment of self-induced regression became even more torturing: his recovered dreams ceased being figurative and became pure form and sound and the liquid abstraction of something that felt like sinking without drowning, like being a wordless message floating in the amniotic soup inside a bottle shaped like his mother, an exceedingly unstable bottle at that. A bottle (it was clear his mother hadn’t given up any of her recreational activities during pregnancy, he’d seen multiple photographs of her, belly out in the air and painted with psychedelic mandalas and third eyes, in the middle of parties and festivals) of the variety that never stops being shaken, as if full of champagne about to be uncorked and bathe everyone in the bubbles of its nights.

  Seeking to recover that sanctuary of restless calm, so close and so far from everything, advised by a known addict of said activity, he’d gotten up the nerve to go into one of those isolation tanks to float in faux salt water: there he would bob in the darkness of a saline solution until he lost all notion of above or below and, supposedly, feel again the nothingness a hypersensitive fetus feels. But the only thing he’d achieved had been to think, more awake than ever, during a very long hour, “I am a fetus … I am a fetus … I am a fetus.” And on like that until he attained the suspicious conspiranoid certainty that, in truth, all the things you dreamed and thought and forgot before age three were absolutely logical and realistic visions. That we never “sound” more lucid and reasonable than at that time. That, if we so desired, at that point we could already speak and even write our best pages: but, out of pity and a dash of sadism (because it would be terrible to be fully conscious of all the stupidity and senselessness that awaits us), something makes us forget. And unlearn all of it. And concentrate on the lack of control of our most basic bodily functions. And so, as babies, we’re reduced to unconsciousness and to sleeping almost all the time (when we’re not crying and keeping everyone awake with voices like a flock of restless sheep) while rocked to the voices of fragile giants, terrified something will happen to us. Something like what, quite specifically, with our arrival, has happened to them.

  And, of course, already on the subject and situation, so diminished, he’d submitted himself to constantly listening to the repetitive structures (which help to domesticate the breathing rhythm and heartbeat of babies and the development of their nervous system, studies claim) of rockabye lullabies. The ones that, supposedly, strengthen the bond between mother and child. The ones that his mother had never sung to him because to her they seemed “so boring they make me sleepy.” The ones that the expert on the matter Federico García Lorca—whose skeleton did not rest in peace—had considered fundamental because “various crucial elements are involved in lulling the child to sleep, including, of course, the consent of the fairies. The fairies bring the windflowers and the right climate. The mother and the song supply the rest.” It sounded good, but was improbable. It doesn’t matter. He knows all of them now. And they all sound as if performed by an electronica and new-age band that might well have been called Nessun Dorma. The classic children’s songs (“Duérmete, niño …”). Or the children’s classics (Brahms, Chopin, Ravel, Stravinsky, Gershwin). And the pop versions weighed down by jangling instrumentation (Cry Baby Cry: The Beatles Go to Sleep; whose title song, according to John Lennon, was inspired by a verse from the classic nursery rhyme “Sing a Song of Sixpence” and the headlines of an advertising magazine). And the immemorial and folkloric songs from all around the world, about the night that advances—that opens and closes, like a curtain—from right to left across
the map with that gear-driven diction of the insides of music boxes. His favorite of all was the Danish “Elefantens vuggevise” or “Elephants Lullaby,” because nothing seemed less sleep-inducing to him than an always potentially raucous elephant singing and swaying: because the elephant was his favorite animal; and because it reminded him of something he’d read a long time ago and had never forgotten or one of those characteristic things you swept out from under the rug or blankets whenever you couldn’t sleep. Something about the disappearance of elephants on the European continent with the retreat of the ancient Romans, who’d used them as a kind of military tank in barbaric battles. Elephants that, after centuries of absence, when represented in medieval bestiaries and no faithful testimonies of their composition and anatomy remained, were deformed by their illustrators, bringing them closer to dragons and sirens (in the same way that manuscript copiers of the time mutated from readers into writers, going along correcting and amplifying the text as they transcribed it). There, in convent cloisters and cells, with very few hours of sleep, monks giving elephants trumpet-shaped snouts and dog ears and horse bodies and fangs on the lower maxillar, like those of a wild boar. They also claimed elephants hated ogres and prayed to the moon with admirable eloquence and were capable of carrying towers of sixty soldiers on their backs. He liked the idea, old as the world, which, in a way, was the fuel of all stories: that of an absence modifying a presence; that of inventing a visible reality from something that’s no longer there, sculpting in marble what will become false history and, then, true fiction. And so, when he ran out of sheep (very quickly), he counted elephants. He filled the dark of his night with elephants ridden by golden-robed kings across icy mountains. Thinking he had almost nothing left and imagining himself wrapped in cloaks, climbing up to the attic of a glacier to, regal, lie down, so the circulation of his blood would freeze and the power of his battery would fade and he would attain the welcoming cold of falling asleep never to wake again. But even that was no guarantee: there was the terrible possibility that he would freeze with his eyes open and thousands of years later be unearthed, in a state of perfect preservation, his pupils still open to the air: eternal insomnia instead of eternal sleep.