Nocturnals

by Edited by Bradford Morrow

  But then I remember that my mother is still up the hill. My left knee buckles as soon as I turn to take the slope. I am amazed at how fast long feet go. A cop stops me before I can go any farther and hands me a folded-up note. Deliver this to my wife, he says. I’m going to be stuck here a long while. Unlike the others who guard the gates to this particular hell, the dream cop is not wearing a mask. He is clean-cut. I think perhaps that he is Andy Griffith. Or an angel of God, if not God himself. I open my mouth to tell him about my mother but I have no voice; the smoke has stolen it. A pig runs past us, screaming and oinking back up the hill in a terrible, desperate wiggle. She’s a pink hog but her butt is burned black, like a side of fatback singed on the grill.

  *

  “If someone dreams that his voice was weak and feeble, he will have a life of pain and grief,” says Achmet, in his Treatise on the Interpretations of Dreams. But whose voice was it, that was weak and feeble? Mine? Or the man whose shoes I wore?

  *

  Eleventh grade, 1987. Our high school offers a strange intertwined set of courses called The Family of Man, an homage to the book of photos by the same title. We read Thoreau and Emerson and Ursula Le Guin and Hunter S. Thompson and Buckminster Fuller with a side of Joan Didion and the first chapters of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. We read and studied a little book called Creative Dreaming by Patricia Garfield. She wrote about lucid dreaming rather extensively, highlighting the Senoi, a Malaysian tribe of dreamers. The value of dreams in their world invites a kind of peace and kinship unknown to Americans. They tell their dreams over breakfast, they make amends to their kinsmen if they dream the kinsmen harm. They have a sort of control over their dreams that makes them living entities, unlike the messy tangles of our adolescence. The Senoi seem to live in a paradise located in the nowhere we have never been between sleep and love. It was, in part, the Senoi who inspired the early years of Esalen and the entire Human Potential Movement; until 1984, the Jungian Institute in Berkeley was called the Jungian-Senoi Institute of Dreams. “The Senoi believe that any human being, with the aid of his fellows, can outface, master, and actually utilize all beings and forces in the dream universe,” said Kilton Stewart, the anthropologist who first studied them in the 1930s. Our class became a network of dreamers, a teeny, tiny worldwide dream web. We carried our dream notebooks to school, we practiced the art of writing in the dark while still half asleep, we took B vitamins to assist our journey into the dream world. We gave up alcohol, which drowns the dream. We read Castaneda. I grew a sickly peyote cactus, but its buttons fell off like old umbilici. When we dreamt of each other, we brought gifts, offerings; if we wronged them, trinkets of conciliation. When we dreamt of sex, we left love notes in one another’s shoes at the door of the classroom. We lived like Asclepians in the early temples, sleeping on the steps, waiting for the prophecies of snakes and scholarships to schools back East.

  *

  The arithmetic of dreams and their interpretations is rather complex.

  Of ancient Sumerian and Akkadian dreams, there are three types: revelations of the deity, reflection of the state of mind of the dreamer, and mantic dreams in which forthcoming events are prognosticated.

  The Egyptians too listed three types of dreams: those in which the gods would demand some pious act, those that contained warnings (perhaps about illness), and those that came about through rituals, such as incubation.

  The Greeks discussed five kinds of dreams: Dreams, Visions, Oracles, Phantasy or Vain Imagination, and Apparition. This was only one in a complex system of classification. There were also the six stoicheía (elements) present in all dreams: Nature, Law, Custom, Professional Skill, Art, and Name.

  In The Rites of Zhou, Chinese dreams were classified in six different categories: regular or restful, startling or disturbing, reflective, daydream, happy, frightening. The interpretation of these was overseen by one Grand Diviner, in turn supervising the interpretations by four different divining masters, who in turn towered over six mid-level dream executives.

  The Torah contains ten dreams, all of which fall under the category of prophecy.

  The Sefer Hasidim, an ancient Jewish text, talks about three kinds of dreams: the highest is prophetic; the lowest is magical, a divinatory dream of the false prophet; and in the middle, the ordinary dream. The dream, it was said, according to the Talmud, was “onesixtieth” prophecy. Solomon Almoni, a medieval Jewish philosopher, adds that sleep itself (dreamless or no?) is a sixtieth portion of death.

  Mohammedans, it has been said, calculated dreams at one forty-fifth prophecy. In Islam, dreams fall into three categories: good dreams that come from Allah, bad dreams that come from the shaitan, and the ordinary things a person is thinking about. Earlier source Qadi B. Abdallah an-Nakha’i, however, broke dreams down as such: divine inspiration, the converse of man with his own soul, confused visions, and tricks played on the dreamer by Satan.

  The Senoi did not classify dreams per se, but did discuss two psychic entities, one localized behind the center of the forehead, the other focused in the pupil of the eye, which are able to leave the body when a person is asleep, and these entities account for dreaming. The soft ruuwaay, or soul in the center of the forehead, is so timid in children that it can be easily frightened away.

  Freud thought of dreams, broadly speaking, in terms of their manifest content, which, while appearing rather “real,” is allegorical in nature and condensed in the mind of the dreamer, and their latent content, asleep for so long as we keep it there, flattened by the gravity of repression. So maybe two kinds, with lots of offshoots, tendrils, a subterranean rhizomic network in which our sexual lives and our neuroses dance behind the lids of our eyes.

  Jung didn’t seem to use a mathematical formula. Suffice it to say, this was probably prudent, given the reductive nature of such calculi. They were a portal to our collective unconscious, the undulating forms and figures of all of civilization, perhaps even of all time. James Hillman would take this further, to see dream as its own underworld, a world of image, which we get to visit like tourists and then depart from, in the darkness from which we came.

  According to “Psychosis, Dreams, and Memory in AI” by Henry Wilkin, there are three ways in which our computers can dream—by accident (sometimes called computer hallucinations), through Google’s DeepDream, and through experience replay, which “arguably bears the closest resemblance to actual dreaming.”

  So, to interpret your dreams, apply the following formula: multiply three Assyrian dreams by the power of ten and divide by the number of Greek dreams it takes to make a prophecy, enter the answer into Google’s DeepDream search engine. Follow the long rope into darkness, and wait until latent.

  *

  A scribe from the double house of life, which sounds a bit like a spy novel from the Cold War, was the official title for the learned men of ancient Egypt—astrologers, diviners, magicians, the children of kings or princes or nobles. They drew horoscopes, they predicted the future of the newborn babe, they indicated the best names, the special amulets, the precautions to be taken according to circumstances, the circumventing of ill fortunes. They were the keepers of the Egyptian medical texts, and, with few exceptions, were mostly male, highly regarded, and highly paid, although there are fleeting accounts of the “Lady of Letters, Mistress of the House of Sacred Books,” who was the assistant to the keeper of secret books. Suffice it to say, these ladies are not greatly detailed in the historic records. “Bring me the scribe from the double house of life, attached to this palace!” orders a king in Popular Stories of Ancient Egypt. “Send me from among you one who is skilled in his heart, a scribe learned with his fingers!” The requisition, granted, of course, immediately, later unfolds with the unfortunate news that the scribe needed a god to supplement his paltry powers of prediction to save the youngest sister of the queen, who suffered greatly from a malady of the limbs. It does not tell us the fate of this particular scribe after his ineffectual performance.

  *


  When I graduated from high school, my first relationship was with a man much older than me, who had in fact attended the same school and had the same teacher and heard about the same society of dreamers in Malaysia. So he built a dream nest in his backyard, suspended in the thick bamboo with bungee cords and rope, resembling, perhaps, a very comfortable BDSM trampoline, floating above the ground in the way that, as it turns out, a generation of high priests must be raised from birth before the Messiah comes—in Israel, quite recently, a sect of Haredi Jews has been calling for parents to hand over their newborn sons “to be raised in isolation and purity,” in the hills of Jerusalem, on elevated floors, never touching the ground where the dead live, to raise them as a priestly caste that will usher in the Messiah. And so it was that I found myself isolated and pure in the hills of Southern California, removed from the ground where the dead lived or my feet could whisk me away, practicing the art of dream sharing with older men in a micro Esalen, complete with partial nudity and banana milkshakes.

  *

  Nobody tells the New Mother that she will forever dream the death of her children. It does not appear in “What to Expect When You’re Expecting” or “Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems,” which, more to the point, should really be called “Solve Your Own Sleep Problems: Get a Vasectomy.” It is not one of the indexed points in the bestselling and memorable guide to navigating adolescence, “Get Out of My Life, But First Could You Drive Me and Cheryl to the Mall?” or other representatives from the plethora of well-meaning and often intelligent books on surviving the teen years, geared, largely speaking, toward the typical dilemmas of modern parenting; back talk and insubordination, bad grades, depression, drugs. Positive parenting books—a growing subset, meme of memes!—are so positively positive that one might, simply to encourage a lack of obedience, flatten the spines with a good set of truck tires. None offer chapters titled “Dreaming Your Children Die: Parenting with Atypical Neuroses” or “Loving Your Inner Coroner: What to Do When Death Worry Is Your Nightly Hobby.” Sure, the crib guard industry does well with its line of wraps to protect children from hanging themselves or sticking their heads through the grates, and the stock options in choking hazard stickers, baby swings that barely rock, and caplets to hide outlets from bobby pins that would blacken the skin of one’s tiny toddler’s hand into reptilian scales are selling at an all-time high. The black-box warning on antidepressants offered to kids from gumball machines are the closest things to messengers: antidepressants increase the risk of suicidal thinking and behavior in children and adolescents. But can we really say, over cereal and milk at the breakfast table, little one, I dreamt that you died again last night?

  It is the goddess Chthon (potnia Chthon) who is, quite literally, the Mother of Dreams. She created dreams, according to the ancient Greeks, to punish Apollo for stealing the Delphian oracle from her. In Euripides’s Hecuba, one of the dreariest tragedies ever written, Hecuba has a nightmare in which she predicts the death of her children. She pleads with potnia Chthon to “beat back that dream I dreamed … I repel that dream, that horror that rose in the night, those phantom children!” She cries out in an utter desperation known by mothers who are visited by such hauntings. But the dream is not a fleeting thing; it is the news of the day. What are the words for loss? Hecuba sings out in her terrible song of grief. To whom can I turn? Childless and homeless, my husband murdered, my city stained with fire, where can I go? What god, what power will help me now?

  *

  Sudden Infant Death Syndrome—or cot death, the more poetic yet no less horrifying term—is, in developed countries, the third most common form of death among infants and babies. Among the fifty or so theories researchers have offered for the strange and yet-inexplicable death of tots on cots might be related to the fact that infants, like the kittens who sleep at the foot of your bed and tremble at the thought of mouse tails and moth wings, are perhaps dreaming of themselves still in the womb, a place where their mothers did the work of inhalation and exhalation, leaving them to float in the amniotic fluid without so much as a gasp for air. During rapid eye movement sleep, when we dream, our brains are thought to be processing our stored memories. Since newborn memory is, essentially, memory of life in the womb—or so it would seem, past-life experiences as Egyptian scribes or cats or beetles notwithstanding—that would be the primary basis for the dream life of the baby, says George Christos, an Australian scientist, whose theories about death by dream are considered by the pediatric profession as “attractive” but remain somewhat unpopular. It makes a great deal of sense to me, though. Had I thought of this as a young parent, I would have been paralyzed with fear all night long that my infants would dream themselves back inside me, causing me ever more endless heartburn as they melted back into the ease of my breath, ceasing to exist here, in the new world of air. Beat back these dreams! I would have yelled, to the Mother of Dreams in the dark hours of my children’s infancies. As if a kind of prophecy to these recent studies, Arthur Koestler, author of The Art of Creation, wrote in 1964 that dreaming was indeed a “sliding back toward the pulsating darkness, of which we were part before our separate egos were formed.”

  Philosopher Henri Bergson writes of these layers of human memories, saying, “Yes, I believe indeed that all our past life is there, preserved in its most intimate details, that we never forget anything, and that everything which we have felt, perceived, thought, and willed since the first stirrings of our consciousness, lives on indestructibly. But the memories which are preserved in these obscure depths are there in the state of invisible phantoms. … Then these memories, perceiving that I have taken away the obstacle, have raised the trapdoor which has kept them beneath the floor of consciousness, arise from the depths; they rise, they move, they perform in the night of unconsciousness a great danse macabre.”

  *

  One young girl, who lived with her mother just above the canyon where the Camp Fire started, had been a goat herder—a state champion, in fact. The fire moved so fast in its first hours that she and her mother left their home with nothing but their dogs, racing to outpace the flames. They had to open the barn gate to let all of her goats out with the hope that they would find their way past the danger on their fleet little hooves. About two weeks after the fire, I began to dream this girl’s dreams with some regularity. Again, I know first that it is not me by looking at my feet; her feet, in my dream, were huge (what Freud would have to say about this seems ridiculously banal). I’m hiking in the ravine, slowly, trying not to break any manzanita branches; I am walking the delicate trails of deer. It is green again, springtime, in a world the fire does not yet know how to find. I approach a little clearing. From the dense chaparral comes Buttercup, the goat I loved best. He wears a bit of tinsel in his horns, as though he’d been rooting through someone’s Christmas decorations. He speaks to me in a language I have not spoken since the fire and I pull the burrs from the tufts of his coat. He’s alone now, he tells me, but he has found his goaty nature, and does not wish to return with me. He stays with me as long as he can, but when we part, he turns away first. This is the world I enter and exit; I am the visitor, he the resident. I don’t want to leave. I wake up crying. In real life, as it were, I am highly allergic to goats. “If animals speak in dreams, they tell the truth, and so do the dead since they are ‘in the abode of truth,’ says Artemidorus, in the fourth of his five-volume series, The Oneirocritica, written in the second century AD. As though it were yesterday.

  *

  My therapist, a Jungianesque Hillmanian genius, laughs when I tell him that I am having other people’s nightmares. “Of course you are!” he says, slapping his knee like an old-timey grandfather, as though he were grateful for the entertainment I’ve brought him. I am not certain if he means that all along, he saw some inner traveling dream genius in me, or if it means that within his world, sandwiched between the unwell and the deranged and the psychotic, he expects nothing less.

  *

  The dreams that
are unequivocally mine are the ones in which my children float away from me like the motes of dust that continue to descend, weeks after the fires, invisibly upon us. I’ve had them with great regularity since their births; if we’d gone to the creek that day, I would later dream that one of them had wandered out of eyesight for a second or two, one heart’s hard beat in the chest as they were whisked away by a current like brown leaves. Or if one of them was ten minutes late to come home, I would dream that night that she was folded up in an oil barrel, sucking her fingers, kicking its sides with shoes that made no sound. Even when they were just infants, I would dream that I had forgotten to nurse them, and they would be desiccated and listless, like houseplants forgotten and unwatered. Ordinary dreams, says the Sefer Hasidim, come without any specific preparation from the sleeper. They come from God through the agency of angels on the “right” side. The divinatory dream, on the other hand, comes from “the left side” through the agency of demons. How do I know which of the dreams I have now are ordinary and which are divinatory and which side it is that I am on?