And Wicked Dreams Abuse the Curtained Sleep
It’s a snowy morning in New England. Most of the Northeast, in fact, lies sleeping beneath this dreamy gauze of falling snow and freezing fog. It is altogether a dreamy sort of season, and when I woke this wintry dawn I lingered in bed musing over the dream from which I had surfaced. Neither a deep nor profound dream, the dream-story involved a contractor my wife and I have come to trust. In the dream the contractor—let’s call him Nick—was here to remodel the kitchen, disconcertingly here because we had no desire for any such work. Nick was not only planning to remodel the kitchen, but, as can occur only in fantasy, to vastly enlarge it, too. The tension in the dream came, not from the absurdity of an amphitheater-sized kitchen, but from Nick’s reluctance to agree to my suggestions because my wife was not home. Nick knew that any decision of mine might well be contravened by higher authority. We were at loggerheads, a frustration that increased in sullen intensity until the dream cracked open, returning me to the cool dim bedroom, the familiar furniture, spouse beside me, cat curled at the foot of the bed. Awake, I reveled in my release, the kitchen wasn’t about to swell like a mutant cabbage, after all; nonetheless, the distortion of my life that the dream’s pathology had wrought rankled me: To a responsible craftsman and his respectful customers the dream did no justice. It was by any measure an offensive slander. Why had my sleeping brain built such a tendentious fabrication? Perhaps unwinding the serpentine coils of those prior scenes might provide a clue? Possibly, but despite my efforts, I failed to recall any earlier fragments: Those, whatever they had been, were lost in the swamp.
So what? What did it matter?
It didn’t, not in the least, but don’t we love doing just this: The irresistible urge to retrieve our dreams from the depths of gluey sleep, to painstakingly unravel these fretted roots that burrow deep into our subconscious, into our fears and sorrows. We gather our counselors—those elders and witch doctors who reside in our souls and those who share our waking lives, mates, friends, coworkers be they so unfortunate—and we throw ourselves into the task, panning like forty-niners the trickling streams of our dream life for messages, symbols, omens. My wife tells me that earlier in her life she kept a dream journal and that she became progressively better at recalling her dreams, writing longer entries each morning. Why do we do this? These are figments of fantasy we all agree, no more than what Scrooge tells Marley he is, a bit of last night’s underdone potato. So, why?
When I came downstairs, the windows were white shrouds, the street not a street but a crystalline meadow sweeping undisturbed to the neighbors’ porch. I had no newspaper. I ate my breakfast thinking of my dream. “The Reluctant Contractor,” I called it. What do dogs make of their dreams? Or our cat, who will occasionally burble softly in some feline rapture—a jolly mouse between the paws, a kibble as big as a cue ball? We explain our dreams, we rehearse and rehash them, serving as expert commentators wearying each other with our tedious narrations. Primitive peoples do it, Ph.D.’s do it. Interesting, this compulsion to lay claim to our sleeping minds: something to do while the shrubs disappear beneath snow that sooner or later will have to be rearranged into piles by the side of the walks; something to do while a brooding hawk shelters on a tall white pine next door. But this is not what draws me.
What interests me is what I’ve come to call, “the production of dream.” More specifically, I’ve become fascinated with the creators of these private Hitchcockian or Chaplinesque dramas. Who are they? Me? I’m not so sure. I have as a matter of fact gone on to declare this whole enterprise of dream-making the production not of my doing, but of a disreputable repertory company housed in some dormitory on the outskirts of my mind, a graveyard shift that shows up at midnight and lays its grubby paws on the controls. Yes, exactly: a gone-to-the-dogs crew if you ever saw one, rowdy, crass, disheveled and slovenly. They do not wash, they do not shave. They belch in public, they fart, they fire up little black stogies and collect the wax from their ears with their fingernails. They put their feet up on the furniture, they slam their coffees down beside the keyboard, they spill the coffee. My wife protests this characterization of my dream production. It baffles her, distresses her, it flatly appalls her, this objectification of my dream creators as if they were not I, not employees under my stewardship. And it’s hard to argue, I admit. Who else, if not I, is responsible for my dreams?
***
I have come in from rearranging the snow. A good foot of the stuff, soaked through with sleet, moist, clumpy, heavy. Heart attack snow, I call this variety, as if by gently spoofing it I might keep it from bringing me ingloriously face down in it. An exercise in humility, rearranging snow. But shoveling’s mindless labor has afforded me an opportunity to step back, to reflect on the precious few winters we are blessedly given, and so, as I massage my stiffened fingers, I suggest that, provisionally, we set aside our civil disagreement of who these roustabouts are who seem to be in charge of answering the phones from midnight to six in our moribund brains and we talk instead about two things: our dreams themselves and what I mean by production.
As I heaved the snow into what resembled a series of burial mounds, I decided that we might analyze dream usefully by thinking of category, of setting, and of plot, or story. Category seems most elemental, but, because the settings occur in all categories and plots, I think starting with setting makes more sense. Very possibly your dreams are more abstract than mine, but mine are always taking place somewhere and those locations recur. Interiors more than exteriors, inside buildings, houses, cars, elevators. Yes, I have city scenes and wide panoramas, but not as frequently. So, what are my interiors? Invariably, sprawling edifices, cavernous as railway stations, many-roomed with hallways that disappear into misty perspective. My dream buildings leak: rain pours in by the buckets, the rugs squish, the wallpaper drapes in long peels. My dream rooms want a good dusting, a good airing out. Frankly, they would profit from an application of Nick’s carpentry skills. And if not in aboveground rooms, I find myself groping through sprawling basements, dim, dank, subterranean settings where Dante sent the bad guys.
If the setting is exterior, it is often a city whose streets are a labyrinth in which I become hopelessly lost. If panoramas, they are almost always wastelands, ash dumps without a trace of vegetation, deeply creviced, and I am in a vehicle heading toward the precipice. If there is a plane above me, it will crash. If I am in a plane, we are worried. The house I spent most of my youth in shows up in my dreams, but distorted, twisted, as if an enormous pair of hands had wrenched the corners in opposite directions. A third-floor flat in a fire-prone triple-decker that my wife and I shared shows up. Looking out the windows never reveals a quite correct view. Sometimes in my dreams I prowl the halls of this house we have lived in for twenty-plus years, discovering rooms I never knew existed being used for purposes I cannot fathom.
Typical settings, these. What are my dream categories?
Well, the first category has to be Where’s the damn bathroom? I imagine this to be the most common dream we have: Everybody’s gotta go. Bathroom dreams find me in painful quest threading through more endless hallways and dungeons. When I finally do locate a bathroom, it is grossly unsuitable. The rooms are squalid, the floors sopping, the bowls, if there are bowls, walnut-brown with mineral deposit. Every so often I stumble into a bathroom with windows all around—windows! What blithering idiot, I rage, has thought to install windows in a bathroom! But in these vile, foetid places what most distresses me is that the urinals or toilets I am to employ are weirdly inappropriate—overstuffed chairs, sofas, lamps, beds.
Am I really, I agonize, to pee into a chair?
Another category is what I call anxiety dreams. Even though I’ve based the bread-earning portion of my life on being in front of people, I share the nearly universal fear of public speaking. In the years it took me to become comfortable before groups, I would night after night be plagued with anxiety dreams. In these dreams I am teaching one of my seminars. An ordinary class, everything’s going fine, then I will squint out at the room to find, incredulously, not ten or twenty participants, but scores and scores. How can I possibly teach hundreds of people? I’m explaining something, say, an obscure grammar point, and I sense people drifting away: chatting, gazing into space, on their feet wandering the room. Anxiety dreams may involve my not being able to find the correct address in the morning, or going out for lunch and discovering myself halfway across some strange city with no way to get back in time, or my getting successfully to a class only to remember I left my briefcase at the hotel.
Other categories are embarrassment dreams—walking into our village center in my underpants—and fear dreams. Having once come within inches of falling from a high roof, I have developed a paralyzing fear of height. In these height dreams I am somewhere far up clinging to a bizarrely constructed scaffolding with no way to get back down, the ladder having disappeared or the normal steps that I walked up now ten feet tall and needing to be rappelled. Sometimes, the steps as I am descending atomize beneath me. Another fear dream is intruder dreams, hearing someone coming stealthily up through the house. In these dreams I try to scream, and the sound I manage to issue, which alarmed my wife when we first became a couple, is what she labels my crypt voice. There are disaster dreams: airliners zooming into a forest in a death descent; nuclear holocaust dreams from my 1950s childhood. And there are dreams of loss, mournful dreams of a parent or friend gone so long, dreams of animals I embrace in loving rediscovery and wake, brought to tears, as they dissolve in my arms.
These are all, for the most part, dark. But there are bright dreams, sexual dreams, gluttony dreams; dreams of splendor, of panoramas not lunar wastelands but meadows, fragrant, green and sweet; dreams of comfort and grace, of quiet, all-consuming, deep and compassionate love. There are dreams that seem to possess no rhyme or reason, as though I’ve accidentally channeled someone else’s dream. And of course prosaic dreams—good God, business meeting dreams! And lastly, dreams within dreams. I remember once a dream within a dream within a dream: Who could keep it all straight?
And the stories, the plots? Problems, puzzles, enjambments and entanglements: cafeterias with more food than one has ever seen but no trays, no utensils, nowhere to sit; vehicles whose steering wheels do not function; hornets swarming, growing as large as starlings; a package with no name, a house with no number. What is wrong with this telephone? How do I get down from here? Oh, they confound us these bedevilments, they scare and bewilder us. We squirm, we kick our legs, we moan, we punch our poor sleeping partners (my wife smacked me a good one once). They consume us, our dreams, they bring us awake stranded on unknown shores, as haunted as old Caliban.
Okay, let’s talk about production.
Note that I am not using the word process. What I prize about production is that it starts us thinking about the fabrications themselves, the shows, the fireworks brought to us gratis every night. It’s the Ed Sullivan Show twice over, a reelly big show, so stay tuned, folks, for some of the most exciting, most foul, most squirrelly goings-on you ever did see! And it is a show—I insist on that.
Do I have an unresolved conflict with my contractor? Is it oedipal? Is Nick a stand-in for my father? Does it have something sneakily to do with the cat? Now, when a kitchen appears in a dream what that really means is . . . . who cares about a stupid kitchen? Asking dreams to be serious, asking serious questions of dreams, seems as pointless as asking a child why he climbs on a sled at the top of a snowy hill to glide all the way down, only to have to lug the thing all the way back up. What’s your problem here, young fellow? Trouble with your mother? Not that I discount dreams, not that I don’t enjoy them, not that they don’t sometimes render me desolate. But they’re shows, entertainments, the nightly follies, and by gussying them up as Serious Psychological Stuff we lose sight of the simple mischief with which these Merry Pranksters our zany dreammakers weave their foolishness about us.
***
So, let’s join my dreammakers. Early evening, they’re outside the studio, slumped in their pickups and ’53 Fords. Since they are my dreammakers, they’ve got their radios on, Pittsburgh 1950s, Porky Chedwick on WAMO, maybe someone’s trying to pull in WOWO, Fort Wayne. A quart of beer in a brown wrapper is circulating. Someone insists on firing up one of those infernal cigars. For tonight’s shows they’ve brought some rough notes, almost all of it recycled material, maybe an unusual twist on something old, maybe some sketchy ideas for a Serious Moment. But nobody here is terribly worked up, nobody’s concerned with originality, continuity, or verisimilitude of story and character. Certainly, nobody cares a fig about ratings or market share—I mean, it’s a tenure-track position: I didn’t hire them, I can’t fire them. Or can I?
Some years ago, after suffering through one anxiety dream too many, I began to question my passivity. I was sick of these dreams and their creation did not feel collaborative or useful. You know, I’m not likely to leave my classroom and wander through a strange city only to realize it’s taken all lunchtime to get here and I don’t have a clue how to get back. Nor have I ever seen a bathroom with windows all around or peed into a chair. The settings began to seem shopworn, the plots repetitive. Wait a minute! the sleeping me cried. Wasn’t I up here on this steeple just last night? Why am I up here again?
So I began to break these dreams. When I found myself in one of these freakish situations, I began kvetching: This isn’t real, is it? And I began to devise tests to ascertain just that. It upset my dreammakers. While they protested that this indeed was real, that I was at that very moment walking into the village having forgotten to put on my pants—feel the cool wind against your thighs, they’d say, conjuring up that sensation, listen to your naked soles slapping on the pavement, sense your mounting chagrin—I would call their bluff. If this is real, I would answer, then I cannot, for instance, fly, can I? No, I cannot fly. So, if this is real and I am actually parading in public in my underpants, then I will not be able to fly. But if this is a dream, maybe I can? And I do! Perhaps my flights are not as graceful as that of the cardinals swooping over our snowy landscape, but up I will rise, an inch, two, a foot, and then, cackling in glee, I am shooting up into the sky, abandoning the dream in shambles below.
I call it breaking the dream. You might call it deauthorizing the dream, disempowering it, desacralizing it. Don’t get me wrong: I bear no enmity toward my dreammakers, I can enjoy their productions. But I don’t like being victimized. Especially, I do not like being subjected to slapdash writing and cheap production values. If all they’ve done is call over to central casting for their staffing requirements, then I reserve the right to break the dream, and I damn well do.
***
We’re going to end with a dream, a scrap. First, some background. My best friend from the years of ten or so through high school—let’s call him Richard—settled his adolescent hash and established himself in his twenties, long before I did. Richard and I had lost track of each other by then, but I knew that he had found a rewarding vocation working with engines and he had found a good woman and started a family. He’d built them a beautiful home. In his early thirties he contracted leukemia. He went through intensive treatment and seemed to be doing well in remission. It was then that a friend put us back in touch, and I spent a long and funny evening reminiscing with him. Within a year, the leukemia took him, quite suddenly. I never recall dreaming about Richard before his death. Since he had been my boyhood companion, I have to believe that occasionally he found his way into my young dreams. But I don’t recollect that. But with his death Richard became—and has continued to be—a regular visitor to my dreams. Months may pass between appearances, I worry that I have finally seen the end of him, but there he will be again—maybe both of us returned to boys, maybe young adults.
Richard, I think, good to see you!
Last night, with our old house creaking beneath its burden of snow, Richard appeared in my dream, near the close of a story that had nothing to do with him. In the dream Richard was in a chair, a sort of exaggerated wing-back chair. The sides of the chair closed around him, and he appeared to be pressed back into it. The effect was coffin-like, and it disturbed me. His face had spread, flattened, as faces in death will do. But it was the topography of Richard’s face that was most arresting: his face was a mesh of fine wrinkles, thousands upon thousands of wrinkles.
He appealed to me from within his chair, “Have I grown old?”
I woke before I could answer him, but as I lay in my familiar surroundings, having for reasons known only to fate succeeded in living into my sixties, I thought of my old chum, of our nutty adventures and of his confident maturation into adulthood that so astonished me. Richard adored his wife, he adored his daughter, he described sitting on the ridge of the house he had just built for them having learned that he had contracted a disease that might kill him. This, he told me, waving his arm at the living room he was so proud of, doesn’t mean anything! What my dreammakers were trying to do, I believe—and I give them credit for this—was answer, or, if not answer, at least confront the two central mysteries of our lives: why do we live, and why do we die? As I pulled back the covers, preparing to rise and begin my day, I formulated my answer to Richard.
No, Richard, you have not grown old.
• • •
Robert McKean’s short story collection I’ll Be Here for You: Diary of a Town was awarded first-prize in the Tartts First Fiction competition and was published by University of West Alabama Livingston Press, Autumn 2020. His novel The Catalog of Crooked Thoughts was awarded first-prize in the Methodist University Longleaf Press Novel Contest and was published, January 2017. The novel was also named a Finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award. He has had six stories nominated for Pushcart Prizes and one story for Best of the Net. He has published more than 20 stories. McKean’s website is: www.robmckean.com.