spawn of the ten-minute story

I thought I was going to write a story about a magic house the other day, but I wrote this instead. I note that I have not posted the remainder of Poo School, but I just can’t get excited enough about it to bother.

Instead, I present another ten-minute story. Same format: one writing session and one redraft while entering the text. I need another name for these, though, since this one took probably two hours all told.

-rf

Dream Devices

It’s a neurological condition. I can’t dream. Or, I do have dreams, but not as many as other people, and I never remember them. I’ve known no frustration greater than being woken by a researcher and told that I was dreaming a dream I can’t remember.

Usually my mind just staggers obsessively through the events of the day, a kind of semiconscious brooding doze. And I snore.

I’m supposed to wake up midway through the night to give my brain a chance to restart the dreaming process. Sometimes I can’t get back to sleep-- adding insomnia to injury.

So one early morning in April, the first intimations of sunrise dulling the stars, I was watching the tail end of the TV loop, that wasteland between three and six, which has improved considerably over the last decade, but still can’t even kindly be called "good."

I watched an antique cop drama with lurid hair, then part of a film on the Family Values network with all the Lord-in-vain dubbed out, and then I descended to the level of reruns of children’s shows, since it was that or This Old House.

Apparently insomniac children like to relive the greatest moments of Inventions! Super Crafty Kids on the FunTimes channel. (I note that a possible acronym for Inventions! Super Crafty Kids is I-SuCK.)

It was hosted by two former child actors in spandex superhero outfits, one showing a paintbrush, the other a musical note– (they must reek – is the show too cheap for breathable microfibre?) They demonstrated how to make ugly things out of popsicle sticks while narrating each step in shrilly cheerful voices.

I switched off the sound and put the Spanish captioning on for practise. The words formed along the bottom of the screen, obscuring those busy, eager hands.

An English phrase drifted by, finned with quotation marks: "Dream Machine." I sat forward. The silence, and the effort of translation, gave the show what I thought of as a dreamlike quality. Or, more precisely, a vision, not quite parsable, and irreducible.

The "machine" was essentially a mobile, made of yarn and popsicle sticks and paper, but it was clever, too. It looked like a hot-air balloon, and if you blew on it or put it in a breeze, it spun. (Or it was supposed to. Paintbrush Lad’s just drooped to one side sadly, trembling, as if afraid of his Super Breath.)

It made me wonder if someone somewhere was having a joke, since the finished artifact was reminiscent in some ways of various devices intended to induce "drug-free hallucinations," which I have ordered over the years in an effort to experience the dream state.

I didn’t have popsicle sticks, but I had chopsticks, red garden twine for yarn, and plenty of late-night take-out receipts to hole-punch and tie in the round for the panels of the spinning balloon. The result was not exactly artistic, but I hung it above my bed, pleased at having produced something out of one of my long empty nights.

I lay down under it, looking up through the paper skeleton. I blew a current of air towards it, but my breath didn’t seem to reach, although it activated an early mosquito, which began noisily haunting my face. I got up and stomped around waving a book until I killed it or it got bored and left.

I lay down again and shut my eyes. I rested like that until I realized wearily that I wasn’t going to sleep after all. I opened my eyes. The room was murky, distorted by my fatigue. The dream machine was turning slowly.

I stared at it. There’s no breeze, I thought. Then, why can’t I focus on it properly? And then, with growing wonder, I’m dreaming.

Which woke me up. But I carried that dream with me all day, close against my chest like a small cherished animal. My sleeping mind had dared to leap out into hypothesis. It was a dull dream, but it was mine.

I was terrified the experience would never repeat itself. I would have said, before, that remembering even one dream would satisfy me. Now I know that one of anything only makes me greedy.

The next night I kept peering at the machine through half-closed eyes, trying to recreate that confused vision. I saw the cage of my own lashes, and the red logos of the restaurants repeated around the circle.

I retreated into familiar paths of rehearsal and teeth-grinding.

Towards dawn, I opened my eyes. There was a woman standing next to my bed. I startled back. Her face was at once familiar and unknown. Solemn, accusatory. I was afraid.

My breath rushed in. I opened my eyes for real. Another dream!

I began to introduce my dreams casually into conversation at work.

"You ever have that dream where you think you’re waking up, but actually you’re still asleep?"

"Yeah."

The rush of finally understanding a shared human experience. "Me too!" Pride and awe in my voice. Then, because more seemed to be expected, "Isn’t it weird?"

"...yeah."

I became superstitious about the device. My conscious mind believed it was a placebo, a suggestion, not a magic device whose instructions had been broadcast to me over the television, but on behalf of my subconscious, I kept it up very carefully anyway. I dusted it, fixed its balance, made sure it could spin freely.

My dreaming mind branched out. I dreamed of turning on the TV and not being able to get sound. I dreamed of being in the kitchen. I experienced that unnerving dream when you’re about to urinate and then you realize you’re only dreaming that you’re in the bathroom. Then you wake up and go down the hall to the bathroom, and it’s much colder than in the dream. (Right?)

During one of these, realizing I was dreaming, I made a great effort and turned myself to look in the bathroom mirror. The face in the deep silver pool was mine, but wrong.

Waking up with an aching bladder, I stumbled into the bathroom. On the way back, I looked at myself in the real mirror. It was none too clean, but I saw the difference. The face in the dream was mine as it had been when I was a child of eleven or twelve.

"Do you ever dream of yourself as younger than you are?" I asked the woman form the cubicle next to mine at work.

"I read someplace that you only do that when you’ve had some big trauma." she said cheerfully.

It was like having all the dreams I should have had all through my life, jumbled, out of order– blurry infant dreams, scary childhood nightmares, adolescent wet dreams.

One morning I woke afraid, unable to shake the idea that I’d been dreaming a dream from old age, a memory dream patched out of fragments of things that hadn’t happened to me yet. A dream from the future.

If all our actions, from a sneeze to a home run, are already implied by the original math of the universe, then all our dreams are there, too, carried in us like a fiddlehead in the heart of a fern, like the dream of a human being lies inside the pinpoint egg cell.

I had seen by this point that you can dream anything– a flying lion, a talking corpse– and it doesn’t have to be true or even possible. But I couldn’t get rid of the idea. I had more of these dreams. Not every night– just often enough that I became a little afraid to fall asleep, which upset me.

They weren’t prophecies. I didn’t see lottery numbers or headlines. They were the garble of memory and hallucination that is the recipe of dreams, but there was something in them that I recognized as mine, a part of a self I hadn’t become yet.

Unknown faces kindled gasping sorrow in me, stirred fear, brought regret. I’d wake weeping. Or, once, laughing. From a dream of roses. I still don’t know why it was so funny.

One day, I saw the woman from my early dream, her morose face reflected suddenly in a bookstore window. I turned to her, and she smiled. She was radiant; the opposite of my dream. I thought, one day I’ll see that expression on her face, that grim accusation, but I was compelled to find out how it got there. It colours our friendship a little, this waiting.

Another dream happened only once. There have been no others like it. It was a fitful dream, of running, falling, half-waking, thrashing in bed, running again. Then falling suddenly backwards, struck in the chest by an invisible hand. Frozen on my back, unable to move, unable to draw breath. Knowing I needed to wake myself up, but unable to do so. Then, as suddenly, perfectly awake, in a silent room.

But not quite that. In between, in the tiny moment before waking, the smallest possible segement of time the human body can measure, a terrible silence. An absence. A not-being deeper than dreamless sleep. Too brief almost to register, and at the same time, infinitely long.

I tell tolerant friends about my funny nightmares and my eerie sex dreams. I tell no one about this dream.

I think it is the last dream I am supposed to have. I think it's the dream I have when I am dying. I don’t know what it means that I have already dreamed it. Does it change my death? Will it be empty and dreamless as my past? Or will the dream come back again? Will I recognize it as it begins, and know that I am about to die? Will I be afraid?

I thought of taking down the dream machine, but I’ve already seen what I would have wanted to protect myself from.

My dreams are still sweet to me, although I am beginning to take them for granted the way that other people do-- to resent nightmares and treat fractured narratives as puzzles from my day-to-day life. I do not see them each as an infinite gift from my sleeping brain. It holds all dreams, and also the end of all dreaming. I might be able to end the dreams myself, artificially, by taking down the machine-- removing the suggestion. Silencing the unconscious. But I won’t be able to make myself forget.

--the end