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Fiction from Web del SolTulunasia Park
From The Tulunasia Journal, AutumnPatrick Keppel
Some time ago, I was fortunate to spot a copy of Dr. Diana Siam's piercing study of dreams, Concurrent Dimensions, on an obscure shelf of the Tulunasia Park library. It lay balanced horizontally atop two slim volumes of equal height--one by a Chinese philosopher whose name now escapes me, the other by Castore, the local botanist, on the subject of medicinal herbs. I had only recently settled for good on this reflective coast, and so could not help but stand grinning for a moment at this odd juxtaposition. I wondered, as I did quite often during that first month, how I could ever have once misunderstood this kind of disorder. It was clearly a pleasant moment, my accidental arrival at this most unlikely bridge of books, yet before I might have heaved a bitter sigh at this further evidence, however slight, of a pervasive incompetence, a malaise of indifference, rapidly spreading throughout the whole round world. I would later examine this and other like signs of my remarkable change of mind in exhaustive depth, but at the time I had not a minute's patience with self-reflection. All I knew for certain was that I knew very little, and that this was undoubtedly the most lucid moment of my life. I grabbed on impulse all three books, blew a decade or so of dust off Concurrent Dimensions, and sat down to immerse myself in this text of which I'd lately heard such reverent praise.
I have since then read the book many times. Controversial* in its time and place, the wonder of her search, the intensity of her desire to glimpse mysteries thickly shrouded by everydayness, now strikes a more resonant chord within us all. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in her introductory chapter. There Dr. Siam, anxious to plunge into the deep waters of her startling discovery yet filled too with humble regard for its many nearly inexpressible ambiguities, introduces her metaphor of the "living mirror" to suggest that each individual can through dreams awaken to a world of unlimited possibilities:We have all [she writes] at least once been suddenly awakened from a dream only to try, while still semi-conscious, to fall back into that sleeping world. Our impulse then is not merely to see, as if watching a film, how the problems set forth in the dream will resolve themselves; we want, rather, to act in the film ourselves, to live with our whole being every facet of the unknown experience. We do not consider in this hazy state that the attempt is in any way odd, nor by any means futile. We fully and easily believe in the simple reality of the vision. Even so, we will later, when completely "awake," claim with a distorted and at times almost desperate arrogance that the image we so confidently sought was 'only a dream.'Later in the work, of course, Dr. Siam recounts the series of dreams she had which led her to this brink of possibility, and then ends with a detailed discussion of how such self-abandonment naturally enables one to control the various settings of his or her own dreams. I always felt it intriguing that Dr. Siam, while still an assistant professor at La Duerma, succeeded in over- coming not only the limitations of her own mind, but those inherent in her professional field as well. She was, I felt, as one so immersed in the objective, work- ing at a considerable disadvantage, so I was certain she was an unusually sensitive and perceptive individual. Since she has recently moved east to Tulunasia Park, I have found this true in the extreme.
How can I explain how misguided this waking notion is? A dream is not a distortion, but an opportunity, a welcome chance to steal a glance into a kind of living mirror. And I know now that if we but allow the instinct which insists upon a return to that dreaming world the freedom it deserves; if we relinquish our rigid belief in the supremacy of the waking self and day and night give ourselves over to the mirror's image, we eventually become conscious of the mind which has always been conscious of each of us--the mind which has at the expense of its own vitality in fact created each of us, and which is restored to awareness again only when the dream allows. We discover at once a perspective we can then never lose and so immerse ourselves in an unending cycle in which all dreams turn inside out (p. 22).
Which is not to say she feels the same way herself; to the contrary, her humility is so genuine it's startling, so much so in fact that I became in a short time convinced that this characteristic formed the very basis of her remarkable emotional and mental powers. When I first met her, I could do little more than emit a series of breathless, fragmented praises, comparing her in less than a minute to six or seven of the greatest poets and philosophers in history. Naturally she was rather taken aback and seemed puzzled as to how she should respond. "I mean, in your dream it was no accident," I ran on excitedly. "You actually figured it out."
Dr. Siam smiled halfway, then shook her head slowly from side to side. "But it was because of weakness," she said finally. "I only 'figured it out,' as you say, because of doubt, because I kept refusing to give myself up." She winced sharply, perhaps considering, as one who has by chance escaped a violent accident does at times for the rest of his or her life, how close she came to disaster and, most of all, how unreasonably she was spared. "Oh, on the surface," she continued with a sigh, "of course I had something to prove. But often when I wrote I swore I was mad, and to be honest, I believe now that's the main reason I did write at all--I mean, to prove my own insanity. I suppose there are those who say I did precisely that. But in any case, the basic truth of the matter is that I was terribly alone and frightened, just like anyone else. Just like yourself, no doubt."
With these words Dr. Siam put to rest my excessive awe, and at once we began to speak at great length about our respective dreams. We continue to do so now, at least once a week, since both of us consider the subject inexhaustible. I am always delighted by the many colorful details Dr. Siam manages to recall, not because they are so very unusual as because they invariably bring out in her a deep fascination more common to a child's perception than a "scholar's." Like a child, she seems to notice and internalize everything that enters her field of vision--and, I would argue, a few things that don't. Like a child she remains surprised at what seem the most insignificant phenomena, reacting to each as if it were occurring for the first time, which (as I know now) it actually is.
It is in a kind of playful celebration of this child's sense that I describe one of my dreams below. My analysis hardly pretends to compare itself with the daring complexities of Concurrent Dimensions. My only hope is that I can reflect at least one of the fresh, bright beams Dr. Siam's work forever emits. In simpler words, my dream is nothing new, but it is a good story nonetheless.
* * I am not quite foolish enough to attempt to square a circle, yet this is precisely my task. The simultaneous images of this dream naturally defy my narrative corners, and I realize already I could end wherever I begin. This dream seems to me not unlike the high-masted ship my patient eyes just guided out to sea. Elevated on this grassy hill high above the sun-spotted ocean, I followed the ship's gentle, bobbing course as far as I could until all at once it vanished into a thin, vaporous line of reddish sea, sky, and sun--one moment the spot of a real vision reflected in my eyes, the next the trace of a memory protected deep within my present consciousness.
This dream is that pinpoint world, a nearly invisible gem of fantastic cut, since even if we should study it every day for years we would glimpse but a tiny fraction of its ten thousand facets. I should like you to see them all. I should tell you, for instance, that in one part of my dream I found myself a small child petrified by the first grade, sitting next to a brazen girl named Mira Doubleday who habitually ate glue; or that in another my ten-year-old self found it difficult to disguise his desire to gaze for hours at his brother's rose-smothered corpse. You should relive with me as well the part of my dream in which I, with damp adolescent palm, for the first time grasped an affectionate female hand, only to stroke at once its one mutilation, a middle finger chopped short by a lawn mower, a purple bulbous stub. Yes, I should tell you every such detail but that they comprise a formidable sea; I would surely thrash about and then drown in any attempt to recall them all. I must therefore be content to limit my narrative to the single facet of the dream which even now I can't help but remember at least once per day, the pivotal scenes that directly preceded my waking.
I entered this part of the dream terrifically bored at age twenty-two. A year out of college and still unemployed, isolated from friends who had vanished happily into the work force, I was content to wallow in my personal creed that I could do absolutely nothing well--or rather, that I could do everything with unsurpassed mediocrity. "Travel" was the only genuine interest I listed on my resume, though I had never once left New England. I was in fact still living in my parents' home in Old Mystic, Connecticut.
They were convinced I was looking for a job, and I suppose it did appear that way. I received at least one rejection letter every day for three months, but I had known all along that I was only remotely qualified for about five or six of the positions. I still do not know what an Obstructive Financier is or does; all I knew then was that at least one was needed on every continent except Antarctica, and that I was willing to learn. Occasionally, my parents' friends and relatives tried to place me in their various banks, offices, and supermarkets, but these little experiments proved embarrassing for all concerned. My benefactors were clearly unnerved by the detached, methodical manner in which I carried out my assigned tasks, no doubt thinking me rather lazy, if not a little soft in the head. "Use your common sense," they told me time and time again when they invariably became exasperated with my frequent questions, and for weeks thereafter I'd try fervently to summon this benevolent god to my aid. But somehow these attempts always ended in some great disaster or other, and the boss we rarely saw would come storming in, shouting "Who did this?!" over and over, and of course the friend or relative who hired me was to blame. Soon I would find myself relieved of more and more responsibilities, until at last, ashamed and nearly brain-dead with boredom, I couldn't help but wonder rather bitterly if it were precisely this "common sense" that enabled its happy possessors to spend nearly every day of their lives in such a meaningless way. Then, of course, we'd have to contrive some circumstantial parting--they had these budget cuts, I had this new job on the horizon--oh, it was awful! After a while, whenever my parents would have any of these helpful people over for dinner, I would either quietly disappear, or, when flight was impossible, like a child develop the symptoms of a mild illness--something at which I became alarmingly adept--and beg my absence be excused.
I had in my dream one night declared myself off-limits in just this manner, when one Harry Sneed made it his business to interrupt my solitude. I cannot say I was surprised. Of all my parents' friends, Harry Sneed was the only one who seemed to care that I was not present when he was. Not that he liked me; to the contrary, he thought me an idle loafer and never missed an opportunity to try to convince my parents, in a voice plenty loud enough for me to hear, that all I needed was "a good, hard kick in the pants"--a prescription for the world's ills to which he had frequent recourse in the arch-conservative editorials he wrote for a local newspaper called the Examiner-Voice.
But I think what bothered him most of all was the idea that anyone in the world thought he could avoid Harry Sneed, much less someone right upstairs, and finally he cracked. That night I heard him shouting my name at least six times during dinner, actually calling up to me with cupped mouth, "He-ey, Tyrone! I'm coming to get you, Tyrone!" In the middle of his fourth scotch, he stormed up the stairs to my tiny cell, which was papered, I remember, with posters of every place I'd ever heard of except Connecticut. Harry scowled at this montage, picked at his balding scalp, and then pronounced my sentence with a smile that creased his face like a moist incision: My little charade was over, he said; I was to report to the Examiner-Voice the following morning at seven sharp.
Of course, I had no intention of working for Harry, but a nervous, self-effacing speech from my father weakened my resolve. The job seemed perfect for me, he pointed out with wrenching timidity, since I would finally have the opportunity to use my degree in psychology, a degree he knew I'd worked hard for, an achievement he too was proud of, since he'd never had such a chance, etc. I did not have the courage to contend that the job, which involved writing a dream interpretation column, probably had as little to do with psychology as my college curriculum had; nor did I have the courage to inform him that I of all people was one of the least qualified for the job, since I had been for what seemed like years unable to remember a single one of my own dreams. Instead I resigned myself to my fate with a sigh and the next day assumed the column's traditional nom de plume, my new identity, Dr. Johann Christian Doppel.
The column, squeezed rather inconspicuously beneath the horoscopes in the lower left-hand corner of the entertainment page, seemed to enjoy what I considered then an unreasonable popularity. A survey posted on the newsroom's bulletin board indicated that 53 percent of all subscribers to the Examiner-Voice "always" read Dr. Doppel Interprets Your Dreams and that about 35 percent of these turned to it before reading anything else. However, it was the visible evidence that soon overwhelmed me. Only after two full weeks did I cease to gape when every day about twenty more letters addressed to Dr. Doppel were dumped into my already cluttered cubicle.
Even so, perhaps what amazed me most about this job was that I actually enjoyed it. As with other jobs I had fallen into in the past, I had no idea how to go about performing it correctly, if indeed that were possible. This time, however, confusion seemed to work to my advantage. For instance, one young married woman wrote that one night after she had argued with her husband, she dreamt that they were poor and living in a country "behind the Iron Hand." Having been born and raised in the free market, they tried to escape by swimming across a narrow river, he holding their son and she their daughter. When she made it to the other side, some people there asked where her husband was, and when she turned around she saw that he and her son were drowning. She swam out to meet them and without hesitating chose to rescue her husband. Her son disappeared under the water, and when she reached the riverbank she discovered that her husband too was dead. As she was hitting him on the chest to revive him, she woke up.
It was of course quite clear to Dr. Doppel, that keen observer of the human drama, that "something was lacking" in her relationship with her husband. Living in the Soviet bloc most likely meant to her that she felt stifled, and probably represented as well her inner anger--a play, believe it or not, on "red" country--which she usually kept concealed. Thus, crossing the river indicated, as it usually did, that she had to make some sort of decision; however, it was clear that both she and her husband were burdened by certain immaturities, represented in the dream by their son and daughter. Now, since she and her daughter made it to the other side, she evidently felt that she was the stronger of the two; her husband, after all, was drowning under the burden of the son. Choosing to save her husband, then, instead of her son suggested that she wished he would rid himself of his immature characteristics, but the fact that he did not survive the ordeal probably meant that she felt he could not. Still, she also believed she must keep trying by "hitting him in the chest"--what else? the heart!--in an attempt to "revive" his inner sensitivity to her needs.
Although I was always aware that what I wrote was, psychologically speaking, far from credible, I soon grew very fond of my Dr. Doppel. There he was, the eminent Austrian physician of mysterious origin, sitting high on his Alp at his broad, ponderous desk, breathing in the perplexing dreams of the world below, breathing out their easy solutions. From such altitude, his long-winded nonsense seemed to make very good sense indeed, and so it became rather a game for me to see how much of this absurdity I could get away with. Naturally I chose to respond in print only to the most dramatic dreams, such as the one above, though to be honest my readers' entertainment was my least concern. All I wanted in this part of my dream was to get through the day with a minimum of boredom, and apparently the only way I could was to respond to these strangers' dreams with interpretations as light as a soft snowfall on April Fool's.
I admit I grew in time more and more suspicious of this Dr. Doppel, but only after what I assume was a month was I forced to face the startling implications of my careless creation. I can never possibly forget the grotesque scene I contrived in which Bundt--the stump of a man who edited the unprestigious and often ridiculed Living section in which Dr. Doppel's kindly elucidations appeared--leapt on me as I entered the newsroom one morning and kissed me like a seal. I swear the man was close to tears. He trembled and choked out a few unintelligible words of gratitude, then just shook my unresponsive hand with his ink-stained flippers and scurried away.
I stood stunned for a moment in Bundt's wake, but a quick check of the bulletin board explained his exuberance. The aforementioned percentages had skyrocketed to 98 and 54, and apparently as a result the lowly Living section was now the "most important," the "most interesting," and the "most helpful" in the entire paper. Further, a few posted letters heaped praise on the column, describing Dr. Doppel, much to my embarrassment, as "wise," "careful," and "concerned." One reader insisted that he trusted the good doctor with his dreams far more than anyone else, and another even thanked the Examiner-Voice for "bringing to this region such a sincere and sympathetic, albeit invisible, father confessor."
I stared at all this in vacant disbelief, but then a sudden perturbation sent me hurrying through the newsroom's labyrinth of partitions and desks to my cubicle. The situation there was far worse than I had expected. My desk was smothered beneath a mutant pile of almost two hundred envelopes!
In awe I sifted idly through the stack; a few letters tumbled like dry leaves to the smeared yellow tiles below. I did not then understand just how easily, and how desperately, people would reveal their most oppressive fears and desires to even the slightest hint of a benign, responsive authority in the world, but there in front of me was the overwhelming proof. Even then I suspected that these dreams would be far more disturbing than the previous ones. Selecting a letter from the pile's summit, I trembled to see how accurate my guess might be.
The letter was from a 44-year-old man who prefaced his dream by telling me all about his job at a medallion factory. He wrote he was one of fourteen employees there who sat all day long in front of a deafening monster of a machine that pressed gold, silver, and bronze into prepared molds. For safety reasons their hands had to be bound in leather straps that dangled on long cords from the top of each press.
He was in his nightmare pressing at superhuman speed hundreds of gold commemoratives, which he had in fact done earlier that day while awake. In a blur he placed the shimmering blanks into the mold, pressed the dirty black button to activate the machine, and then removed the finished product--piles and piles of patriotic medals celebrating New London's submarines. He said that at first he was proud of himself, and hopeful too that such amazing efficiency would be recognized by a quarter-an-hour raise, but soon he began to feel unusually tired and queasy. He decided he'd take a short break but at once realized he couldn't stop by himself. As if detached from his body, his hands continued to work at a furious pace. He glanced desperately to either side of him only to see his fellow workers, their hands obediently strapped, flopping about like wooden marionettes. He began to sob uncontrollably but could shed no tears. Frantic, he tried to stick his head under the two-ton press as it slammed down on the blank gold before him, but a tight leather strap appeared around his neck to prevent him. Each time he tried, the strap yanked his head back with greater violence, until at last his neck began to bleed. Sobbing without tears, choking without dying, he woke up.
I shook my head and sighed throughout, but oddly enough it was only after I had finished reading the letter that I realized what should have unsettled me most of all. The very idea should have made me recoil the moment I'd read the letters on the bulletin board. I suppose I too had begun to consider Dr. Doppel an essence far removed, because only at that moment did I face the awful fact that the role of New London's wise, sincere, sympathetic, and invisible father confessor was solely mine.
*Perhaps "loudly ignored" would be more accurate. Because of its "unusual" scope and "unverifiable" experimental methods, many of Dr. Siam's former colleagues at the University of California at La Duerma had in various publications condemned Concurrent Dimensions as "a preposterous and absurd fiction" and as "yet another personal whim masquerading as serious scholarship, based as it is upon a total absence of fact."