harlotte had a recurring dream after her mother’s death.
In the dream, she was walking on the sand by a large lake, so large that the far shores were invisible in the distance. The sand was white and silky smooth, and her bare feet sunk into it with a purely physical sensation of pleasure. The sensual sand encompassed her foot as she exerted the pressure of her body on it. As she lifted her foot, the sand closed around the footprint, erasing any memory of its passing. The feeling of the sand sent a tingling shiver up her leg as each of her feet in turn sank into it, engulfed in its center, and then rose from it into the open air.
As she walked along the beach, her eyes were focused downward, at the sand and her feet, and their interminable motion of pleasure: sinking into the sand, rising from the sand, sinking into the sand, rising from the sand.
This perpetual motion of walking hypnotized her, put her into a trance. She left her mind, and so she never realized the transition between sand and water. The comfortable feeling of the sand was replaced by the sucking liquid of water, parting freely against her foot and yet pushing up with its own passive pressure as her weight fell upon it.
She walked, now on liquid. At first, her foot would reach the solidity of sand, still smooth and flawless, below the shallow reach of water. Gradually the sand receded, but her foot continued to fall to the same depth. The water was somehow thicker than water. As her foot made its recurring journey into the depths, the water condensed to honey and then to something more, something solid beneath her, concocted for the sole purpose of upholding her, levitating her at the top layer of water. The water was dark and deep. Perhaps there was motion barely visible underneath the rising and falling of her feet, but perhaps it was merely the reflection of Charlotte herself on the water.
Foot following foot, in her erotic dream state, she walked out onto the water. She stopped, not by her own will, but by the dictates of her body, which moved in its own prescribed pattern. Now, both feet planted beneath her in the water, the liquid lapping at her ankles with a lush sensitivity, she looked up from the ground for the first time. The shores were distant around her. Her tracks were invisible in this transient medium. Her sight moved effortlessly in a full circle around her, encompassing the fullness of the lake, regardless of the constrictions of eyes or faces.
Beyond her in every direction, the lake stretched effortlessly, motionlessly, smoothly, serenely.
As she was lulled into a state of eternal calm, a figure constructed itself at the farthest point of the horizon.
Her gaze fixed in its direction. It existed merely as a play of light and shadow above the water in the ambiguous region of mist between surf and sky. If the surroundings had been full of movement, created of streets and shop windows, horses and automobiles, the subtle form would have been invisible. Only among the calm and peace of the cold lake did this vision present itself to the eye, to the attention of the mind.
Charlotte waited and watched as it drew nearer. It gained form and figure from the mists that surrounded it. Still one with the sky and water, the apparition gained bulk and dimensionality. As it grew in presence, moving ever towards Charlotte over the smooth waters, it gained detail. It became nameable.
After a wait of the interminability of dreams, the figure hovered ethereally before Charlotte.
“Baby,” Charlotte named it, “I told you to go.”
“I can’t go,” the figure said and didn’t say.
“You can go. Just know that you can go.”
The figure hovered in silence.
“Go!” said Charlotte. The serenity of the lake was shattered.
“No,” said the baby.
“You are unnatural here.”
“It does not matter.”
“Get on your way. You have nothing to do with me.”
“I’ve everything to do with you.”
“What do you want?”
“Want? Want? We all want.”
“Want what?”
“Anything that you can’t give us.”
“Us?”
“I am I, and I am us.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Why should you understand?”
“Who are you?”
“I am pain.”
Then the figure would move closer and closer to Charlotte, as she stood unmoving in the dead center of the lake. It was a natural change, the figure engulfing and overtaking her, until the two were joined and unified.
Then Charlotte awoke.
During the daylight hours, Charlotte’s house was filled with odd occurrences. The kitchen was a particularly belabored room. Cabinet doors would open and shut at their own whims. No one could prepare a meal or pour a glass of milk without being jostled mercilessly. Food that should have been perfectly good was spoiled. Flames on the stove were a dangerous thing, as they exhibited a tendency to suddenly erupt into blazes.
The rest of the house was not immune. Montague was found chasing invisible entities through doorways and down halls, until his pursuit would dead-end in an empty room, where he would moan and cry at the ceiling for hours upon end. Stones that had laid unmoved for years took it upon themselves to hurl across the drive. Professor Rowe’s books, which had calmly behaved themselves in the normal manner in the past, could not manage to stay on the shelves. Although the professor found that the random pages they opened to, as they fell to the floor, were intriguingly useful, this habitual untidiness was less than desirable.
Professor Rowe related these occurrences to his daughter and felt that the best way to combat them was through psychoanalysis.
“My dear,” he said, “you know quite a bit about this process. I ask you to open yourself up to it fully and not be constrained by any preconceived notions.”
Charlotte told him of her recurring dream.
“Dreams,” he said, “are always important.”
They worked for many weeks on this particular dream. Its unchanging nature and constant recurrences were encouraging to Charles.
“Let us begin,” he would say, “at the beginning. Describe again the shore.”
“It is an untouched beach,” she said.
“Yes?”
“A virgin shore.”
“Why is that?”
“No one has been there. No one has traveled there.”
“It is new ground.”
“Yes.”
“And you lay footprints upon it?”
“Not exactly. My footprints are swallowed up by the sand.”
“Yes?”
“The sand won’t accept my prints, it won’t be trampled on.”
“In fact, it resists the knowledge of mankind.”
“I suppose so.”
“You see that this is the mind of God, the message of God, that refuses to be imprinted on the mind of man.”
“Yes, I see.”
The analysis went on in this vein for some time. Still, the dream remained the same, and the house continued to be tormented.
And then, one night, the dream changed.
“Now,” it said, “you will know.”
“How will I know?”
“You and I, we are joined. You can feel it already.”
“Yes.”
“Be still and listen.”
What I remember is vague and strange. I came from a place where there was no real understanding of those things that surrounded me. There were colors, but I did not know the word ‘color.’ There were shapes, but I had no concept of ‘shape.’
What loomed large in my mind was a circular thing. It was a face, or a breast, or both, or neither. I only know that it attracted me, and that when it was gone from me, I created an uproar. My only recourse to the world, whenever I needed or wanted, was noise. Only when I had this circular shape near me, with me, was I peaceful. Sometimes this shape seemed to be a thing in the world. Sometimes it seemed to be merely an extension of my own mind.
But everything in this time is confused. The external world, the world of actual things that existed around me, and the internal world, that only existed within me, were inseparable. I had no conception of myself as separate from any physical reality, just as now I am joined with all things. Now, I have a greater understanding. During this time, all was confusion. I cannot really tell you what it was like. My hand did not seem to belong to my body. My surroundings did not seem separated from myself.
I never had time to untangle this jumble of unimaginable issues. Before I could resolve my situation, understand my self and others and the space that we occupied, a time of agony came upon me. I was unaware of anything, in one of the frequent periods of oblivion that characterized my state, when suddenly a feeling of pressure and pain enveloped me. I remember a sweet smell and an unrelenting darkness. A feeling of panic developed in me. For the first time, I recall feeling separated from my surroundings. “It” was upon me, something separate from me, outside of me, in the vast unknown was attacking me. I was not ready for this separation of self from other. Only the most rudimentary instinct of preservation allowed me to realize the something outside myself was my enemy. I have an impression of darkness, darkness and a deep, red light. Red from underneath, molten red that comes from an angry, burning fire. The red that would forge something hateful.
This struggle and anguish did not last long. I sank into oblivion again, unaware that I had undergone a deep and irreversible change.
If this oblivious, non-being state was like sleep, then I dreamt. There were lights and colors and shapes, incomprehensible things that even now I don’t have words for, things that cannot be represented in three dimensions. Ideas, knowledge flashed through me and within me. All of these things were one with me. I can’t really explain. I was greater than myself, and there was peace in the knowledge of the eternal cycle of all things. I had no thought, only being.
As brutally as I was pulled into this state, I was pulled out of it. I was dragged separate from the universe, a drop of water falling from an ocean. In a moment, I existed and I was transformed.
Not only was I incorporeal, I found, but my mind was fully grown, fully sensate. I understood who I was, what I was, and what had happened. Yet, my knowledge was useless to me. I was not bound by a body, but I was confined behind a screen. My ability to perceive the physical world around me was limited. I could not communicate. I was bound to my mother, tied to her and yet separated from her.
I had gone from total connectedness to total isolation in a single blow. I tried to make myself known, but no conscious action of mine had any effect. I did create changes in the world, waves upon reality, but this was entirely unconscious. I could not control it. These were the things, though, that I perceived most clearly. I heard the cries in the night, my own cries played back to me. I smelled the scents of my former self. Each of these effects was an echo, originating within me and emanating back to me.
It was you who ripped me into this world, who made me what I am. You reached into that other place and pulled me out. I cannot return.
Now you’ve separated me from the mother to whom I was bound, but you have not freed me. I am bound to you with a different bond. I am your pain.
In 2005, it was reported that a scientist conducted a memory experiment. This scientist convinced a number of people, through suggestion, that they had as children felt sick after eating strawberry ice cream. This supposed memory caused the people to be less inclined to eat strawberry ice cream, at least at the moment.
I know this because I read about it. At least, I believe I read about it. I have a memory of reading about it. Not that false kind of memory like the strawberry ice cream. This memory is real, and I can prove it by finding the same article again. Then I will have a second memory, a real memory that reinforces the first one, not a strawberry ice cream memory.
The journalists who wrote stories about the strawberry ice cream memories wrote down things that they remembered they saw and remembered they were told. The scientist, assistants, and subjects remember the experiment. They remember writing descriptions of the experiment, generating recordings of the experiment. All of their notes, their collective recollections, their recordings, all of these things are reinforcements for their minds that what they remember is true. Truth lies in reinforcing your memory with new memories, driving home that this memory is concrete and actual. The scientist and assistants remember reading their own records, watching their own recordings. They reinforce their brains, create an impenetrable wall of interlocking memories that indicate the truth.
Perhaps God is a student of memory, and all of our neatly docketed and filed records of the past are doctored in a complex conspiracy to make us believe that we can create results by our actions.
When I remember a dream, it is a memory of something that I know is false. It has no physical reality. It is only in my mind: a shadow in a mirror. Yet, the shadows in my mirror are truth. As the great Professor says, all dreams are true. The truth is just disguised.
My dream is all about me, the most important (and only sure) thing in the universe, with no intrusions from pesky reality. There are no “objective” things in my dream, no things outside of myself. There is no strawberry ice cream in my dream. When I awake, the dream is only a memory, but that does not matter. As I relate it, I am aware of its inadequacies.
I did dream of the spirit of a baby, incessantly and repetitively, in the weeks following my mother’s death.
My memories of these dreams are in bits and pieces. I know that over the passage of time, I have filled them in with things from my imagination, logical deductions from no evidence. It doesn’t matter. The dream came from my mind. My mind reconstructs it. The same source, the same result. You always know the truth about your dreams.
I remember an impression of red, like a light, so bright that it hurts my eyes. Even when I closed my eyes and turned away, the aching red light persisted in piercing my eyelids. It imbedded itself in my mind, in my cornea. Red is an angry color, an energetic, moving, electric color. Red is a violent color. That red was the most vivid color I have ever seen. All other reds pale in comparison.
One snatch of conversation:
“What could I say? What could I do?”
“Nothing, nothing.”
“She murdered me. Murder, murder, murder.”
That word. It echoed and rummaged around in my subconscious. “Murder.” I can still hear it now, when I close my eyes.
I had a dream that Montague was sitting on my chest. He was moving his tail slowly and steadily, hypnotically, like a snake. His eyes were wide and bright as he stared at my face.
He opened his mouth and said, “Murder.”
“What?” I asked.
“Murder. Murder. Murder.”
He blinked his eyes at me, and began clawing into my chest, making muffins with his paws.
Then I was awake, lying in bed, and Montague was on my chest, making muffins with his paws.
“What?” I said again.
He cried at me, his cat cry. Mew.
I was standing alone in my room, looking at myself in the mirror, brushing my hair. Behind my shoulder in my ear, as clear as day I heard it: Murder. I looked over my shoulder. The room was empty. There was nothing in the air. I was awake. I remember that was not a dream, not an ice cream memory.
I was walking up a spiral staircase, surrounded by walls. At the bottom of the wall, where it met the stair, there was a crack. My eye followed the crack as I wound my way up the staircase. In some places, the crack was almost nonexistent. In other places, it was wider, much wider, wide enough to fall through. As much as I wanted to look forward up the stairs, my eyes were drawn to the crack at the bottom of the wall.
People were calling to me from above. I was in a line of people who were moving up the stairs. These were my ancestors. I was the last in the line.
I looked up from the crack.
In front of me, there was a thin old woman with white hair. She turned around, casually, and extended a bony hand toward me. I could see the sinews in her arm, exaggerated through the translucent white of her skin, which was marred by the blue of her veins. Her fingers were wedged together and distorted into a claw from arthritis, but her fingernails had grown long and razor-sharp. There was no concern on her face, and she smiled at me. Her teeth were also razor-sharp. They were small biting implements, waiting only to get a grasp on something soft and meaty.
“Murder,” she said.
The floor seemed to disappear from beneath me. A vacuum grabbed me in its eternal arms. I was falling. The woman, her arm still outstretched to hold me, disappeared into the distance. The staircase was swept away into some impossible sky. The world appeared around me in a flood of daylight. I was on a hill, outside, tumbling down among weeds and grasses and dirt.
This is a dream. This is true.
I would wake up in the middle of the night, with a panic in my chest, knowing that I had just barely escaped death. On waking, I had no memory of what I had seen or heard in my private bedtime world. Flashes of a dream would come to me during the day: a red and dripping wall, a descending cloud becoming thick and hot and hostile as it engulfs me, the smell of milk becoming intensified hundreds of times over (as Montague must smell milk) and creating a needful desire, the taste of milk mixed with the iron taste of blood.
I found a piece of paper one day that I had written on as a child: I hate you so much, can’t you understand that I needed to talk to you, otherwise I wouldn’t have been so horrible? I can feel myself going insane. I feel enclosed, trapped. I have been crying for no reason. I can’t sleep, I can’t eat. I’m not myself. I think there is something wrong with me. Why can’t I talk to you? You didn’t even hear me, God damn you. I want to set this entire place on fire. A match to the papers, and sit and watch it burn. Or jump out of the window and leave it all behind me. I hate life. It is too complicated, too heavy. I have become confused.
The sad part is that the world never ends. A point of light at the end of the tunnel is another soul. Fear is loneliness and loneliness is death.
Kill me, send your sword
Through my heart, pumping
Red blood and let me
Finally slip away and die,
Denying insignificance.
I love you, and I don’t mean to hurt you, but I hurt inside. Would you forgive me if I died? I am wracked with guilt, the past haunts me, ghostly chemicals in my brain, tearing away at my sanity. The pen is mightier than the sword. I raise my sword to the paper and stab myself. The blood spurts on the page in gasps, and drowns. Leeches carry away my illness by carrying away my blood.
Are these my thoughts? Who are they to? What do they mean?
Weeks stretched into months. Over time, I came to believe in a story that I made up in my head. It was not something that I dreamed. It was not something that I remembered. It was not something that I was told. It was something that I saw in my mirror.
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