WAS THERE REALLY A DREAM MACHINE?

Two dreams, both of an unusual and ominous character, were vouchsafed unto me last night. You get to hear all about them. Lucky you. Don't read this if you're already feeling depressed.

Dream #1 -- Most of the details are gone, but I was visiting my friends Cat and Susan. Cat was recovering from something and at times he seemed like Cat and at others like my brother Kenneth.

(Has that happened to you in dreams, that an individual's identity shifts around and it seems perfectly natural while the dream is happening and it's only when you wake up that you wonder what the hell? Of course it has. Maybe these people really are of indeterminate identity in the dream, or it may be that in the dream the person has an identity you wouldn't be able to bear if you were awake, and your waking mind unconsciously breaks it up into two people and gradates between the two? Too fanciful, I'm sure.)

The house they were living in was more like a modern art museum than a house, except at the end of the main gallery there was a den with a TV in it. Cat, or Kenneth, had taken up painting, and he showed me some of his work; it was good, if amateurish. He had potential. This was the part where he seemed most like Kenneth. He broke down and cried, an un-Kenneth-ish (and un-Cat-ish) act except in times of stress, and we held onto each other, and I told him I was happy to have him for my little brother. I don't really know why he was crying like that, but I was crying too.

Then, don't ask me why, we were on a bus trip. We were taking some kind of tour. The details of this are fuzzy. Cat was now definitely Cat, and the kids were being their usual obnoxious if entertaining selves, and I was trying to help C&S keep them in hand.

I was on the bus, on the last leg of the tour, when it occurred to me that C&S and the kids weren't anywhere on the bus. It occurs to me now that they may have abandoned me, but in the dream I assumed that they had never intended to come this far, and had made other arrangements, and I was inattentive when they discussed it with me.

We'd already gone a good way and taken a number of turns and there was no question of asking the driver to stop so I could get out and walk back. It wasn't long before I wished I had, because the bus let us off in a very strange little town. It seemed to be in the wrong country, or even the wrong era. It was more like the 1950s than anything except there weren't any malls in the 1950s, I don't think, and the bus dropped us off in what was undeniably a mall, though an odd one. For one thing, buses don't usually drive around in malls. And the whole place had an uncanny, between-the-worlds atmosphere that was really out of place in a commercial enterprise.

Probably the best course would have been to stay on the bus and hope it might take me home, but I guess I was hoping C&S had realized what I'd done and followed me, so I made the fatal mistake of getting off the bus, took a few moments to realize that C&S probably wouldn't be able to follow me here, turned and found that bus and driver were gone. Well, maybe I could call them. Their cell number wasn't in my wallet. I didn't have my cell, and even if I'd had it, it didn't have any minutes on it (as in life, so in dreams), and I doubted if there was a T-mobile outlet around this place. Pay phone? Couldn't find one. Even if I found one, it was doubtful whether a phone in this weird place could have reached them, wherever they were now.

And it didn't occur to me until just now that the cell-phone probably wouldn't have worked anyway. Or maybe it would have. As in life, so in dreams, but not always.

From this vantage, it seems as if in that bus ride I crossed the boundary between one dream and another, and the personnel and details of the previous dream were somehow still important to me even though they had no actual existence here.

And it seemed as if I couldn't exist here either, for long. The sun was setting. The mall was closing; security people chased me out. Other shops and offices were shutting; the whole town was shutting up for the night. I was looking around for an embassy of the Old Country, for anyone who might help me. The light was fading.

Dream #2 -- More time-travelling. It looked like New York City in the 1920s but it was on an island somewhere in the Pacific, and it was a colonial city. I had purchased an old bar on an avenue, and I and some friends of mine were using it as a front for a detective agency, but at the same time I wanted to make the bar a going business concern on its own. Natural enough; it was my money and, in dreamland as in life, I didn't have much.

But there was a break-in one night early in our tenancy, and the plate-glass window up front was damaged, as was the window on the neighboring store. For some reason, I was going to have to pay for both -- apparently because mine was the store the thieves had actually broken into, though legal reasoning that seemed depressingly watertight in the dream seems murky now -- and I could in no way afford to pay for both, or even for one of the windows.

I don't know why plate-glass was so expensive if this was an island colony, though it certainly seemed like a bustling metropolis.

But I was worried about my bar, and I was searching the joint, trying to figure out what the intruders had wanted -- was there anything missing? Not that I could tell -- and I think I was worried they might have planted a bomb -- and my friends were no help; they were in the back room drinking my beer and debating whether they should stick with me or write the bar off as a bad job and get their own little office somewhere. Bastards. There was one guy who was actually helping me search the place and he was a bit annoying, though I was grateful enough for the help in spite of that.

My search was interrupted when a cop outwardly of the bumbling Irish type I've seen in old movies but never actually met came in through the hole in the front window. A bit supernatural, that; my friend had duct-taped the hole for me (duct tape?) but for some reason the cop was able to walk right through.

He started asking me questions, his large moustache moving when he talked, bunching when he smiled his disbelieving smile. For some reason, we started playing dodgeball -- there was a ball lying around. We were playing at question-and-answer simultaneously with the dodgeball; he seemed to suspect there was something amiss with our operation and was trying to catch me in a lie. I had increasing trouble answering his questions honestly -- anyone in business, it seems, even on the humblest level, is about two steps from prison if he's not careful.

It was just the two of us; the boys were still in the back room swilling, and I didn't know where my friend had got to. As the questions got harder to answer the ball got harder to handle -- it became heavier, larger, and less perfectly round, and it was all a bit like trying to play dodgeball with a bean-bag chair. (Have I ever played dodgeball? Not sure. Certainly not recently.)

My adversary the Law, curiously enough, had changed also: he had gradually become larger, rounder, lighter, and more difficult to pin down. He still had the moustache, though the location of the rest of his face was more difficult to determine. The moustache still moved when he talked, bunched up when he smiled.

My last view before waking was of the cop floating near the ceiling, like a slumming planet, and whacking the ball, which had become like a bean-bag three-quarters filled with molasses, right at me. I was watching it descend in the late afternoon light from the broken window, wondering if it would kill me, and trying to think up an answer to his last question.

*

In both of these dreams runs a thread of hopelessness which I have labeled the "crisis of competence" motif. (Just now. I didn't really have a name for it before this morning. I may have been somewhat influenced by the fact that when I woke up from Dream #2 I was running twenty minutes late for work.) Whatever it is I'm trying to accomplish in the dream becomes less and less accomplishable as the dream progresses, or regresses, and then the dream ends right before the spot where we'd hit the recognition-and-reversal, in a well-crafted story, or right where things become quite hopeless, in real life. To quote John Updike out of context, "The typical Kafkaesque process of non-arrival is in place." The classic example of this in my own Oneironomicon is a dream from several years back in which I had reenlisted, don't ask me why, and had to report to a command on the west coast with a full seabag. Simple. Not a thing I ever had much trouble with in real life. But by the time the dream ended I was stranded naked in the midwest somewhere, with only the seabag, which I was trying to use to hide my private parts from public view, and one last quarter, which I was trying to use in a payphone to call someone and beg them to please for the love of Jesus come and help me. The quarter kept bouncing merrily out of the return slot.

I don't suppose anybody really wants to read about this, any more than I want to dream it, but I do find it consoling that, as hopeless as I am in many ways, I'm not nearly as bad as I am in my dreams. I can usually manage. Sometimes I need help, and I often have the good sense to ask for it. In dreams I try to do it all myself -- in dreams there is nobody else, or usually nobody who matters -- and I end up, metaphorically or literally, tangled up in typewriter-ribbon like the late James Thurber, screaming for my wife to for God's sake come in out of the kitchen and help me, help me, help me, I'm starting to go under, damn it. I don't know what your dream-life is like, but maybe you have something similar -- maybe the worst-case scenarios play out in our dreams so that we don't have to have them in life.

Or maybe I'm being an utter Pollyanna. There are people on this funhouse planet whose worlds and lives continue to go steadily to hell, especially in countries like Iraq, until they end, often with wretched abruptness -- or not nearly abruptly enough. I hear about these people all the time. One, a fourteen year old Iraqi girl, was gang-raped in 2005 by American soldiers while their buddies murdered her whole family in another room. When they'd had their way with her, they killed her too and doused her in kerosene and lit her on fire, hoping to cover up what they'd done. All the murders that've been going on, who's going to notice one more? At least one of them had been drinking. All of them were murdering shits who dishonored their uniform, though you could argue, metaphorically at least, that they were only following a popular trend. Either way, Abeer Qassim al-Janabi is gone. Her dream has ended, the Old Country knows her no longer, and if there is a New Country for her to go to -- "much virtue in if" -- phone lines don't reach into it or out from it; it is silent. She has gone where we all go eventually, but in unnecessary pain and horror. A poet and a storyteller is liable to go silent himself, in the face of such a story. The things one normally complains about seem inconsequential. This is not a new observation, of course. But this tired cliche has a heavy reality, and it's one I struggle against, lately.

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"Pharaohs always travelled to the next world first class. To judge
by our departures, most of us travel steerage." -- Alan Moore