By Eric Le Roy
It is the business of dreams to solve dream-problems. That’s why they come forth in the mind of the vulnerable sleeper, in the twirling nebula and radiant nimbus of a slumber. They conjure a world, and that world spins. But dreams usually slip out the back door when sleep lifts, don’t they? They are the best of all burglars, and as they vanish, they take your nocturnal fictions with them, every trophy that your sleep presumed to validate.
Yet dreams are not confined to the trances of stunned brains dipping into deep pillows. I, for example, am a prodigious daydreamer. Whether this habit indicates discontent, frustration, or boredom is unclear. Maybe all three, and some things I haven’t even thought of. But I do it a lot, and I confess, I relish it. T.S. Eliot referred to sleep as ‘death’s twilight kingdom’, and I am not one to argue much with Eliot. But I would add that daydreams are the twilight kingdom between bald, blunt wakefulness and sleep’s calculated amnesia, its garden of partially granted wishes.
Often, daydreams are a step up from the dreamless day.
In childhood, my dreams were mostly nightmares: zombies pursuing me toward the last walls of empty warehouses. I used to die in those terrible dreams. I didn’t know it then, but I know it now. I would run until there was nowhere to run. Then I would turn and face what was coming. I would always wake at that point. One day I won’t. To accept Death is as much an act of surrender as it is to those who surrender themselves to what they conceive of as God. And in my nightmares, long ago, I would try to elude the killers until facing what they were going to do was my only choice. I would simply give up. A good definition of death is when you have no other choice.
Now, much older and with so much eventfulness behind me, I find, to my intense pleasure, that my dreams (always narratives of a sort) set me out on adventures with people I have known. Mostly women. The difference is that now there are no ‘wet dreams’; only situations and journeys, frequently joyous, occasionally erotic. But they always stop short of sex, manic or mild. It is the wonderful affection that is experienced when going on a dream journey with someone you once loved, and obviously, in the back of your mind, still do. I like those places, just as I like twilight evenings in autumn. It seems somehow to be where I belong.
That said, we also spend a great deal of our waking time imagining tomorrow and reflecting on yesterday. Of course, age plays a big role. To a child, the past is small and the future large; to an adult, it’s the other way around. For me, ahead is one day at a time; in back are thousands of yesterdays and the days before, strewn in all directions. The point is, today often gets buried amid the ruminations.
Many would say that the best solution to life’s absurdities is simply to stay busy. Try not to think about it. There’s truth in that. Highly motivated individuals – as long as they have enough sense to know when to slow down – have always seemed the happiest people, compared to those who do not feel the pulsations of purpose. Also, in an era of flagging attention span, the people who can stay on task often find desirable rewards waiting at the finish line.
The moral? For some, staying awake is essential; for others, it is a chore, not because they are lazy – not necessarily – but because they want the gates of another kingdom to open. For such people, sleep has more creative possibilities than staying awake. That sounds terrible, but isn’t it the same reason people get drunk or play video games? Why should pounding hard cider on Friday night invite nods of understanding (you know, just ‘blowing off steam’) while turning from the ‘action, tuning it out, and beckoning the dream be labeled as a repudiation of one’s civic duty?
Also, dreams at night do not have the same distractions as life in the day, where interferences crop up from all directions. And when you think of all the great artists and crooks, kings and queens, conquerors and martyrs, a lot of their time must have been spent looking out the window or staring at their hands. It’s like (so I’ve been told) what a film set is like. We see the passionate intensity of the scenes as they unfold; we never factor in how many takes it took to get it right and how much sitting around there was. If the film called for a sunny day and it was pouring rain, the mega-stars had to wait till it stopped. Some of them were so hungover or doped up that they had to be dragged onto the set, whereupon they abruptly transformed into heroes and heroines. And that’s what we see on Netflix.
But beyond contrivance and artifice, nothing can disguise the malaise of Boredom. I have long been struck by how, in this finite little life we have, such a lot of it is spent being as bored as a dead person must feel as he waits for an invitation to the next life. Or as paint must feel when it is drying on the side of a wall or fence. I mean, imagine that you are the paint. Pretend you are just waiting for yourself to dry. Does that sound like a cocktail to you? You just want to get it over with, right? Put this in human terms and ask yourself: how much of our time do we squander just trying to get this and that over with?
So, nutshell, we sleep a third of our lives away; we spend a lot of our waking hours daydreaming, anticipating, and reflecting; and in the meantime, we are using up these ‘precious’ lifeline minutes peeing (how many gallons in 80 years?), clamping our butts onto toilets and waiting for the bombs to drop, lingering at 120-seconds-till-green traffic lights, sitting sullenly or fearfully in doctors’ and dentists’ offices, smoldering over various slights and resentments, struggling to come up with an idea for a birthday present, fantasizing about lovers lost or never had, guessing if our real life partners are as tired of us as we are of them – or out shagging somebody else.
If all else fails, there is C.l.i.c.k.b.a.i.t. How eagerly we succumb! Ah, the clickbait! At least today we have electronics. Centuries ago, 95% of the human race spent their short lives carrying buckets of sand or water. (Ironically, if you take the sand and water out of the bucket and blend them, you have the foundation of a human being.) But now with the internet so handy, we can spend our lives reading about and watching videos about other people’s lives. The fantasy provided by electronic gadgets has made sleep a secondary event for many. The dreams are taken over by machines, leaving only insomniacs at the end of the journey.
I mentioned sand and water, the bucketfuls of which defined the experience of millions utterly unknown to history except that they are said to have been there, whatever their names might have been. Speaking of water, that’s mostly what we are. Did you know that a human being is approximately 50–70% water (with the exact percentage varying by age, sex, and body composition)? Were you aware that about 71% of the Earth’s surface is covered in water? (When the polar ice caps all melt, there will be even more.) That’s a lot of H2O. Hardly surprising, since water is the source of life.
Let me run a list by you to see if I’ve got it right. We are a kind of walking, talking aquarium, except that instead of fish, we have the instruments of human life: a lanky (mostly vertical) stack of bones, flexible cords of muscle, cartilage, etc., blood shooting up and down like ink-filled tubes stolen from ballpoint pens and strung together into a cardiac necklace, and a row of horizontal plates (discs) that attach themselves to a spine. (Without the spine, the body no longer knows itself.) Up top is a very formidable bony nest wherein resides the stiffened porridge we call the bain, through which electric darts burst forth in all directions like metro trains at rush hour in the megapolis.
So there we have it: the mass of bones, tissue, and cord is what we are: a combination of muscle gel, wine-colored syrup, and a miscellany of Lego parts – all floating in water, topped up by a psychedelic sponge in whose porous cavities the human zoo sings, squeals, and squawks in all its cacophonous eloquence.
The brain is who we are. A lot of traffic. A lot of rushing about in the brainy thoroughfares. But when we sleep, this subtle, secret-keeping prison releases its hidden hostages. In daylight hours, our minds become hardened editors; during sleep, such standards lapse; the script can be rewritten a thousand ways, and the wanderer, the transient, the vagabond have free rein at last. That’s the secret of the dream world: it plays no favorites. Everyone and everything can qualify for temporary residence. There never was, and never will be, such a thing as a boring dream. When the humdrum hours dissipate and the daily bric-a-brac is folded up, the subversive mind puts on its party gear. ‘Go to sleep, go to sleep’ is Mr. Sandman’s whispered cry as he stands there with his drum.
Thus, the human being, caught dead to rights at its essence, is a bored water closet (in more ways than one), whose antecedents are in primeval ponds and whose future depends on trying to control robots, the latest interlopers into the overall equation. What to do? Well, if surrender to the ‘whatever-will-be-will-be’ doesn’t float your boat, my advice is to bury your cares in stoicism and make that place of stone as cheerful as you can. At night, the dreams will come like flocks and bear you away. There is no telling where to.
Other animals understand the cycle better than we humans do. So do plants. So do the seasons. So does the wind. Death agonies of a mouse articulate the horror and loneliness of all destiny better than any poem that has ever been written. The human being, I believe, is in a constant war with elusive meanings, and its only weapons are definitions. And so, when we are stripped naked of our defenses, our sacred assumptions, and our long-coveted sense of uniqueness, and of being the exceptions to rules that govern all others, we don’t really know what to do, do we?
And now, mechanical AI is showing us that our brains are no better than rental storage spaces, and that the future is writing itself. Soon, we will no longer be able to edit it.
Basically, a human being is a cup of water who dreams of becoming a pitcher of milk.
So enjoy your dreams of long-lost Maria, who followed you down to the banks of the river, and of Beth, who kissed you in the backseat of your car and then went away into life. Or Brian or Darcy, or whoever it was. Let go, and, as you age, take heart in the inventions of the night, where you get to start and finish the conversations you never had or completed before.
The magic of dreams is that they keep giving you chance after chance. Then, right in the middle of it, your full bladder demands that you rise, go, and empty it. So dump your water (you have a lot more), and hurry back to bed. If you are lucky – and still sleepy – you might even rejoin the dream. Your imaginary cast is waiting in the car, and even though it tried to drive away while you were ‘pointing Percy at the porcelain’, you can catch it if you run.
Your only chance is to bury yourself in the dream again. For in dreams, every shard of shattered glass reflects you differently, the rain sings when it strikes the porcelain, and there is nothing that is irretrievable.
