By Eric Le Roy
Content 18+ I have never studied or done research about whether old people dream more or dream less than young people. Of course I have always been, personality wise, a ‘dreamer’ which, I guess accounts for a lot of things good and bad in my life, but I’m not talking specifically about what some have called “having my head in my ass.”
It’s true that I am referring in part to ‘daydreams’, but mostly about ‘Nacht Traumen’ – those strange, beguiling, debauched or terrifying episodes that hold sway over the sleep-trance, the vivid almost-deathscape of the rooms and fields and buildings that are so deeply nocturnal as to bring the living and dead together, rather like Stephen King’s grand ballroom in The Shining.
In fact, I have a Mexican friend who tells me about the ‘Day of the Dead’ (“Dia de los Muertos”), which, I have learned, combines an ancient Aztec tradition of celebrating ancestors on All Souls Day with a present day commingling of the living and the dead on the 1st and 2nd of November. It not only celebrates the departed among family and friends, but actually invites them back so that they become the guests of honor. They walk among the living. Here is how it is described in National Geographic:
First, people set up a candlelit altar in their homes so spirits can find their way back to their relatives. The altar also offers some of the favorite foods of the deceased—just in case they get hungry. Items that were important to the ancestors when they were alive, such as a favorite book or musical instrument, are placed on the altar as well.
Then it’s off to the graveyard for a big party. Families bring a huge feast to eat while they clean tombstones, sing songs, and talk to their ancestors. Parents might even introduce a baby to a grandparent who died before the baby was born.
Well, maybe that sounds macabre to you, but it appeals to me, maybe because of the strange temperament I seem to have which obsesses as much about what is not there as about what is. When presented with famous monuments, my eyes always stray off into the alleys behind them. When lights are on in windows above the street, of course I notice. But I catch myself looking more carefully at the windows of rooms which remain unlit. I’ve no idea why. Is it a symbol of some sort of longing for death? A lot of famous artists have explained that what they leave out is as important as what goes in – and this makes perfect sense. But I have never understood the fascination I have with slums, with streets that drift away in the deepening ennui of some incomprehensible solitude on the vacant Sunday afternoon of a City Without a Name. with unpeopled balconies and lonely bridges; I have never understood why that Edward Hopper painting of an unattended gas station seemingly at the edge of some small country town affects me as it does, or why I feel such odd ambivalence toward forlorn figures at bus stops on winter days that darkness sweeps away like a broom.
Therefore, as a citizen of the dark, I am a good match for dreams that assault or soothe, always at the edges of something I can never reach and which vanish instantly in the washboard morning light.
When I was a child I was beset with nightmares. To this day, I have absolutely no earthly reason why. I had an attentive, kind, supportive family, but my health was not good, and I was terrified of the dark. Again, I cannot offer a reason, although it’s common knowledge that many children have such fears. Mine was so bad that I sometimes would get up in the night and sit on the edge of the bathtub or on the toilet seat under the gleaming fist of the overhead light bulb. Imagine that: a seven-year-old boy hiding in the sanctuary of the bathroom at 3 o’clock in the morning while in the hall outside and in his bedroom a host of prowling ghouls was on patrol.
In my nightmares, there were zombies, sometimes one, sometimes a squad of them, in some desolate side of the city where there was nothing but broken streets and abandoned warehouses. There was never color, only gritty black and white. And grey. Yes, the grey, the nauseous color grey of the mental fixations of the condemned as they kneel before the executioner. And, sure enough, the zombie would narrow the distance no matter what tactics I used to escape, and finally I would be trapped. In a seizure of terror, I would turn to confront my executioner, and it is difficult to explain how that moment felt, but I will try.
It was bizarrely exhilarating. In fact, if you can possibly imagine an orgasm in the form of a nightmare, that’s what it was. It’s like I was flinging myself at Death, plunging headlong into the orgiastic spasm of Death. For the barest slice of a split second, all fear would leave me. But I could never ‘enjoy’ this fearless transformation nor find out what would come next, because then I would wake up. It happened over and over again.
The Brothers Grimm certainly knew this nightmarish side of things, especially how it tormented children, and they exploited it to the fullest extent. Sometimes I wonder about those guys, and I have to laugh, the delight they apparently took in terrorizing the Little Tots. Why? Well, all I can come up with is that back in those days people looked at children differently than they do now. I mean, why mollycoddle a child when you could give them a good thrashing instead? Or scare the daylights out of them? Besides, the first versions of those ‘fairytales’ were written for adults, not children. Thus the elders could bask in the gruesome fate of the boys and girls.
But it’s the baleful seductions of the dark that keep springing out of the primitive side of our human character, don’t they? For example, I also find it interesting how the soundtracks of movies, simply by hitting darker notes, can turn a friendly forest into a suffocating cobweb full of psychopaths. How we can tell that an office will soon become the bloody grave of its occupant, all foretold by a change in the music – from airy to ominous. And yet the point of it all, I believe more and more, is that the shadow-charred forests, the heart-crunching zombies, the chuckling murderers, hissing rapists, and chainsaw waving slaughterers who populate the bleak hours are only avatars of imaginary Hells of which our own minds are the creators and choreographers. They are the primitives whispering that they haven’t gone away at all; we just thought they had. They are watching us. Wait until dark, comes their cackling murmur.
Mercifully, there is another side to all this, and I have found it: the art of sustaining the narrative dream. By this, I mean a dream in which you find yourself among friends – or companions of some sort – and there is a story involved. It may express anxiety – I guess – like a dream in which you are looking for your parked car and can’t find it. Or you are a single waiter in a restaurant with a thousand tables and everybody screaming at you at the same time. But often – I am getting on in years, remember – it has to do with some old lover or maybe someone you wanted as a lover and couldn’t get or maybe it involves a riotously joyful sexual escapade with a woman you never consciously noticed back at school – maybe some tall, skinny girl with round black glasses – not all that off-putting (obviously) but… nondescript in the way of small town phone directory or a plastic apple – who comes back after all those years and there you are: writhing and twisting and panting and cavorting like a pagan swain and milkmaid…. all this after you found her walking in the hall one day after school and trailed behind her into a twilight classroom where no one else would ever come…and she would be waiting, strangely beautiful – plain old Margie Wilson transformed into a dripping goddess.
Why? What can it mean? With age I have learned the subtle powers of ‘ordinary’ girls – as opposed to the suped-up, rather arrogant, but insidiously insecure ‘popular’ ones – but why do these unexpected nightingales that I took for mere sparrows all those years ago – sometimes fly back with a Renaissance flourish and ravish me?
One way or the other, the best of my dreams are like a revisit to the ancient world of my early days, and together they consist of an amazing paradox: the people of my past are inaccessible without the aid of dreams, daydreams, and nebulous vision-things that come from the impulses of my own spirit’s breezes and zephyrs, gales and hurricanes, and yet, like ancient Rome itself, they can be reassembled in the blink of a dream’s eye; everything I have ever known and done can be summoned faster than an owl can twitch in the belfry lookout it lives in. And I am there, ah yes, I am there among the young people who will always be young, no matter which of them I wouldn’t recognize now in their dying age, and those who have otherwise slipped away forever and ever.
There is yet another way that dreams have partially taken control of me, and it has to do with literature: what I read and also what I try to write. I guess it was Haruki Murakami who, in his short fiction, introduced me to the concept of ‘magical realism’. Of course, I now understand that Franz Kafka (a hero of Murakami’s, I think is fair to say) was doing it all along. (I didn’t have a name for it until several months ago I saw an online group advertising for members.) In the informal, chatty voice of Murakami’s unassuming protagonists, we begin with a seemingly real, palpable world (usually Tokyo or Kyoto); the protagonist of each story may strike us as mildly eccentric’ yet one who seems adjusted to the world around him in the sense that he makes no waves, challenges no authority, seeks to intimidate or disturb no one. He works or studies, keeps a cold beer or two in the fridge, travels about the city, and normally has a girlfriend, but (he seems to imply) nothing special, just a transient partnership of convenience.. He could be anyone in any city; Japan just happens to be the country Murakami was born in and uses as a background. Otherwise, there are no undercurrents about ‘Japanese culture’, so to speak. Moreover, like Kafka’s characters, Murakami’s heroes seem determined to apply reasonable, practical solutions to whatever problems crop up, and indeed most of these dilemmas appear to involve minor issues, incidental distractions, that in fact are agents to other zones of existence.
For then we start to understand that nothing is what it seems, and that slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, then in a more pronounced yet still rather ‘laid-back’ manner, we have been drawn into a place of dreams, a thin lampshade of landscape where reality crumbles away like wafers in broad daylight, and the protagonist must navigate in a maze – not one with dark corridors but rather like a strange open air market, and at no time does this observer-participant lose composure and really push back. The result doesn’t always work for me, because there are occasions when I find Murakami a bit too frivolous, and it has become clear to many (like me) that he doesn’t really know how to end a novel. But when the stories do work, I am transported; moreover, the writer has another trademark (which he shares with a growing number of others): the stories often have no climax, clearcut resolution or denouement; they just end.
At first, this frustrated me a great deal. I wanted more, and the reason I did was because the author had me in his grip, so I wanted Murakami to guide me to the finish line. Instead it was as if the stories ended in mid-sentence. I was left wanting to scratch and claw at the page to find out what was going to happen next.
But nothing happened because nothing was supposed to happen. The story was what it was and nothing more, and if it seemed to ‘end’ arbitrarily, then well, what was one to do? Isn’t that what dreams do? We are engrossed but then have to chop it off to go to the toilet, or else the alarm clock snaps us back to real time, real place, and, wouldn’t you just know it? – the dream disappears. And usually we can’t remember unless we hurry up and write it down, which I almost never do.
But something of the dream – or should I say an effusion, a collection of dreams, lingers in the human brain, at least in my brain and I have found that they start to rule this brain of mine they creep within, like an infestation of questionable night flowers. Or they are like birds, solitary at first, and then they begin to multiply until finally they are sitting in the room with me: Quoth the raven, Nevermore! – a whole flock of them. Or like a bus with a thousand conductors all tumbling aimlessly about, reaching for tickets that are not there, that no one has because there are no arms reaching back to the conductors.
Life becomes a city bus you get on, without knowing for sure where you want to go. And other people crowd the bus at first, and then, in small groups or one by one, they start getting off as the bus proceeds along its apparent route. But you remain, the driver with his back to you always, and then you understand that there is no destination, just the bus roaming along the scattered streets that gradually grow less and less populated. The driver turns down strange roads.
And suddenly you know that these backroads are there only for you, like Kafka’s parable Before the Law. Still the driver does not turn or even twist. His job is to convey you across the River Styx. Then, after what seems like a long, unnecessary convalescence from an undiagnosable fit of boredomm, people start to appear again, along the sides of the narrow roads, and next there is a little town and a market place in the center. The bus stops.
You get out, as you know you are supposed to, and the bus drives away. All around you, as in the Dia de los Muertos, the friendly, indeed effervescent Dead approach you – young and old alike – with happy expressions, flowers, and glasses of tequila. You join them in the carnevale , and the party erupts like dancers in a village square at harvest time. No, it is not Heaven, nor was ever designed to be. Rather, it is a place that you always carry in the back of your mind somewhere, a hidden roadmap giving directions to a hidden town – a place where the living and the dead and all connecting gods are there for your delight and full of taverns in the silver twilight of the gathering dusk.
