TELL ME YOUR DREAMS

Brilliantly breaking a long-held unwritten rule that claims dream sequences in novels are tough to bring off at best and should probably be avoided entirely, author Cormac McCarthy ends No Country for Old Men with one. And it’s one of the most perfect endings ever. There also couldn’t have been a better actor in the film version to play the part of the dreamer, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, than an aging Tommy Lee Jones.

The images Sheriff Bell describes matter-of-factly to his significant other, Loretta (Tess Harper), while sitting at the breakfast table, are nothing short of compelling. The sheriff, who has just decided to retire, after a very dangerous and utterly failed case, in which he admits feeling “outmatched”, describes how, in the dream, he and his father are making their way through a mountain pass on horseback in the snow. He says it’s “peculiar”.

 “I'm older now'n he ever was by twenty years,” says Sheriff Bell, “so in a sense, he's the younger man.”

He describes what he saw, as if it were perfectly recorded in his mind.

“It was cold and snowin', hard ridin'. Hard country. He rode past me and kept on goin'. Never said nothin' goin' by. He just rode on past and he had his blanket wrapped around him and his head down. And when he rode past I seen he was carryin' fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin’ on ahead and that he was fixin' to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold, and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. Out there up ahead.”

Then Sheriff Bell pauses, as if still seeing the images in his mind, before he says, “And then I woke up.”

But the part of that excellent final scene that I most identified with was that quiet morning portrait of Ed Tom and Loretta sitting there at the kitchen table, where she has just poured them each a cup of coffee.

“How'd you sleep?” Loretta asks.

“I don't know. Had dreams,” says the laconic sheriff.

“Well you got time for 'em now,” says Loretta. “Anything interesting?”

“Well they always is to the party concerned,” says Ed Tom.

“Ed Tom,” says Loretta patiently, “I'll be polite.”

The reason I identified was because, up until that moment, the scene could have been taking place in my own kitchen. Except that, re-written for Virginia and Dan, it would have gone like this.

“How'd you sleep?”

“I don't know. Had dreams.”

“Which you’re not going to tell me about!”

“But they were really interesting.”

“Maybe, to the party concerned.”

“But not to anyone else?”

“Exactly!”

And there the conversation would have ended.

Virginia’s right, of course. Dreams are most often one of those “you’d have to have been there” propositions.  They seem so brilliant and revealing when you’re in the midst of them, but in the clear light of day, when you try to articulate them, they can become a really amorphous hash.

But hey, you’re my readers, a captive audience, so today, boys and girls, we’re going to talk a little about dreams.

I used to not think of my dreams as dreams. I tended to think of them more as a sort of separate reality. A world I lived in beyond the material world. A place where things might look familiar, might even imitate reality effectively, but a world where none of the rules of everyday life applied. In dreams, anything was possible if you could learn to focus and place yourself at their disposal. They were important to me, a kind of twilight zone where, I fancied, I could resolve things that vexed and escaped me in the waking world, in which I was, all too often, powerless.

I was reading a lot of Carlos Castaneda back then. And that led me to read a number of Native American writers as well. They all only underscored my suspicion that dreams weren’t nothing. They were something, I sought to convince myself. A real place, a real world that inhabited a separate reality.

One of the things I discovered in reading Castaneda was his quandary about the advantages and disadvantages of disembodiment in the dream world. One of the major problems with our flights of fancy in the real world is how our necessarily physical state fails to accompany them. In this earthly world, everything takes tremendous physical effort. A simple example is the very real physical difficulty and stress involved in traveling long distances. Cars, buses, trains, boats and planes, to say nothing of ports, stations, airports and terminals, as well as security, immigration, customs and so on and so forth, are factors that tend to dampen dreams of all travel, foreign and domestic. If you want to see something, first you’ve got to get there.  And that’s complicated. In fact, it quite often becomes the deciding factor in not entertaining any such desires.

Dreams simplify that. For those lucky enough to learn to fly—I, for instance, don’t possess that dream-world art and have never gotten off the ground in any of my dreams—it’s just a matter of spreading your “wings” and soaring to wherever you like. And since time, as Einstein suggests, is an invention of the conscious world, dream-flying from place to place can often take no time at all. My wife and I haven’t talked about dreaming in a very long time, but I recall that she used to be a “frequent flier”. She indicated that she could usually just leap into the air and soar off over whatever destination she wished.

Indeed, she couldn’t understand why I didn’t fly. For her it was like, “But it’s so easy. You just let yourself go and you fly!” Well, I never knew how and never learned. Perhaps, better said, what I never learned to do was “let myself go.” The best I could sometimes manage was to take very long, elastic, gliding strides that helped me to cover ground quickly.

But in my dream world, I eventually opted, as on earth, for conveyances. Big American sedans from the fifties and sixties that were so versatile they could take me from one season to another, from Europe or South America “back home” to Ohio, and from my remote mountain home to the avenues and dark bowels of a major metropolis. And those fabulous cars could do it in the blink of an eye. Or sometimes I would “fall asleep” at the wheel and wake up again in a brand new dream-world location. In other dreams I traveled by train, either on the surface of a world the tracks knitted according to their (or my) whimsy, or else I might take a subway that would plumb depths beyond the normal underground routes and wend its way into perilous caverns with sulfurous air and steaming pools, where the stations were caves in which passengers hurried on, but no one got off. I occasionally was on horseback in landscapes I’d seen before, or simply on foot but finding that my walks no longer took me to the places I knew but to what they were “now” in some dystopian future where nothing remained of how it used to be.

As I say, back when my dreams were of far more interest to me than they are now, I started taking Castaneda’s advice (or better said, the advice of the Yaqui mentor, Don Juan, that he claims to have had) and, when a dream began to overwhelm me and make me feel powerless to change its outcome, I would try to look at my hands. That’s right. That, according to Don Juan, was how to gain a measure of control over the action. If you could see your hands, you weren’t some virginal and disembodied spirit completely at the mercy of ancient powers much stronger than you were. If you could see your hands, you were you and could command reason and self-control, avoiding immobilizing panic.

Now, looking at your hands sounds easy-peasy in the waking world, but it is exceedingly hard in sleep. Or at least it is for the non-flying dodo likes of me. It took me a long time to be able to do it. The first thing was to remember, while still conscious, that once you fell asleep and started dreaming, you were going to have to attempt to see your hands. After consciously working on that unsuccessfully for, perhaps, months, I finally, in the midst of a terrifying dream in which I was paralyzed with fear, heard a little voice say, “Look at your hands!”  And suddenly, there they were, my hands, completely recognizable. Incredibly, once I could see them, I was able to take charge of the situation and either cope with whatever fearsome enemy I was facing, or run and manage to get away.

It wasn’t a perfect method, of course, but it worked more often than not. And overachiever that I tend to be, I figured if looking at your hands in the dream world could imbue you with a certain amount of power, how much more so if you could see your face. So I started working on that, with the ultimate goal being to look into my own eyes. With a great deal of practice, I got so I could see parts of my face in a dream-world mirror—my jaw, an ear, my lips and chin, a piece of my forehead, my hairline. And those things gave me an added measure of control over the action. But I was never able to look into my own eyes. I assumed, for a time, that no one could. But I later found out there are indeed people who can…just not anybody I’ve ever talked to.

Ignoring, like Cormac McCarthy—well, not exactly like McCarthy, but in the (lesser) style of him—I’ve included dream sequences in at least one unpublished novel of mine. Indeed, I did that long before I’d ever read Cormac McCarthy. That novel has been lying around in my desk drawer for a spell (like, say, twenty years or so).

Anyway, two friends got me in touch with two different Manhattan literary agents who agreed to have a look at the manuscript and see if they wanted to represent me.

The first one read it (or at least part of it) and said she, “hadn’t fallen in love with it”. And right away I figured the dream sequences were part of what she didn’t fall in love with. But then again, maybe she thought the whole thing stank, who knows?

The other one said it was “quite well written,” but wasn’t the sort of writing he represented. When I asked why, he said, “It’s just not the sort of thing that, say, my friend John Updike would write.”

Now, I’ve read a lot of Updike and my impression has always been that he is an incredibly good writer, but with just as incredibly little of importance to write about. So I couldn’t help but respond to the agent and “Updike friend” by saying, “Yes, indeed, I agree. It’s not. Thank you and good-bye.”

Even now, re-reading it, I wouldn’t take the dream sequences out of the book. Don’t tell Virginia I’m doing this, but if anybody’s still here reading this essay and has not yet dozed off, here are a few excerpts from one of the dreams, which wasn’t fiction at all, but a real dream of my own that I incorporated into the manuscript. Perhaps you’ll tell me what you think…or not.  Here goes…

…As I turn onto this road, I know that I have seen all of this before, but I can't recall where or when. I only know it is poignantly familiar, something more than déjà vu. It is the absolute knowledge that I have been in this place at another time, and that on the other side of the next rise there is a destination that fills me with apprehension, yet attracts me like a magnet, irresistibly, inexorably toward it.

I continue over the rise, almost beyond my own volition, and a church suddenly looms before me—a huge, cathedral-like church, a European-style cross-shaped colossus, complete with soaring towers bedecked with fearsome gargoyles and stern, immutable saints. It stands alone and monstrous amid the sterile-green hills, imposing and awesome, a terrifying intrusion on the otherwise uneventful landscape.

I fight my relentless compulsion to continue, knowing full well that the cathedral is my unyielding destiny, that I have been here before, driven to it like now, unable to help myself…

The chilling monotony of muffled Gregorian chants mesmerizes me, drags me forward, even while filling me with almost uncontrollable dread. Now inside the building without passing through any portal, without the slightest idea of how I have arrived, I am nearly overwhelmed by the certain knowledge that this is not what it appears to be, not a sanctuary, not a haven of peace and tranquility. The cathedral seems shrouded in a force-field of foreboding, cloaked in darkness, a place where details are frighteningly unclear, where twilight, candlelight and dusty, stained glass-filtered daylight anemically permeate the dense atmosphere...

…The chanting remains muffled—a droning, constant background from somewhere behind the dense stone walls. It is almost not a sound, but a monotonous, maddening hum inside my head. Despite the incantations, the silence in the nave is such that I can actually hear the hot drippings of the sputtering red candles as they spill from their gutters and spatter the altar stones, beneath which, I am suddenly aware, lie blood-filled chalices, teeth, bones and hair, relics of ancient, nameless martyrs.

 Abruptly, the chanting is absorbed through the normally impenetrable walls and becomes an undeniable presence all around me in the desolation of the nave. I turn in a cautious circle to see the owners of the advancing voices but find myself totally alone…

My feet itch to run, but I am riveted on the course my captive brain is setting. The chanting is now as loud as if I were in the midst of the chorus of hooded, faceless singers and yet they are nowhere to be seen. They chant to the deafening pounding of my own heart that throbs painfully in my head and ears, as my feet carry me involuntarily toward the main altar, where I can now clearly see an ornate burial casket on a sumptuous brass and hardwood bier. I am still beneath the raised altar and can only see the coffin — fine, burnished mahogany trimmed in gold so soft and pure that it glints instead of shining and clearly contrasts with the brass of the bier. I focus on details, the smoky gloss of the waxed wood in the unsteady candlelight, the delicate filigree designs of the gold trim, the solid weightiness of the hardware and carrying rails attached to the sides of the casket.

Hypnotized, my brain pulls me forward with morbid curiosity. I suddenly have an urgent need to see inside the coffin. But at the same time, my mind is split and one half is trying to pull back, stop my feet, turn me around, make me reverse my course. But the morbid side is stronger, involuntary, impossible to quell. And as it draws me forward, I can hear the other side of my brain whimpering and protesting to no avail… Again I wonder too if, in fact, God, whatever God might be, has anything to do with this place, because what I feel here is nothing like goodness.

 I am now standing beside the casket on its bier. But for some reason the sides of the coffin are still incredibly high— too high for me to see over, high as a garden wall that must be climbed to satisfy one's curiosity about the mysterious world on the other side. I stretch my hands high over my head and barely grip the slick-waxed edge of the casket. As I start to heave myself upward, I have a sudden twinge of apprehension, the same pit-of-the-stomach, scrotum-tightening chill I used to feel as a child, when I would leap into bed from a yard away to make sure the ax-murderer who lurked beneath my berth would be unable to grab my ankles, draw my child's body effortlessly under, and cleave my head from shoulders with one smooth, razor-honed stroke…

Chinned up over the "wall", elbows straining as I hang from the seemingly ever-taller side of the coffin, I can now see its contents. In this position, my face is only a few inches from the waxy-yellow countenance of the deceased—a bishop, I discover, laid out in royal purple regalia, ebony crucifix and rosary wound between the death-stiffened fingers of his inter-laced hands. At a distance, the cadaver would look impeccable, wax-figure-like in the absolute stillness of death. But at such close-quarters, my view of the body is practically microscopic.

Though I try to ignore it, though I make an effort to retrieve my vision from the spot, I cannot turn my eyes away from the bishop's miter. It is not the liturgical headdress itself that interests me. I am, instead, inescapably, morbidly drawn to the constant, evil trickle of yellowish-brown fluid that escapes from the golden and white headband and is channeled down behind the stiff, dry ear of the corpse, to soak, almost (but not quite) out of sight, into the purple head cushion of the casket, just above the dead cleric's shoulder.

A large, hairy blow-fly buzzes past, banks a hundred and eighty degrees and returns to perch on the deceased's cheek. It crawls over the cool-dead flesh, toys with an eyelid, then makes a brief flight to my lip, where it comes to rest an instant until I feel its tickly legs and sputter in desperate disgust to make it fly away. It returns to the corpse, sits on the miter, studies the fluid that my obsessive eyes refuse to abandon and crawls blithely down behind the shell of the dead bishop's dehydrated ear. I try to shut my eyes to the horrific sight but can't, as if it were an act beyond my will.

Just behind my left ear, a hoarse, unnerving whisper advises me, as if I were blind and couldn't see the truth for myself, that "the bishop is rotting" ("El obispo se pudre," the voice advises almost gleefully) and my face is involuntarily drawn nearer the sick-colored liquid coursing slowly but steadily from under the episcopal miter. I hold my breath. I struggle. I try to let loose of the box and drop to the altar, but I can't. Nor can I shut my eyelids, no matter how hard I try. I grit my teeth, hear myself groan, strain until my neck feels as if it will break, but I am inescapably locked on the image of the dead cleric.

Then, just when I think I might die of panic, a clear, calm, reassuring voice, this time close behind my right ear, says simply, "Come with me." I suddenly go limp and let go of the coffin, only to find that I am not hanging from a steep wall as I had been so sure I was. My feet are on the ground, and I am looking into the casket at the bishop's body, which, even perched on the bier, is only about chest high to me. Then, I turn effortlessly and walk away as commanded by the disembodied right-side voice...

Things grow even more horrific after that, but you get the idea.

In short, maybe my wife is right. Maybe dreams are nonsense, all chemistry, electrical short circuits in the brain, too much food and drink too late at night, mental flatulence, as it were. Who knows? Or perhaps it’s more like Castaneda suggests, and there are dreams and dreams. “Power dreams”, as he calls them. The mystery is, what—on earth—are we supposed to do with them?

Pleasant dreams!