Within A Dream

by Vincent L. Scarsella

  “Do you think he can really hear you?” she asked.

  Charley looked up with annoyance, sorry she had to come in the first place. “If he can’t,” Charley said with a shrug, “what’s the harm?”

  Mrs. Finch returned the shrug and went back to reading her tabloid. Charley didn’t have much more to say anyway. The one-sided conversations made him feel silly and useless. So he sat back on the chair next to the bed and watched Andy for a time. After a few minutes, he closed his eyes, still tired from waking up last night in the middle of another nightmare and a long day of difficult algebra questions at school. Suddenly, not really expecting it, he found himself in a dream. Andy was there, sitting up in his bed, smiling.

  “You never did this before,” he said to Charley. “Dreamed so close. We’re actually here in my hospital room.”

  The tubes and stuff were sticking out of Andy’s body and Charley worried that they would start coming out and leak fluids and piss all over the floor. Then there was a young doctor in the doorway, looking inside the room, grinning. Charley’s mother was still in her chair, asleep, snoring. The tabloid had drooped onto her lap.

  “Andy!” he whispered harshly and nodded to the doctor.

  “No,” said Andy. “Zorl.”

  Charley turned and saw that the grinning doctor had indeed turned into the demon, Zorl. He stepped forward toward Andy’s bed and before Charley could react, was reaching for the breathing tube stuck in Andy’s throat from the other side.

  “Mother!” Charley shouted.

  Zorl’s hand moved closer and closer to the tube. There was a crazed, determined light in his eyes.

  “Mother!” Charley yelled.

  Zorl’s hand was on the tube…

  “MOTHER!”

  He was tugging at the tube…

  “Charley!”

  He was being shaken. Mrs. Finch’s hand was on his arm, tugging.

  “Charley!” she screamed into his ear.

  His eyes opened. A nurse had rushed in. There was an alarm sounding. Charley looked at the bed and saw that Andy’s breathing tube had fallen out.

  Chapter Three

  The Sleep Lab

  “The dreams were bad all week,” Charley told Dr. Arambaala as soon as Mrs. Finch had left them alone. “I think Andy is getting weaker.”

  “Did you write them down?”

  Charley stood up and handed over his dream journal.

  “Very good,” said Dr. Arambaala as he began to skim through it. After a time, a deep frown formed across his thick, dark forehead. Finally, after some minutes, he looked up at Charley. “These dreams are—” he searched for a word, looking excited and beside himself in the process “—extraordinary.”

  Charley nodded. Yes, they were. Extraordinary. More real sometimes than real life. Full of motion and colors and action better even than life itself sometimes. During the previous week, the dreams had involved Charley and Andy in many difficult and scary adventures. The worst was when they ended up in 'Toon-land, with all the cartoon characters they had ever watched, and sometimes still did, over the years on TV, popping up and fighting either for or against Andy’s cause. The usual good guys, like Popeye, Bugs Bunny and Scooby Doo fought on their side, while the usual bad guys, like Brutus, Wiley E. Coyote, and Boris Badenough fought for Zorl. It was a wild, colorful, and sometimes psychedelic show that changed locations and plots with the expected frenetic madness of a cartoon reel.

  Somehow, usually with the help of Andy’s dad, they managed to escape the clutches of Zorl and his demons, whether they were dragons, orcs, wraiths or evil ‘toons. But the close calls were getting closer and Charley was beginning to worry that Zorl seemed destined to prevail.

  “Were you close to Andy’s dad?” Dr. Arambaala asked. “Mister Moss?”

  Charley shrugged. He wasn’t sure how to answer that. He was and he wasn’t. It was not unlike the relationships most kids have with their friends’ dads. Some dads are cool, guys who play ball with you, or give you a wink after a funny comment. Other dads – like Charley’s dad – couldn’t care less, and couldn’t be bothered to get involved, let alone bond, with any of Charley’s friends, including Andy. Heck, Charley’s dad had never even come to the hospital to visit Andy since the accident. “What am I going to do about that,”

  he had asked when Charley’s mom had urged him to join them one Saturday afternoon. “I ain’t no doctor.”

  “I guess so,” Charley answered.

  “And you were sad when he died?”

  “Yeah, sure. He was a cool guy.”

  “I can tell you feel that way by the way you write about him. By the way he is always there to rescue you and Andy out of your predicaments with this creature, Zorl.”

  Charley shrugged. That’s what most dads do. Help their sons. If it were the other way around, and he was in the coma being pursued by Zorl instead of Andy, he bet that his dad, Ed Finch, would arrive just in the nick of time to help him, too.

  And, yet, he sometimes wondered about that.

  “Has your father been in any of the dreams?”

  The question caught Charley by surprise. In truth, he had – once. But it was before the time when he was writing his dreams down and only had a fragmentary, vague recollection of what Mr. Finch had been doing in the dream. There was a part of Charley that had the guilty sense that his father had been helping Zorl in that dream, actually helping that murderous bastard!

  “Charley?”

  Charley looked up. “No,” he said. “Why—why would he be?”

  Dr. Arambaala gave Charley his usual dark frown. “I don’t know, Charley,” he intoned. “They’re your dreams.”

  “Well, he wasn’t, and he hasn’t been in any of the dreams. Not a single one.”

  * * * *

  At the end of the hour’s session, Dr. Arambaala invited Charley’s mom back into the room for a consultation.

  “I’d like to have Charley tested at a sleep lab,” he said once Mrs. Finch had settled herself on her chair.

  “A sleep lab?” She let out a small laugh, like she always did whenever something befuddled her or that she found ridiculous. That laugh annoyed Charley.

  “Yes,” said Dr. Arambaala. “The state university has an excellent sleep lab which not only studies the usual problems associated with sleep – insomnia, sleep apnea, snoring –

  but also has done some rather interesting research into the physical and para-physical process of dreaming. It’s run by Doctor Melissa Strang, a foremost authority on sleep and dreaming.”

  Mrs. Finch was squinting at the doctor now, while Charley leaned forward, excited and a little nervous about the prospect of being tested, or whatever they did at the sleep lab besides sleep. He also wondered how cool it was to think that someone had actually studied and worked to become the foremost expert on sleep and dreaming. Dr. Melissa Strang. Now hers was a career he might want some day.

  “What happens there?” Charley wanted to know. “What will they do to me at this lab?”

  Dr. Arambaala smiled. “All you have to do, Charley,” he said, “is sleep. They attach some electrodes and monitor what’s going on while you sleep. They’ll wake you up in the middle of one of your dreams and talk to you about it.”

  Charley’s mother sighed. Reluctantly, she agreed to try it. Anything to rid Charley of these dreams. Of course, she needed a way to tell Mr. Finch about it. He wasn’t going to be happy.

  * * * *

  Charley’s appointment at the sleep lab was set up for Friday evening, so it wouldn’t interfere with school. It occupied six small rooms in one of the squat, orange brick

  buildings at the edge of the State University Medical School on the extreme north side of Buffalo. There was a kind of living room with some couches, end tables, a large flat screen TV, a control room with a bank of computers where the technicians and sleep scientists spent studying the instruments, a small lunch room and four bedrooms with attached bathrooms—glorified hospital rooms actually—wh
ere the sleep studies were conducted.

  After getting lost for a while trying to find the lab, at 9:30 Friday night, half an hour late, Charley and Mrs. Finch rushed down a corridor toward a sign that said, naturally enough, “Sleep Lab.” After passing beyond a plain wood door and walking down a short hall, they found Dr. Strang sitting on a stool alone in the control room, munching an apple while gazing at a computer screen. She was a petite, birdlike, brainy-looking woman with long, straggly dark hair streaked with gray and narrow, brown beady eyes. Finally, she looked up at Charley and Mrs. Finch.

  Mrs. Finch introduced herself and Dr. Strang nodded. “Welcome, Charley.” Dr. Strang stuck out a small bony hand, which Charley lightly shook. “Glad to have you. Maybe we can get to the bottom of the dreams you’ve been having. Doctor A’s told me all about them.” She got up off the stool and gestured for them to follow. “He even arranged for us to conduct a little experiment this evening.”

  “Experiment?” Charley asked.

  Outside in the corridor, Dr. Strang stopped. The lab seemed mostly empty and quiet, as one might expect for most places on campus at that hour on a Friday night.

  “Doctor A’s arranged for us to monitor the sleep of that boy in the coma,” she said.

  “Your friend, Andy. We couldn’t bring him here, of course. His doctors wouldn’t allow it, but they said it was alright to do it there, in his hospital room, and Andy’s Mom agreed, so I sent a technician out there to the hospital where Andy is, and we’re all set up. So, both you and Andy will be monitored tonight when you sleep—and dream. This way, we can see if your REM cycles coincide.”

  “REM cycles?” Charley asked. Next to him, his mother frowned. This was getting much too complicated for her. Maybe Mr. Finch had been right when he had rolled his eyes and laughed out loud when she had told him that the government and medical school actually spent taxpayers’ money so that some goofy scientists, like Dr. Strang and her staff, could study how human beings sleep and dream.

  “This way,” said Dr. Strang.

  She led Charley and Mrs. Finch into the long, narrow waiting room. The large screen television was off and she patted the wide couch against one wall, inviting them to sit. After Charley sat next to his mother, Dr. Strang sat across from them in the loveseat and crossed her skinny legs.

  “Let me give you both a little primer on sleep and dreams. Though we all spend a great deal of our lifetimes sleeping, we seem to care so little about what sleep really is. How it operates, what it means. That’s what we try to learn here.”

  Charley nodded. He had to agree that he had never given sleep much thought. Sleep was, well, sleep. It was just something that the body needed, a bodily function, like taking a crap, or eating a McDonald’s hamburger. Yet, it did seem kind of crazy that people knew so little about something they did so much. For example, why did the body have to

  get a certain amount of shut-eye every night? And, what was with dreaming? What possible need could that crazy process serve in our lives?

  “Let me start with REM sleep,” continued Dr. Strang.

  “REN?” asked Mrs. Finch.

  “No,” said Dr. Strang. “REM – R, E, M. It’s an acronym for Rapid Eye Movement –

  REM sleep. It was discovered in nineteen-fifty-three by a couple of scientists who noticed that when people were dreaming, their eyes fluttered violently, in the throes of some physical process. What they ultimately found was that REM sleep is a mentally active period when most dreaming occurs.”

  Dr. Strang continued for some time about what scientists had discovered about dreaming and sleep over the years since then. At one point, Charley yawned, and Mrs. Finch glared at him. That seemed funny since the whole point of his being there was to go to sleep, and dream!

  Charley’s yawn did nothing to stop Dr. Strang from droning on about what they had learned about sleep and dreaming since the discovery of REM sleep. For one thing, she said, it suggested that sleep is a complex activity, fundamentally different from waking, but just as active. (At one point, Mrs. Finch couldn’t help yawning.) REM sleep also provided sleep scientists with a marker for when dreams were occurring, so that immediate ‘dream reports’, as she called them, could be collected from subjects. Unlike a person’s usual inability to recall a dream upon waking up in the morning after a long night’s sleep, researchers had found over the years that when people were awakened during REM sleep, each of them had a distinct recollection of their dreams.

  “And that’s what we’re going to try to do tonight,” she told Charley with a kind of crooked grin that must have been her smile. “Wake you up, Charley, in the middle of one of your dreams during REM sleep.”

  She went on to tell Charley and Mrs. Finch exactly what they were going to do. Electrodes would be attached to Charley’s head, chest, arms, and legs to monitor his bodily functions. He’d also be connected by the electrodes attached to his head to an electroencephalograph, which Dr. Strang shortened to EEG. She said it was a fairly simple machine that would register Charley’s brain electricity during sleep. The nerves in the brain emitted electricity, which the EEG could pick up and record on a set of needles that ran across a page. During the REM cycle, his brain would emit something called

  ‘beta’ waves. That was when he would be dreaming.

  “So, ready?” Dr. Strang asked brightly, as if he was about to go to a ball game instead of being attached to electrodes and then going to sleep.

  “I guess,” said Charley.

  The idea of having electrodes strapped to his head and the data coming out on a bank of computers didn’t really appeal to Charley at that moment. But maybe it would help Andy somehow. He thought of Andy in his hospital room, oblivious to the technician from the sleep lab attaching electrodes to him and setting up a computer to monitor his brain activity. Maybe, too, going through this would help Dr. Arambaala understand why he was having these bizarre, endless dreams. Even Charley was growing tired of them.

  “It won’t be so bad, Charley,” said Mrs. Finch. “All you have to do is sleep.”

  Charley gulped. He wished he was going to his own bed right then as he followed behind his mother, Dr. Strang, and a technician into the sleep room that had been designated for him. They made Charley strip down to his underwear and lay down on a surprisingly comfortable, wide bed. Mrs. Finch stayed, embarrassing Charley by reminding him over and over that it’d be alright and she’d be just over in the next room during the long process, as the technician squirted plops of yucky adhesive gel on specific spots on his forehead, arms, chest, and legs before attaching the rubber electrodes, perhaps as many as twenty or twenty-five of them. Charley couldn’t help thinking how much it was going to hurt in the morning when they had to tear off each and every one of them.

  By the time the technician had finished, it was almost ten thirty, already a half an hour or so past Charley’s bedtime. But, he didn’t feel the slightest bit tired, and he told Dr. Strang and his mother that as they prepared to leave him alone in the room.

  “That’s quite normal,” Dr. Strang said. “In fact, we expect it may take you some time to fall asleep. We’ll just pipe in some soft music and put the TV on low, and, you’ll see, in no time you’ll be asleep.”

  Within only a few minutes, Charley surprised them by falling into a deep, dark sleep during which he didn’t dream at all at first. But suddenly his brain went alpha, and the dream started with Andy rushing toward him, then past him, being chased by none other than Zorl and a band of leering, screaming mutant monkeys.

  “Run!” Andy shouted. “Run! Follow me!”

  Miles away across the city, in a silent hospital room, another sleep lab computer registered alpha waves and the beginning of REM sleep. Andy was dreaming, too.

  Chapter Four

  Coma

  In the control room down the hall from Charley’s room, Dr. Strang showed the record of Charley’s sleep on the computer screens to a worried-looking Mrs. Finch.

  “This means,” she said
, pointing to a squiggly white line on the dark blue screen background, “he’s fallen asleep.” Squinting, she added: “Into a deep, deep sleep.”

  Only five minutes later, with some measure of excitement, she blurted: “He’s entered REM.” When Mrs. Finch turned to her, Dr. Strang added, “He’s dreaming.”

  Then she made a little yelping sound. “And so is Andy,” reported Dr. Strang, pointing to the feedback screen from Andy’s room.

  “We’ll let him dream whatever dream he’s having for a few minutes,” continued Dr. Strang, “then go wake him up and let him tell us what it was all about.”

  The time dragged slowly while Dr. Strang, the three technicians assisting her, and Mrs. Finch stared at the computer screens registering the readings from the brains of Charley and Andy. After a time, it seemed as if the squiggly lines spreading horizontally across the screens were involved in some kind of metaphysical duet. Finally, Dr. Strang said, “Let’s go wake him up.”

  They followed her out of the control room and walked single file into Charley’s room. He looked deep in sleep, a million miles away from them. There seemed no exact procedure for waking up the subject. Dr. Strang simply started jostling his shoulders.

  “Charley,” she said lightly. “Wake up.”

  When he didn’t stir, Mrs. Finch stepped forward.

  “Let me try,” she said with a smile. “I practice this every morning, getting him up for school.”

  That got a small chuckle out of the otherwise mirthless Dr. Strang. She stood back and let Mrs. Finch roll Charley by his shoulders.

  “Let’s get up, Charley,” she called, and then in a sing-song way, she added, “Time to get up.”

  But Charley didn’t stir. He didn’t even emit so much as a mild snore.

  “Charley!” shouted Mrs. Finch when Charley continued to show no signs of cooperating, no signs of any consciousness, in fact.