It was also widely accepted that everybody dreamed, whether or not they could remember their dreams. But it wasn’t until Dr. Musoka at UCLA’s Center for Sleep Research first captured a dream that it became clear just how varied was the quantity and quality of human dreams. And just how important they were.
By the time I met Kyle, as undergrads, scientists had identified over two dozen ONs, and linked deficiencies in several of them to disease susceptibility. Clinical trials on dream-replacement therapy started almost immediately, with astonishing results in fighting certain cancers and auto-immune disorders. Kyle could explain it better than I—it was his undergraduate advisor at Stanford’s Center for Human Sleep Research who developed the first dream-diffuser. I was just another uninspired artist with one flopped gallery event and a room full of untouched canvases to show for my BFA in art.
Oneirotoxins were discovered a few years later. High levels of these seemed to be correlated to disease, especially auto-immune and mental health disorders. Dream-replacement therapy showed early successes in those applications too.
By the time we were married, the field had been so thoroughly explored that Kyle was forced to research the finer points of dream “types” for his doctorate in Oneirology. The FDA had approved the use of donated human dreams for a host of ailments, and the national dreambank system had been established. Which I guess was lucky for us, since Kyle’s ON-deficient leukemia was diagnosed just three years later.
With Kyle sleeping—perchance to dream—I collapsed onto the couch where he’d been. I stared at the detritus on the coffee table, willing the Kleenex to get up and march into the wastebasket. It didn’t move. For a long time, neither did I, but eventually I sat up and started tidying the papers that had fallen to the floor. They were print-outs of analyses of dreams—long columns of numbers and abbreviations and symbols that represented the components of the dreams he ran through the machine in his office. He had told me what it all meant, many times, but I still had trouble understanding it. Lately he’d been spending a lot of time working with the sour dreams from Dreams 4 Life, an obsession that I wasn’t sure was related to his dissertation.
Every page was marked up in Kyle’s looping handwriting, numbers circled and underlined and double-underlined in four different colors of ink. Kyle wanted me to follow his work; he feared he wouldn’t live to finish it. But when I looked at those messy pages of symbols and codes and truncated notes, I knew I’d never get it.
With the living room neat and the Kleenex disposed of, I followed Kyle to bed. He flinched when I switched on my bedside lamp, and the feathery tendrils hanging over his head trembled, but he didn’t wake. His eyes were moving—he was dreaming—so I didn’t dare touch him.
I reprogrammed my own DreamCatcher, making sure I had enough empty vials in the collection slots, and quickly shut the light off. That night I wasn’t going to save any dreams for myself. It was a long shot, but I thought whatever paltry ONs I could produce might help Kyle, even if only a little. Arranging the soft wires around my head I looked up into the machine’s grid-like collection plate until I fell into a sleep of my own.
#
At first I thought I was screaming. My heart was pounding. Snatches of hypnagogic speech trailed off before I could grasp them, until I realized I was awake, it was morning, I was in my bed, and so was Kyle. And he was screaming.
I swept away the intruding wires of my DreamCatcher, then did the same with Kyle’s, placing my hand softly but firmly to his face to wake him. Through a layer of stubble his skin felt clammy, like damp Velcro. The screaming stopped as he shook awake, swiping at my hand.
“It’s just me.” I waited for the wild look to drain from his eyes.
He inhaled sharply and seemed to realize where he was. “I’m sorry,” he said in a dry voice, “nightmare.”
“I figured.”
He pushed himself up in the bed, then lurched over the side and vomited. I couldn’t tell from my side of the bed whether he’d hit the wastebasket this time.
I swung my legs out of bed and into my sweats before I knew why I was doing it. He already had everything I could get for him huddled together on his nightstand: Kleenex, water, pills. I came around the bed anyway, just as he was straightening back up and groping for a Kleenex to wipe his mouth with. He had hit the target. We were getting good at this.
“What was it?”
He shook his head, falling back into his pillow, and I knew it would be just like the other times, and he wouldn’t remember. I looked at his DreamCatcher, making sure all four bottles were spent. Kyle reached for his water glass and he looked so weak that I picked it up and held onto it until it was steady in his hand. When he was done I set it as close as I could on the bedstand, sliding the dream machine over. My own hands shook.
I’d picked the plastic liner out of the wastebasket and was on my way out of the room before he spoke. “It was . . . shadows.” I set the bag down by the door and went back to the bed, crawling up beside him from the foot until I lay on my stomach and elbows looking up at him like a little girl waiting for story time. Scary story time.
His smile became a frown as he tried to recall the dream. “Shadowy things . . . moving around me. All dark and grey. No eyes.” He shrugged. “I can’t remember now why it was so scary.”
I shrugged back, though because of the way I was propped this consisted of lowering my body rather than raising my shoulders.
“Dreams are that way, I guess. No real logic.” I remembered my own DreamCatcher. I didn’t remember having any dreams, but then you never did if they’d been collected. I looked hopefully at the row of tiny jars, but only two had any liquid in them, and one was a shady shade of sepia. Rats. I slouched lower into the bed.
“Just a feeling of dread,” he said. “I’m sorry I scared you.”
I put on the best smile I could, climbing all the way up so that our faces were close. “You can’t scare me,” I lied.
Kyle still had the straining-to-remember look on his face. “Why am I still so tired?”
My smile wavered. “It’s okay. Just go back to sleep.” I put my hand on his scratchy face—drier now—and moved in to kiss him.
“I taste like vomit.”
I didn’t care.
Before I left I pulled the blinds closed and loaded my one viable dream into Kyle’s machine. I stuck the other vial in the pocket of my sweatpants, where it clinked against yesterday’s bad dream.
I took both of them to Kyle’s office. One thing he had taught me was the importance of record-keeping. Using his notation system I affixed both tiny jars with tiny labels, and entered them into his log. Kyle’s corny saying was that in our house, bad dreams made good data.
#
I spent all day chewing my nails to shreds and waiting for the delivery driver from Dreams 4 Life. Kyle slept almost all day, and I alternated between frenzies of pointless activity—organizing my fabric swatches by color and texture, throwing out oil paints dried up from disuse, picking the layer of paint off of all the house’s light switches—and fatigue so deep that even changing the channel on the television seemed an impossible task. A few clients called, but I let the phone go to voicemail. The idea of drawing any more stuffy modern living rooms or kitchens made me feel physically sick.
The only useful thing I managed to do was to pour a few drops of food-color-tinged water into empty dream vials to give to Dreams 4 Life. They insisted on collecting the bad ones for “proper disposal,” but Kyle wouldn’t part with any of them.
The doorbell rang sometime after six. I’d been practicing my complaint all day, but when I opened the door and saw the harried look on the driver’s face I hesitated. But then so did he. I imagined two slack and haggard faces staring each other down, caught in an infinite loop like reflecting mirrors.
“Wow,” I said. “You look like your day’s been as bad as mine.”
The driver—Matt, his nametag said—blinked at me. He chuckled, then looked like he felt guilty
for chuckling. “Well, I have been feeling sorry for myself. I probably shouldn’t.” He handed me a small tray with five clear vials, still cold from the onboard cooler. I peered into each one, looking for the faintest hint of color. They looked clear, but I would have bet our house that some would turn before bedtime.
“How many bad ones?” Matt held his clipboard in his left hand and clicked his pen repeatedly with his right.
“One,” I said, setting the new dreams on a table inside the house and handing him yesterday’s tray, with its four empty vials and one of brownish water. “But it’s five this week, and”—I looked back into the house and lowered my voice—“he’s so sick. I’m so worried. What am I going to do?” I felt a note of instability entering my voice and stopped, though there was more, much more, that I wanted to say.
Matt looked somewhere below my eyes. My neck, maybe. “I really can’t say. I’m sorry.” I knew it was true, too; he was just the messenger.
He held out the clipboard and pen so I could sign for the delivery, then retreated down the brick steps of our porch to the driveway where the company’s hatchback idled, generic sunshiney logo mocking me with its horrific mustard and cyan color scheme and Comic Sans font.
Dreams 4 Life really was the worst of the dream providers. But also the cheapest, and therefore the only one our lousy insurance would cover. In the Wild West of dream-replacement therapy there were a lot of operators, with widely varying quality. It was such a new field that regulation and oversight really hadn’t caught up with practice.
The first tears were leaking from the corners of my eyes before I shut the door. A part of me wanted to run after Matt and invite him in for a drink, just to have someone to talk to.
It wasn’t that I had no friends, but lately it felt like it. All of my best friends were scattered across the country, dealing with their own troubles—children and unemployment and ailing parents—and the people we knew locally were mostly Kyle’s friends and colleagues. He hadn’t wanted them around since he’d gotten so sick. He hadn’t even told his parents how serious it was. So aside from my clients, whichever driver Dreams 4 Life sent, and Chloe, the nurse who came in twice a week to check on us, I was on my own.
#
“Do animals dream?” I asked Kyle on one of our early dates.
He launched into a rambling answer about what it meant to dream, which I half-listened to. All animals that had yet been tested produced ONs and OTs, to a much more predictable degree than humans. “For example,” he said, “every mouse whose dreams have been collected produce roughly 80% ON-L and 15% ON-A.” He went on to talk about the fluctuating of the other 5%, and the reliability of sampling methods, before getting back to my question: “But they aren’t dreams the way you probably think of them.”
When humans had tried mouse dreams, nothing happened. They didn’t dream of cheese. They didn’t have nightmares about cats and mousetraps. They just got a reliable dose of ON-L. Human use of animal dreams was banned almost immediately, though, so no one got to find out whether dogs really do dream of chasing cars. As far as I knew, the FDA still hadn’t decided whether it was safe.
“Their fear is just a knee-jerk reaction,” Kyle always said. I knew he tried whatever dreams came his way, animal or human. He’d try serial killers’ dreams if they were available.
Kyle had long been distracted from his proposed dissertation research into the “types” or substrata of dreams, focusing instead on the nearer-to-home problem of dreams souring. Some dreams were born bad, heavy with oneirotoxins and deeply discolored. But the only ones that seemed to change over time were the ones from Dreams 4 Life, a fact that puzzled Kyle.
He had analyzed hundreds of dreams, both from the dreambank and from individual donors, and though he hadn’t found the answer yet, he had made some discoveries. One was that the chemical makeup of the dreams didn’t change as they went bad. If it was made of ON-D and K when it was fresh, it still was when it stank like a month-old fish. Another was that the oneironutrients he received in his daily doses were startlingly regular. Which, of course, puzzled me. If they still had ONs, why wasn’t he getting any better?
But Kyle just waved that question away in favor of a more basic mystery. He posed the problem to me as a logic puzzle: “Everyone you know is on ON-replacement therapy, right?”
Well, not everyone. But they were prescribing it an awful lot, for everything from depression to lupus to leukemia.
“And everyone needs at least a dream or two per night, including donors?”
Right.
“And they can’t be split, or stretched, or synthesized.”
Okay, if you say so.
“So where are all these dreams coming from?”
It seemed to me that the math still worked. There had to be enough strong dreamers, putting out eight or even ten dreams a night, to cover the demand. But what did I know?
I asked an executive with Dreams 4 Life about it once, but the company was about as transparent as a brick wall. Their sources were confidential, she said.
#
Two of the dreams were already bad by ten o’clock. Kyle had come out to the living room and thought he could handle some dinner, and when I had my head in the fridge I saw the dreams’ discoloration.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!”
“What is it?” Kyle called from the couch.
I stepped into the opening between rooms. “We’re out of tomatoes.”
Kyle squinted at me as if to say, I know you better than that; what is it really?
“It’s the damned dreams again. Two of them.” I looked up at the ceiling, staring down the uneven line between ceiling and crown molding. My lower eyelids felt heavy. “At this rate there won’t be any dreams tonight. Or worse, more nightmares.”
Kyle sighed. It was a loud sigh, carrying all the way across the room, over the drone of a Discovery Channel narrator.
I looked at him.
“You know it doesn’t matter,” he said. “They’re not helping, and I suspect they’re making it worse.”
“How can you say that?” I asked. “You know the research better than anyone. You’ve seen your tests. Your illness is caused by deficiencies of ON-D and K. If you’re not getting better . . .” I couldn’t finish. I’d never allowed myself to vocalize my theory, that he’d done this to himself testing distilled and mixed dreams before the practice was regulated, or depriving himself of his own “native” dreams so he could study them.
I’d never allowed myself to blame him for dying on me.
Not out loud, anyway.
Kyle’s words were quiet, but they carried right into my soul. “It doesn’t matter,” he repeated. “Nothing’s going to help now.”
My eyelids overflowed, first one then the other. I blinked, and when I looked at the room again everything was blurry and Kyle was lost in the haze. I wiped my eyes with my palms.
“It does matter,” I whispered.
I went back in the kitchen and made my best tomato pasta for dinner.
#
Once Kyle was back in bed with the two remaining dreams loaded in the DreamCatcher, I started making phone calls.
I was a long time out of the loop for dealers, but through friends of friends by one in the morning I was on the phone with a guy calling himself Nocturn. He quoted me a ridiculous price per unit, and we agreed to meet in an hour. He promised me nothing but high-quality individual dreams, none of the “gruel” we were getting from the donorbank. “You don’t want that shit,” he said. “All the individuality mixed right out of it; all processed and packaged like fast food. My shit is five-star farm-to-table cuisine, organic and gluten free.” He didn’t fill me with confidence, but I was out of ideas. I made sure Kyle had everything he needed on the bedside table, and left before I could lose my nerve.
Kyle didn’t share my reservations about illegal dreams, but I still didn’t tell him where I was going. He’d been one of the early dream traders, collecting and diffusing dreams with a machin
e he built from Internet plans. He mostly did it for research, but even before medical testing started, people were getting high on each others’ dreams. I don’t think it was even a year after Dr. Musoka captured the first dream.
The craze hit my college hard, but it scared me. Even though I’d always been a weak dreamer—or maybe because of it—I didn’t like the idea of having another person’s images in my head.
Then came the horror stories: people becoming dream junkies, sleeping their lives away; people developing schizophrenia from their first try; people dying from overdoses or rotten dreams. People were mainlining them, and the problems spread. You couldn’t know which ONs—or OTs—were in a given dream, so you couldn’t trust them. It became illegal to deal dreams.
I did try it once, despite everything. My roommate went on about her fantastic dreams so much that I finally relented and let her share one with me. All I remember about the dream is that everything shone, and I could fly.
For the next three days I felt like I could fly, to the point that I almost tried it. My skin felt flushed and everyone I saw around campus looked like a stranger. Colors seemed brighter. I painted like a madwoman, and made some of my favorite pieces (the same ones that would bomb in my gallery show). I skipped classes. I stared at ceilings. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t think about anything else. It was the most intense three days of my life, but I recognized a dangerous path when I saw one. I requested a room switch.
So it was with shaking hands that I traded cash for a brown bag of clinking vials under the chrome-edged table of an all-night diner. I left my milkshake three-quarters full on the table and hurried home.
#
I really didn’t know what the sound was that greeted me when I opened the front door, not at first. But the stink of shit and vomit and sickness was unmistakable. I dropped everything but the dreams on the parquet floor, kicked the door shut, and ran to the bedroom. That was when I recognized the sound as crying.
Living Forever & Other Terrible Ideas Page 13
