by Max Ehrlich
Suddenly he was driving a car. Moving fast over a narrow road lined with tall, stately trees. The car had its top down. A woman was in the seat beside him. It was not Marcia, but some other woman—a redhead. They were going very fast. The moon was a thin crescent. The woman’s hair was flying back in the wind. She was as beautiful as Marcia, but in a different way. She seemed ecstatic with the sensation of speed and the wind. She had her head thrown back, and she was singing an aimless, nameless tune. But it was the car that really interested him. It was an absolute beauty—red leather upholstery, black broadloom carpeting, burled walnut-grain instrument panel, a color-indicator speedometer needle that changed color according to speed. The needle was green from zero to thirty miles an hour, yellow from thirty to fifty, and red over fifty. He even noted the exact mileage. There was a pushbutton radio mounted in the center of the dash. The car was long, low, racy. It had a long vertical grill with small horizontal bars, big disc hubcaps, large, curving fenders. The steering wheel was low and below the cowl. Overlarge tires, whitewall. Classic design. He looked at the redhead, smiled at her. He stepped on the gas and they started to fly.
Suddenly a bell was ringing, steady and insistent. He opened his eyes. Through the window he could see the red sky. The timer had just gone off, and now he was aware of Marty Stein standing over him. The peppermint fingers pried into his mouth again.
“All right, Pete. Let’s have a look.”
They were all very familiar. The Window Dream, the Street Dream, the Tower Dream, the Prison Dream, the Tennis Dream. And, of course, the Cotton Mather Dream, the one with the big Puritan staring down at him. Funny thing about that one. The giant figure never moved. Maybe it was a clue of some kind. It seemed to suggest a still life. A painting perhaps? It could be. He’d ask his father. Maybe there was a portrait of his Puritan ancestor somewhere around. Old Increase Proud. The old hypocrites may have been short on tolerance, but they were long on ego. He knew, because once he had gone to the Research Library and dug up a rare volume on the Puritan oligarchy in America. Everybody who was anybody in the Old Massachusetts Bay Colony seemed to have had his portrait painted.
He’d had all these dreams before, and he knew he would have them again. But this time something new bad been added. A new entry in this crazy pantheon, a shiny new hallucination to add to the others he kept in his black book. Instantly, he gave it a name: The Automobile Dream.
He sat there in the dentist’s chair, shaken. The small fragments in his unconscious, the mysterious but familiar pictures, always seemed to hover over him like roosting vultures. But this time they hadn’t come in deep sleep. For the first time they had slipped in just over the edge. For the first time they had invaded a daydream. And for the first time there had been another woman, someone else besides Marcia.
Score Three for Edna.
Later that night, after Nora had gone off to a meeting, he decided to work on the book he was writing: The Red Man: Origins and Culture. His Ethnic Role in America, Present and Future. He hadn’t done any work on the project in weeks.
He fumbled through his pile of research folders. Finally he made a few notes and wrote a couple of paragraphs on a new raid some Indians had made on the building housing the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington. Then he crossed out what he had written and tried again. He liked it even less than before. Finally he threw down his pen, slammed shut his reference books and stuffed his notes and clippings into their designated folders.
Bullshit! He was already way behind on the project. Worse, at the moment he didn’t give a damn. Once the book had been an exciting project to him, but he had done little or no work on it for the past six months.
Ever since these dreams, or hallucinations or whatever, had begun, he had noticed a certain loss of energy. At times he was aware of not being with it at all. He simply was unable to concentrate; his mind would wander or go totally blank. Sometimes his eyes would blur, or his physical reflexes would seem to be dulled. He noticed it particularly in the tennis he was playing. And he was unable to summon up much ambition in other areas.
More than this, he was becoming irritable. He snapped at people, his students or his teaching assistant, for no reason at all. So far Nora hadn’t noticed, or if she had, she gave no sign. He had tried hard not to give her any hint of what was bothering him. But he knew that sooner or later, if this went on, he would have to tell her.
He admitted that he was frightened. At times he had to steel himself not to panic. At first he had been sure it was a temporary psychic phenomenon. He was sure the hallucinations would go away. But when they not only continued but became more frequent and began to take their toll of him in his day-to-day activities, he really became concerned. He had no idea what was going on in his unconscious. Nobody seemed to know. And if an analyst like Ludwig Staub didn’t know, then it was something to worry about.
If you were sick and there was no diagnosis, then it had to scare the hell out of you. A patient who knew he had cancer at least had a diagnosis. Even if it was terminal, he somehow learned to live with it. At least if you knew, you could do something, try to do something. But all he could do was take it, like a dumb animal. And each night he hated to go to sleep. Sometimes he fought to keep himself from drifting off. Not that the devils possessed him every night. Occasionally they gave him an entire night off.
What was more, he felt persecuted, singled out. Why me? he thought. Billions of people in the world, and this is happening to me. Peter Proud, psycho. But a very special psycho: superpsycho. Unique. Even your psychiatrist can’t tell you. The proof duly recorded in the notebook he kept by his bedside. My dream book, he thought. A Diary of My Dreams, by Peter Proud. It would probably go big in one of the occult magazines. Or, he thought sardonically, how about a scholarly paper on the subject? In the gobbledygook of his profession, A Dissertation on Unusual Dream Phenomena Totally Unrelated to the Conscious Milieu. A Series of Psychic Hallucinations Defying Known Methods of Analysis: A Challenge to Freud, Jung, Stekel, and the Traditionalists, by Peter Proud, MA, PhD.
All he wanted was to get rid of these sick hallucinations somehow. Go back to nice, normal, Freudian dreams, like killing his father or raping his mother.
He had, of course, told Nora that sooner or later he was to be one of the subject-patients at Sam Goodman’s Sleep Laboratory. Of course he had not told her why. He had said merely that Goodman needed volunteers, and he had obliged. He would be sleeping away from home for a week, ten days at the most. Nora had smiled and told him to hurry home. Meanwhile, she said, she would be terribly unhappy in a cold and lonely bed. She had grown to love the pleasure of his company, but of course she would be brave and try to survive.
He hoped to God that Sam Goodman and his Sleep Lab would come up with something, anything.
That night he had the House Dream.
He was standing before a house. It stood in a row of other houses on the street, all somewhat similar in design. But this was his house. It had two stories. The upper story was faced with brown shingles, the lower with white stucco. There was a big tree-arched front porch, and he saw that it was the third house from the corner. Then came the Tree Dream. He was in some kind of park. There was a large square mausoleum behind him. On top of it were the marble figures of a man and a woman, the man’s arm curled protectively around the woman’s waist. But he himself was standing before a huge tree, about a hundred feet from the mausoleum. He was a boy, perhaps thirteen or fourteen, and there was a girl with him about the same age. Her face was fuzzy, but he knew that she wasn’t Marcia. She had freckles, and long brown hair falling down to the middle of her back, and she was laughing. He had a knife, and he was cutting initials into the bark of the tree. The bark was tough, and he worked hard, cutting the initials deep. But he could not see what they were….
Chapter 5
A few days later Sam Goodman phoned him and said they were ready to take him at the Sleep Lab.
He went there on a Monday night, as instructed
, at eleven o’clock.
Sam Goodman was waiting for him. He was a partly bald, dark-faced young man with a big military mustache and intelligent black eyes. He wore a bright red shirt and brown corduroys. He grinned and said, “Before you get undressed, I’ll give you a short tour of our little dreamland here, courtesy of the house. By the way, we call our sleepers here by number rather than name. Just to make it anonymous and impersonal. And to keep you as a case history statistic. You’re sleeper number seven.”
He led the way down a corridor, explaining that his staff consisted of five dream researchers. All of them were graduate students working for their doctorates, and they serviced about ten sleepers on any given night.
Sam showed him into a large room filled with a number of boxlike stainless steel machines, each studded with wires and cables. To each was attached an automatic pen that jiggled across a slowly revolving drum of graph paper. Each unit was also equipped with a tape recorder, the tape set in position and ready to go.
“This is our EEG room.”
“EEG?”
“Electroencephalograph. What they do is record the dreams of our sleepers without waking them up. They’re built with channels for displaying, all on one chart, the sleeper’s respiration rates, body movements, brain waves, and rapid eye movements. Follow?”
“Yes.”
“All right. We’ve got ten sleepers in various rooms here. Each has a number. When one of them starts to dream, everything starts to record here. We can tell by the brain waves and rapid eye movements and other data when the dream’s just about finished. Then we ring a bell in this room and wake him up suddenly. We call it the arousal bell. At that moment, in most cases, he’s able to remember everything in the dream he’s just had. He has a microphone in his room, and he passes on the information here. Then we record it on tape.”
The staff researchers were sitting at small tables before the individual units. They chatted, smoked, and drank coffee out of paper cups. They all seemed a little bored, but their eyes kept flicking to the revolving drums, where the pens continued to draw jagged strokes. Sam Goodman took him over and introduced him to a sandy-haired, blue eyed young man.
“Charlie, here’s our new subject. Doctor Peter Proud. Charlie Townsend. Charlie, he’ll designate as number seven.”
Townsend grinned. “Hello, Seven. Welcome to fantasy factory.”
“Nice meeting you, Charlie.”
“You won’t think so. Not after I keep waking you up in the middle of the night.” He turned to Goodman. “Shall I prepare him now, Sam?”
“No. It’s his initiation. I’ll take care of it myself.”
As they moved toward the door, one of the researchers called out.
“Number Five coming through.” Goodman motioned to him and they came back toward one of the machines. Together they stared at the revolving drum. The pen was moving furiously now. It was changing quickly from a valley pattern of hills and crags to almost a flat pattern.
“What stage, Paul?” asked Goodman.
“Stage one; EEG indicates breakup of alpha rhythms. Crest and trough flattened. He’s lost touch with outer world. REM activated. This one won’t last very long. Watch it.” The pattern held steady for about a minute. Then Goodman said,
“EEG’s beginning to change in amplitude. Short bursts at a frequency of fifteen cycles a second. He’s on his way into stage two.”
“Yeah. And rapid eye movements decreasing. Dream’s almost finished.”
“All right. Give him the bell. Wake him up.”
The researcher pressed a button. From a feedback, they heard a loud bell ring in the sleeper’s room. Then it rang again. The researcher turned on the tape recorder. An irritable, sleepy voice came over the feedback:
“Okay, okay, I’m awake, goddamn it.”
The researcher turned off the bell and spoke into a mike. “What’s the dream, Number Five? Do you remember?”
“Yeah. But maybe we ought to skip this one.”
“Why?”
The voice, that of a young man, hesitated. “It’s pretty dirty.”
“Tell us anyway. If we don’t record it, we can’t pass it on to your psychiatrist.”
“All right. I dreamed I got out of bed. I went into the john and tried to turn on a water faucet. The thing wouldn’t work. I kept turning and turning the thing, but no water would come out. Then I called a plumber. A little while later the door opened, and someone dressed in plumber’s coveralls came in. At first I thought it was a man. Then I saw that it was a woman. I was pretty surprised. I told her it was crazy—I mean, this idea of a lady plumber. I didn’t think she could do this job. She took off her coveralls, and I saw that she was naked under them. Then she went to the basin and turned on the faucet. She just gave it a little flip, and it turned. I waited for the water to pour out. But just before it did, you bastards woke me!” The sleeper sounded aggrieved. “Man, you woke me just before—well, you know. I’m lying here with the biggest hard-on you ever saw.”
“Sorry about that, Five,” said the researcher.
“You think Dr. Melnicker win like this one?”
“I’m sure he will. Now go back to sleep.”
“I’ll try. But it won’t be easy.”
“Try anyway. Goodnight, Five.”
Paul turned off the tape. Then he grinned at Goodman. “Would you like a little mail-order analysis, Sam?”
“Go ahead,”
“He sees sexual fulfillment as a plumbing conception. The faucet is a symbol of the dreamer’s penis, the turning of the faucet is genital manipulation, and the flow of water is ejaculation.”
Sam Goodman laughed. “You really spoiled his fun, Paul.”
“If I had known, I’d have let him sleep.”
They walked down another long corridor which Sam Goodman called “Dream Street.”
It was lined with a series of rooms, each occupied by one of the sleepers. Peter could hear gentle snores coming from a couple of them.
“Everybody’s already in the sack but you,” said Goodman.
He opened a door marked seven and ushered Peter into a small cubbyhole. It was monastic in style—a cot with khaki army blankets, a chair, a washbowl, and a toilet compartment. On the wall next to the sleeper’s head was a panel box with electrode leads, a speaker, an ordinary doorbell, and a microphone, all of which communicated to the EEG room. That was all.
Sam grinned at Peter’s expression.
“Well? How do you like it?”
“It isn’t exactly the Beverly Hilton.”
“What did you expect? Wall-to-wall carpeting? Louis Quinze furniture? You’re not going to live here, you’re going to sleep here. Now pour yourself into your pajamas and we’ll get this thing on the road.”
When Peter was ready, Goodman pasted the EEG electrodes—tiny discs at the ends of long colored wires—on his forehead, scalp, and ear lobe, and just over the eyes.
“How does this stuff feel?”
“Pretty sticky.”
“It’s colloidal glue. Used to patch up professional boxers. We’ve found it works better than adhesive tape.”
He patched other electrodes which measured heartbeat to Peter’s chest, and still others to his arms. These, he explained, were part of the electromyograph setup used to measure micromuscle activity. He connected a photocell device attached to the bedsprings which would record those periods in which Peter would toss and turn in his sleep.
Then Goodman turned off the lights. “Goodnight, Pete. Happy alpha and delta rhythms.”
The door closed and Peter was alone. He lay there feeling ridiculous, like some mechanical man wired for sight and sound. Wires sprouting out of his head like the Medusa.
After a long time, he fell asleep.
He checked in at the Sleep Lab every night for the next ten days.
First Charlie Townsend would wire him up. Then sleep. Then the raucous bell would sound, and he would wake up abruptly. Then Townsend’s voice, over the speaker i
n his cubbyhole:
“Tell us about your dream, Seven.”
And always the same answer. “I don’t remember any dream.”
Each night, they woke him three or four times. Each time he could remember nothing about any dreams. Not at that point. Not at the time they woke him up. He never remembered any dream when he was supposed to.
Yet, at the times he wasn’t supposed to be dreaming, when his eyes showed no rapid movement and the valley patterns on the EEG showed all quiet, he experienced them all.
By actual count, he had the Lake Dream three times, the Automobile Dream, the House Dream, the Tree Dream, and the Tennis Dream twice, and the rest of them once. Throughout, as always, they were his constant companions.
Whenever he checked in at the lab, he sensed that he was an object of some curiosity on the part of the staff. They stared at him, then turned away. He became increasingly aware that there was something special about his case. He tried to pump Charlie Townsend about it. But Townsend said, simply, “Sorry. I’m not supposed to discuss anything with you. Not until the data’s all in and I get clearance from Doctor Goodman.”
It was “Doctor Goodman” now, instead of “Sam.” Peter found this a little too professional, a little too serious. It made him uneasy. They were all acting too damned mysterious. There was altogether too much hush-hush where he was concerned.
He noted that ever since the first night, Goodman had not appeared at the lab. It was as though he were avoiding some personal confrontation with Peter. Peter called him three times at his office before he finally answered.
