My first impression of Miss Locher, as she positioned herself almost sidesaddle in a leather chair before me, was that of a tense and disturbed but basically efficient and self-seeking young woman. She was dressed and accessoried, I noticed, in much the classic style which you normally favor. I won’t go into our first visit preliminaries here (though we can discuss these and other matters at dinner this Saturday if only you are willing). After a brief chat we zeroed in on the girl’s immediate impetus for consulting me. This involved, as you may or may not know, a distressing dream she had recently suffered. What will follow, as I have composed them from my tape of the September 10th session, are the events of that dream.
In the dream our subject has entered into a new life, at least to the extent that she holds down a different job from her waking one. She had already informed me that for some five years she has worked as a secretary for a tool and die firm. (And could this possibly be your delicate touch? Tooling into oblivion.) However, her working day in the dream finds her as a long-time employee of a fashionable clothes shop. Like those state witnesses the government wishes to protect with new identities, she has been out-fitted by the dream with what seems to be a mostly tacit but somehow complete biography; a marvelous trick of the mind, this. It appears that the duties of her new job require her to change the clothes of the mannikins in the front window, this according to some mysterious schedule. She in fact feels as if her entire existence is slavishly given over to dressing and undressing these dummies. She is profoundly dissatisfied with her lot, and the mannikins become the focal point of her animus.
Such is the general background pre-supposed by the dream, which now begins in proper. On a particularly gloomy day in her era of thralldom, our dummy dresser approaches her work. She is resentful and frightened, the latter emotion an irrational “given” at this point in the dream. An awesome load of new clothes is waiting to attire a windowful of naked mannikins. Their unwarm, uncold bodies repel her touch. (Note this rare awareness of temperature in a dream, albeit neutral.) She bitterly surveys the ranks of these putty-faced creatures and then says: “Time to stop dancing and get dressed, sleeping beauties.” These words are spoken without spontaneity, as if ritually uttered to inaugurate each dressing session. But the dream changes before the dresser is able to put one stitch on the dummies, who stare at nothing with “anticipating” eyes.
The working day is now finished. She has returned to her small apartment, where she retires to bed... and has a dream. (This dream is that of the mannikin dresser and not hers, she emphatically pointed out!)
The mannikin dresser dreams she is in her bedroom. But what she now thinks of as her “bedroom” is to all appearances actually an archaically furnished hall with the dimensions of a small theater. The room is dimly lit by some jeweled lamps along the walls, the lights shining “with a strange glaziness” upon an intricately patterned carpet and upon the massive pieces of antique furniture around the room. She perceives the objects of the scene more as pure ideas than material phenomena, for details are blurry and there are many shadows. There is something, however, which she visualizes quite clearly: one of the walls of this lofty room is missing, and beyond this great gap is a view of star-clustered blackness which, irrationally, may in truth represent the depths of a colossal mirror. In any case, this maze of stars and blackness appears as an enormous mural and suggests an uncertain location for a room formerly thought to be nestled at the cozy crossroads of well-known coordinates. Now it is truly just a lost point within the unfathomable universe of sleep.
The dreamer is positioned on the other side of the room from the brink of the starry abyss. Sitting on the edge of an armless, backless couch of complex brocade, she stares and waits “without breath or heartbeat,” these functions being quite unnecessary to her dream self. Everything is in silence. This silence, however, is somehow charged with strange currents of force which she can’t really explain, an insane physics electrifying the atmosphere with demonic powers lurking just beyond the threshold of sensory perception. All is perceived with elusive dream senses.
Then a new feeling enters the dream, one slightly more tangible. There seems to be an iciness drifting in from that dazzling starscape across the room. Suddenly our dreamer experiences a premonitory dread of something unknown. Without moving from her place on that uncomfortable couch, she visually searches the room for clues to the source of her terror. Many areas are inaccessible to her sight—like a picture that has been scribbled out in places—but she sees nothing particularly frightening and is relieved for a moment. Then her anxiety begins anew when she realizes for the first time that she hasn’t looked behind her, and indeed she seems physically unable to do so.
Something is back there. She feels this to be a horrible truth. She almost knows what the thing is, but, afflicted with some kind of oneiric aphasia, she cannot find the word for the thing she fears. She can only wait, hoping that sudden shock will soon bring her out of the dream, for she is now aware that “she is dreaming,” thinking of herself in the third person.
The words “she is dreaming” somehow form a ubiquitous motif for the present situation: as a legend written somewhere at the bottom of the dream, as echoing voices bouncing here and there around the room, as a motto printed upon fortune cookie-like strips of paper and hidden in bureau drawers, and as a broken record repeating itself on an ancient victrola inside the dreamer’s head. Then all the words of this monotonous slogan gather from their divers places and like an alighting flock of birds settle in the area behind the dreamer’s back. There they twitter for a moment, as upon the frozen shoulders of a statue in a park. This is actually the way it seems to the dreamer, including the statue comparison. Something of a statuesque nature is back there, approaching her. Something that is radiating a searing field of tension, coming closer, its great shadow falling across and enlarging her own upon the floor. Still she cannot turn around, cannot move her body, which is stiff-jointed and rigid. Perhaps she can scream, she thinks, and makes an attempt to do so. But this fails, because by then there is already a firm and tepid hand that has covered her mouth from behind. The fingers on her lips feel like thick, naked crayons. Then she sees a long slim arm extending itself over her left shoulder, and a hand that is holding some filthy rags before her eyes and shaking them, “making them dance.” And at that moment a dry sibilant voice whispers into her ear: “It’s time to get dressed, little dolling.”
She tries to look away, her eyes being the only things she can move. Now, for the first time, she notices that all around the room—in the shadowed places—are people dressed as dolls. Their forms are collapsed, their mouths opened wide. They do not look as if they are still alive. Some of them have actually become dolls, their flesh no longer supple and their eyes having lost the appearance of teary moistness. Others are at various intermediate stages between humanness and dollhood. With horror, the dreamer now becomes aware that her own mouth is opened wide and will not close.
But at last, through the power of her fear, she is able to turn around and face the menacing agent. The dream now reaches a shattering crescendo and she awakes. She does not, however, awake in the bed of the mannikin dresser in her dream within a dream, but instead finds herself directly transported into the tangled, though real, bedcovers of her secretary self. Not exactly sure where or who she is for a moment, her first impulse on awaking is to complete the movement she began in the dream; that is, turning around to look behind her. (The hypnopompic hallucination that followed served as a “strong motivating factor” in her decision to seek the powers of a psychiatrist.) What she saw, upon pivoting about, was more than just a simple headboard with a blank wall above. For projecting out of that moon-whitened wall was the face of a female mannikin. And what particularly disturbed her about this illusion (and here we go deeper into already dubious realms) was that the face didn’t melt away into the background of the wall the way post-dream projections usually do. It seems, rather, that this protruding visage, in one smo
oth movement, withdrew back into the wall. Her screams summoned more than a few concerned persons from neighboring apartments.
End of dream and related experiences.
Now, my darling, you can probably imagine my reaction to the above psychic yarn. Every loose skein I followed led me back to you. The character of Miss Locher’s dream is strongly reminiscent, in both mood and scenario, of matters you have been exploring for some years now. I’m referring, of course, to the all-around astral ambiance of Miss Locher’s dream and how eerily it relates to certain notions (very well, theories) that in my opinion have become altogether too central to your oeuvre as well as to your vie. Above all, I refer to those “otherworlds” you say you’ve detected through a combination of occult studies and depth analysis.
Let me digress for a brief lecture apropos of the preceding.
It’s not that I object to your delving into speculative models of reality, sweetheart, but why this particular one? Why posit these “little zones,” as I’ve heard you call them, having such hideous attributes, or should I say anti-attributes (to keep up with your theoretical lingo)? To whimsically joke about such bizarrerie with phrases like “pockets of interference” and “cosmic static,” belies your talents as a thoughtful member of our profession. And the rest of it: the hyperuncanniness, the warped relationships that are supposed to obtain in these places, the “games with reality,” and all the other transcendent nonsense. I realize that psychology has charted some awfully weird areas in its maps of the mind, but you’ve gone so far into the ultra-mental hinterlands of metaphysics that I fear you will not return (at least not with your reputation intact).
To speak of your ideas with regard to Miss Locher’s dream, you can see the connections, especially in the tortuous plot of her narrative. But I’ll tell you when these connections really struck me with a hammerblow. It was just after she had related her dream to me. She was now riding the saddle of her chair in the normal position, and she made a few remarks obviously intended to convey the full extent of her distress. I’m sure she thought it de rigueur to tell me that after her dream episode she began entertaining doubts concerning who she really was. Secretary? Attirer of mannikins? Other? Other other? She knew, of course, the identity of her genuine, factual self; it was just some “new sense of unreality” that undermined complete assurance in this matter.
Surely you can see how the above identity tricks fit in with those “harassments of the self’ that you say are one of the characteristic happenings in these zones of yours. And just what are the boundaries of the self? Is there a secret communion of seemingly separate things? How do animate and inanimate relate? Very boring, m’dear... zzzzz.
It all reminds me of that trite little fable of the Chinese (Chuang Tzu?) who dreamed he was a butterfly but upon waking affected not to know whether he was a man who’d dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly now dreaming... you get the idea. The question is: “Do things like butterflies dream?” (Ans.:no. Recall the lab studies in this field, if you will for once.) The issue is ended right there. However—as I’m sure you would contest—suppose the dreamer is not a man or butterfly, but both... or neither, something else altogether. Or suppose... really we could go on and on like this, and we have. Possibly the most repellent concept you’ve developed is that which you call “divine masochism,” or the doctrine of a Bigger Self terrorizing its little splinter selves, precisely that Something Else Altogether scarifying the man-butterfly with uncanny suspicions that there’s a game going on over its collective head.
The trouble with all this, my beloved, is the way you’re so adamant about its objective reality, and how you sometimes manage to infect others with your peculiar convictions. Me, for instance. After hearing Miss Locher tell her dream story, I found myself unconsciously analyzing it much as you might have. Her multiplication of roles (including the role reversal with the mannikin) really did put me in mind of some divine being that was splintering and scarring itself to relieve its cosmic ennui, as indeed a few of the well-reputed gods of world religion supposedly do. I also thought of your “divinity of the dream,” that thing which is all-powerful in its own realm. Contemplating the realm of Miss Locher’s dream, I came to deeply feel that old truism of a solipsistic dream deity commanding all it sees, all of which is only itself. And a corollary to solipsism even occurred to me: if, in any dream of a universe, one has to always allow that there is another, waking universe, then the problem becomes, as with our Chinese sleepyhead, knowing when one is actually dreaming and what form the waking self may have; and this one can never know. The fact that the overwhelming majority of thinkers rejects any doctrine of solipsism suggests the basic horror and disgusting unreality of its implications. And after all, the horrific feeling of unreality is much more prevalent (to certain people) in what we call human “reality” than in human dreams, where everything is absolutely real.
See what you’ve done to me! For reasons that you well know, I always try to argue your case, my love. I can’t help myself. But I don’t think it’s right to be exerting your influence upon innocents like Miss Locher. I should tell you that I hypnotized the girl. Her unconscious testimony seems very much to incriminate you. She almost demanded the hypnosis, feeling this to be an easy way of unveiling the source of her problems. And because of her frantic demands, I obliged her. A serendipitous discovery ensued.
She was an excellent subject. In hypnosis we restricted ourselves to penetrating the mysteries of her dream. I had her recount the events of this nightmare with the more accurate memory of her hypnotized state. Her earlier version was amazingly factual, with the exception of one important datum which I’ll get to in a moment. I asked her to elaborate on her feelings in the dream and any sense of meaning she experienced. Her responses to these questions were sometimes given in the incoherent language of delirium and dream. She said some quite horrible things about life and lies and “this dream of flesh.” I don’t think I need expand on the chilling nonsense she uttered, for I’ve heard you say much the same in one of your “states.” (Really, it’s appalling the way you dwell both on and in your zones of the metaphysically flayed self.)
That little thing which Miss Locher mentioned only under hypnosis, and which I temporarily omitted above, was a very telling piece of info. It told on you. For when my patient first described the scenes of her dream drama to me, she had forgotten—or just neglected to mention—the presence of another character hidden in the background. This character was the proprietor of the nameless clothing store, a domineering boss who was played by a certain lady psychoanalyst. Not that you were ever on stage, even in a cameo appearance. But the hypnotized Miss Locher did remark in passing on the identity of the employer of that oneiric working girl, this being one of the many underlying suppositions of the dream. So you, my dear, were present in Miss Locher’s hypnotic statement in more than just spirit.
I found this revelation immensely helpful in coordinating the separate items of evidence against you. The nature of the evidence, however, was such that I could not rule out the possibility of a conspiracy between you and Miss Locher. So I refrained from asking my new patient anything about her relationship with you, and I didn’t inform her of what she disclosed under hypnosis. My assumption was that she was guilty until proven otherwise.
Alternatives did occur to me, though, especially when I realized Miss Locher’s extraordinary susceptibility to hypnosis. Isn’t it just possible, sweet love, that Miss Locher’s incredible dream was induced by one of those post-hypnotic suggestions at which you’re so well practised? I know that lab experiments in this area are sometimes eerily successful; and eeriness is, without argument, your specialty. Still another possibility involves the study of dream telepathy, in which you have no small interest. So what were you doing the night Miss Locher underwent her dream ordeal? (You weren’t with me, I know that!) And how many of those eidola on my poor patient’s mental screen were images projected from an outside source? These are just some of the bizarre q
uestions which lately seem so necessary to ask.
But the answers to such questions would still only establish your means in this crime. What about your motive? On this point I need not exert my psychic resources. It seems there is nothing you won’t do to impose your ideas upon common humanity—deplorably on your patients, obnoxiously on your colleagues, and affectionately (I hope) on me. I know it must be hard for a lonely visionary like yourself to remain mute and ignored, but you’ve chosen such an eccentric path to follow that I fear there are few spirits brave enough to accompany you into those zones of deception and pain, at least not voluntarily.
Which brings us back to Miss Locher. By the end of our first, and only, session I still wasn’t sure whether she was a willing or unwilling agent of yours; hence, I kept mum, very mum, about anything concerning you. Nor did she happen to speak of you in any significant way, except of course unconsciously in hypnosis. At any rate, she certainly appeared to be a genuinely disturbed young lady, and she asked me to prescribe for her. As Dr. Bovary tried to assuage the oppressive dreams of his wife with a prescription of valerian and camphor baths, I supplied Miss Locher with a program for serenity that included valium and companionship (the latter of which I also recommend for us, dolling). Then we made a date for the following Wednesday at the same time. Miss Locher seemed most grateful, though not enough, according to my secretary, to pay up what she owed. And wait till you find out where she wanted us to send the bill.
Songs of a Dead Dreamer Page 6
