#43: Quests for Full Lucidity (Dream Report)
Powerful desires spur me toward perilous border crossings, revolutionary activity in the mountains, and talks with intimidating dads. I struggle to achieve a more genuine freedom of the will.
A view of the mountains from a plane over Kyrgyzstan (photo my own)
The guards might find the shampoo I have hidden in the comforter. This terrifies my father. He is berating me for the risk, and yet he continues to drive toward the border. “I can’t believe we’re doing this, honey,” he says to my mom, and he scoffs angrily as we take our place in line behind some other cars. My mom tells him it will be okay. Why would the guards search inside the comforter? But I can hear how her voice trembles. In truth, I am also worried that they might search our car and find the shampoo. For my father’s sake, I strive to project confidence despite my rattling frame. After the heated argument we had about the shampoo, which I insisted I needed, how can I tell him now that I am having regrets?
We are selected for a search. My dad responds with exaggerated politeness, but then he looks back at me. His enraged glare and sweaty forehead arouse a border guard’s scent for fear. Hoisting an assault rifle, he barks at my father to park off to the side.
Border guards have always been among the people I hate most in this world, and now they will finally be my demise! By nature, they are eager to find some excuse by which they might play god over us. My attempt to keep my eyes away from the evidence of our crimes only makes me look even more like the law-breaker they want to find and torment. We drive off toward a secluded area. My heart is thumping against my chest, and I yield at last to the temptation. I caress the outline of my precious shampoo.
While we wait for the guards to approach the car, my dad turns around to me. “We never should have brought that shampoo!” he says. “This is your fault!”
“But dad,” I say, trying to believe they won’t find the contraband, “I have to wash my hair!” In truth, I am shaking with regret, picturing the rest of my life in prison.
He scoffs. “We are fucked, honey,” he says to my mom.
She holds his hand. “It’s going to be okay,” she says, her voice quiet and scared.
The guards commence their search. The three of us sit perfectly still, but I can see my father’s face in the rearview mirror. He doesn’t seem so angry anymore. When he looks into my eyes, it is as if he were sitting beside me at my deathbed. Within moments, the guards pick up the comforter, and my dad’s eyes drift toward the cause of my misery. I see the shampoo bottle fall out from duvet cover, dropping onto the ground. The guard’s face darts between the shampoo and me. I recoil with fear at the bright smile forming on his face. His exultant chuckle conveys the scope of the pain awaiting me. Like any border guard, he wakes up each day anxious to deploy the powers given to him by his Lord and Master, the object of his devoted worship: the nation-state. When he grins joyfully at me, his toothy face is that of a Christian saint whom God allows to dispose of some sinner. It is as if this righteous servant has been waiting untold centuries for me to die and realize I was wrong about his beloved Lord, and now he is the one who has the honor of escorting me to Hell for all the sins I had insisted were perfectly fine. And I know he is right to despise me, because it is not my crime against our nation that I regret, but that I was caught. “Arrest this man,” he says, pointing at me. “Take him to the interrogation room!”
When I wake up in the hostel, I quickly write down notes on my phone. I am frustrated that I failed to achieve full consciousness of my dream state in that one. A shampoo bottle? Really? I should have known. But I am sure that if I continue taking notes after each of these dreams, I will eventually achieve the awareness I seek.
A few nights later, I am in a wintry world, watching a soccer game at an Irish pub. Only I am sitting outside of the establishment. Beneath the deep surface of the snow, my boots have vanished entirely. I am drinking a cold milk cocktail in my snow pants and goggles. Flanking me on either side are similarly-clad explorers. People behind us begin screaming with joy at a goal which Bayern München has just scored. We cheers each other with our cold milk cocktails, taking eager sips from the alcohol. I remembered a little German boy from an interview long ago. During a break from his rigorous training at the Bayern München youth facilities, he told reporters that “football is life; there is nothing else that matters.” “It’s time for us to move forward,” I say to my neighbors, and I see myself reflected in the neon glow of ski goggles. I am that little German boy now, blonde and devoted, my life meaningless unless we reach our goal. I shudder at the thought of failure. We commence a long trek up the icy path. A yearning for success presses me ever higher into these great mountains. We must overthrow the elders. I feel this necessity as the explanation for my very existence, and I dare not resist the call of destiny.
The summit is a vast plateau laced with hills. A blindingly white and sparkling snow covers the whole expanse. The kind of wooden cabin a multi-millionaire might own, with a structure between a palace and a ski lodge, sits perched on the highest of the hills. Around it rages a battle of electricity. As people scamper about one another in snow pants, blue currents flow violently between the bodies. A few catch on fire. These dive into the snow, burying themselves beneath its glistening surface. It seems like the lightning is flowing horizontally between the fingers of the people around me, and the sparks remind me of a witch who once attacked me in Skyrim.
But then I see that all this fiery electricity is seeping out from a great door leading into the hill beneath the ski lodge. A man is struggling to hold down a large concrete slab over the rectangular entrance into what must be that cabin’s basement, but he is not strong enough. The electricity continuously pushes the fortification back up to him, and bright blue electric currents stream constantly out from its sides, striking people around me. Soon one brutally hits the would-be hero. His arms and legs fly off. His torso falls to the side.
I start to clap my hands, just as if I were screaming for an encore at a show. Yet I feel no joy, only horror, but I seem not to be in control of my movements. I somehow know I need to clap. And then, as if by some spell I have uttered, the rectangular slab falls down into place. The electricity is no more. The elders’ last defense is neutralized. I remember now where I was! Just before we came here, I was in that great oval room, shooting electricity from my own hands at the evil men with white beards. I almost died, I recall, and it was by sheer luck I managed to kill the most important one.
The people are looking to me now, for I have defeated the elders. I solemnly enter the council chambers in the ski lodge. The old men sit before me like a long tribunal of judges or wizards. Their dress and hair fashions combine aspects of both these learned professions. Long white beards wisp down toward their waists. The rarest grimoires I have ever encountered lay scattered about the room. Although their robes are black and white, and although their hands hold gavels rather than wands, their hats are tall and pointy. I notice yellow stars etched into the black fabric. All my life, I have been training and studying for this moment, and I am devastated by satisfaction.
“I have come to take my rightful place at the head of the council,” I announce.
The crowd behind me is full of dirty peasants. Most of them are dead. But among the living, there is a small faction which claps awkwardly and hesitatingly for me.
I wake up in a hostel again. I am too tired this time, I think, to write any of that down. And yet I know I must keep taking these notes if I ever hope to achieve my dreams of a genuine kind of consciousness. The kind I keep encountering is one in which my whole existence becomes motivated by some intense desire with an unclear origin and an unknown context. I remember caring about the shampoo and the elders with such intensity. Were I to have made myself realize that neither the cosmetic contraband nor the council had any meaning, who knows what kind of existential crisis I might have had? I laugh at the thought. Dangers to my inter-dimensional self be damned. The yearning to achieve a genuine self-awareness within the dream world, one which bestows upon me a real freedom of will, drives me forward. However tired I am at this late hour, my real-world determination must match the vague desires that drove me up the mountain to the palace / ski lounge. And if I don’t write down the details of what happened up there, then I will forget. How intriguing it would have been, I think, to know that I had been traveling. To have interrogated the elders accordingly, rather than to have lived by the delusion that I had a genuine position in their world.
Soon after taking my notes, I have to get up and go to a party. Her parents are not home this weekend, and everyone is so excited about the mischief we might rouse. She has been a friend of mine for a long time, but we have had some real disagreements, and this will be the first time I’ve seen her in years. It is a big sleepover, like we used to have when we were kids before her father lost his mind. I am hopeful that the return of good times will help us make amends. I smile at the thought of all of us falling asleep together in the basement. So many memories! I wonder if I might have interesting dreams sleeping on that couch where I slept so often as a teenager. I hope that I will be back among the elders, and that if I stay focused on them while falling asleep, I might find myself again in their world rather than some new one.
We are all drinking in her kitchen. Fleetwood Mac blasts on the speakers. I know I am not permitted here, for her father despises me and has banned me from the home, just as he has banned most of her friends. I will have to leave in the early morning, before her parents have returned from their trip up north. My plan is to drive far away. I will live out my life on some far-flung and rugged frontier where that man will never find me. A few of our friends, those whom her father also hunts, are coming with me. At least, that is the intention with which I came here. But what about her?
She tells us this might be her last night of freedom, for she cannot foresee another time her parents might leave town. Her father, she says, will never let her see anyone again. “Come with us to the frontier zone,” I tell her. “He won’t find you there. “No, no,” she says. We all take several shots in succession until I am feeling utterly drunk. I worry my drunkenness might inhibit my REM cycles, dashing my hopes of dream consciousness, but then I curse myself for caring about such a thing when my friend is to be her father’s prisoner. This might be the last time we ever hang out together, and I must relish it until the end. So I try to embrace the moment for what it is. We all begin dancing and smoking weed in the living room, and I feel the disorienting swirl of THC and alcohol. I go to the kitchen to chug a cup of water. I am alone there.
“Oh my god!” someone screams from the living room. “Her dad is home!”
The living room empties. By the time I have a chance to rush out the front door, I see the outline of the father at the window. I am one of only a few people left here.
A girl with the body of a human and the head of a cat jumps out suddenly from under the couch. “Quick!” she says. “He’s home! Run to the basement!”
In her eyes, I see the same terror that many cats must endure at the sudden apprehension of a stranger’s presence. I follow her, running in her wake. Her cat ears bob down the stairs into the dark basement, and she looks back at me with shining cat eyes. I follow her into the shadows, soon losing track of her. Yet I know where I am. This is where we always used to hang out. I hear her dad shouting upstairs. He’s coming, I know. But when I open a closet in which to hide, it is already full of people. I open another closet, and the cat girl is there. Finally, I resort to the bathroom, where I conceal myself alone behind the shower curtains.
Then I am driving in my car, with a few friends in the backseat. All of us are fully packed for our long drive to the frontier zone. I never even got to say goodbye, I mourn. “You’re lucky we even made it out of there alive,” one of them assures me. And now I am going somewhere far away, somewhere I will never see that girl or her dad or that cat-person ever again. Nostalgia for the times we’ve shared together overtakes me. I tell my companions that what we are doing, leaving her there, is wrong.
To their horror, I turn the car around, driving back to the house. I park outside of it. I see the whole family eating dinner together through the window. The father is at the head of the table, and he sits tall and mighty. Not happily, but with a smug satisfaction about the immensity of his property and the superior genetic makeup of his offspring. I fortify myself with the nerve to go knock on the door. I am going to tell this man what I think about the way he treats his daughter and her friends. Or… maybe I will just avoid him. I will just convince his daughter to run away with us. I wake up in my hostel bed. I hastily make notes about the dad, the girl, and the cat.
A few weeks later, I am with some friends talking to them about my mission to realize I am dreaming. I will seize control of my actions within the dream world, I tell them. They say that sounds like it could be an interesting song, and I realize I am hanging out with Arcade Fire. We are sitting around in a living room, and I tell one of them that my favorite album is Reflektor. He frowns. “Listen,” he says, leaning in really seriously, “I… uh… I really hate talking about that one. We pretend it doesn’t… yeah.” He looks exactly like a friend of mine from college; he has the same mustache.
Then I have to pee. While in the bathroom, I text a friend. I am hanging out with Arcade Fire, can she even believe it? “!!!!” she texts back.
I wake up in my bed. It would have been difficult, I admit to myself, to have recognized I was in a dream when I was dreaming about exactly what had happened that very day. And so, forgiving myself, I take some notes on my phone. I walk tiredly to the bathroom to actually pee. “It’s always the peeing that fucks me,” I think. “It ends the dreams too early.” After I pee, I join my new friends from Arcade Fire in the living room. I tell them that I dreamed about them last night, but then I woke up having to pee and it ended. “Well, I mean, I also peed in the dream. We were all in this exact room. It felt so real.”
The one who looks like my college friend is reclining on a mattress on the floor in the corner. “That happens to me all the time,” he says. “Having a dream about peeing and of course in the end I actually have to pee.”
“It was so real though, this one,” I say. “Like, as real as you and I are right now.”
He laughs. “What did we talk about?”
“I told you that Reflektor was my favorite album,” I tell him.
He chuckles. “Oh god,” he says. “That one is my least favorite.”
“That’s more or less what you said in the dream,” I tell him.
“Ugh,” he says, almost hiding his face. “Don’t even bring that one up around her.” And then I notice a young woman across the room.
“Well, I like it,” I say. And then we light up a joint to pass back and forth. I start to feel extremely high. “It was so real,” I tell them. “The dream.”
Soon I have to pee again, and I go back to the bathroom. “Can you believe it,” I text my friend, “I’m smoking weed with Arcade Fire!”
