Spider Lake (3 page)

The doctor wrote more notes down in his notebook, and glancing over the lenses in his glasses he asked, “Are you depressed?”
 

Now Ben was feeling really agitated.

 
The doctor asked again, “Ben, please answer the question. Are you depressed?”
 

Ben gave the question serious thought. He knew that his life was a mess, but he did not miss the daily grind of his job. He had learned over the last few years that he could only take each day as it comes.“No, I’m not depressed. I have plenty of troubles sure, but depression no. I guess I could say I am not depressed.” The statement made him feel better somehow.

“Ben, I am going to ask you a few questions. Please bear with me. These questions are standard and they help me to get a sense of where your state of mind is, and afterwards we will address your dream. Is that okay with you?”

 
Ben was calming down. He thought that he would play along, and that maybe this would not be as bad as he thought it would be. “Okay doctor fire away. I will give it a shot.”

“Okay Ben, please keep in mind that this is only standard and asked of everyone. Do you have suicidal thoughts or do you want to hurt yourself?”
 

“Oh sure. I almost jumped off a bridge on the way here. No!”
 

“A simple yes or no is sufficient Ben. The quicker you answer, the better. Do you wash yourself regularly?”

What an odd question, Ben thought: “Yes.”
 

“Are you socially anxious?”
 

“No.”

 
“Do you have friends?”

 
“Yes, a few.”
 

“Do you have a drinking or a drug problem?”
 

“I drink more beer than I should but—”

“Just beer?”

“Yes. Sometimes wine.”
 

“What are your goals in life?”
 

“Just to provide a good life for my family, nothing more.”
 

“What gives you joy in life?”

 
“ I don’t know. My family, my wife.”
 

“Is there any mental illness in your family?”
 

“No.”
 

“Do you feel like you have a functioning family?”

 
“I guess I do. My boys are always playing Nintendo, and my wife is pretty busy at her job, but I would say all in all I am happy at home.”
 

“Do you have any siblings?”
 

“No.”

 
“Were you happy in your childhood?”
 

“Before the monkey I was.”

It slipped out. The doctor looked up sharply. His eyebrows were noticeably raised.

“The monkey?”
 

Now Ben thought that he had really stepped into it. “Yes, the monkey.” he said reluctantly.

The doctor removed his glasses and gave Ben full eye contact. He stopped writing in his leather-covered notebook. Up until now, Ben thought that the good doctor was just going through the motions. Just another day at the office with a patient with a bandaged head and every-day problems, but with the mention of the monkey, the doctor seemed almost excited. Levine composed himself. He brushed his sleeves and chest with his hand. He shifted in his seat to a more forward position towards Ben. He asked slowly and deliberately: “Is the monkey in the dream?”

“Yes doctor, the monkey is in the dream.”

The doctor had a slight Mona Lisa smile on his face. His entire demeanor had changed since the mention of the monkey. He tried not to show it, but it was there in plain sight for Ben to see. “Tell me what you remember in the dream.”
 

Ben knew that he had the shrink’s rapt attention, and he began telling the dream as best as he could. He began,

“In my dream I am in a tourist town of some sort. It seems as if the town is in a hilly area. There are very expensive and very old mansions lining the boulevard on both sides. I am in a small line waiting for a tour bus to pick us up. While standing in the line, I notice to my left down the street where it ends, on a cross street, a man riding a very large, beautiful black horse. He is only in my vision briefly while riding past the intersection. I was thinking what a beautiful horse it was, when, in my peripheral vision on my right, I see a young woman in full riding regalia, galloping from my right to my left on a smaller, yet equally beautiful white horse. She is riding towards the intersection where the other rider was, and turning left at the intersection, she follows the other rider.

The other tourists and I are talking about the woman on the white horse, and I am telling them about the other rider on the much larger black horse, which none of them had seen, and the conversation turns to how the wealthy two riders must have been meeting for a fox hunt or something. We all climb on the bus, which is open air, and we head down the street and to the left in the same direction as the two riders.

As we are crossing a bridge over a narrow river with fast moving water, the driver loses control of the bus. We go flying through the air, and the bus crashes through the roof of another beautiful home along-side a river just below the bridge. There is a small, white-haired lady having tea in the room where we end up, and she looks pretty startled, but continues to sip her tea.

All of the tourists climb out of the badly damaged bus and out of the ruined house and proceed to the next-door neighbors for a cocktail party. We are all in the living room or den being served soft drinks ( and hard drinks ) and everyone is chatting about the ordeal of the bus accident. I notice that nobody is injured, and I say to the others; “Don’t any of you realize that we all walked away without a scratch? Did any one of you even hit the seat in front of you?”

Then a very frail old man who presumably lived in the house, perhaps the relative of one of the hosts, walks slowly up to me. He has tears in his eyes and he proceeds to hug me. I can feel his ribs as he embraces me. I can smell a mixture of his aged body and some old after-shave. I don’t know what to do, or why he is hugging me, so I kind of hug him back gently, and tell him it is alright. All the other party-goers are touched by this and I can see some of them getting emotional. I realize when we finish the embrace that he is the organ-grinder which died and left the monkey at our resort on Spider Lake in Wisconsin.

Doctor Levine interrupted, “Ben, did you say organ-grinder?”

“Yes doctor. Well, he really wasn’t an organ-grinder when we knew him. He may have started out as one. I think when we met him he was doing the carnival circuit.”

Doctor Levine was relishing his patient’s story as well as the dream. He was furiously writing in his note pad. He wished he could whistle, but he knew he must suppress his joy at such rich material. Once in a great while you get something much more interesting than the garden variety bad marriage, bed-wetter, or brooding teenager and this patient had some real promise. “Go on with your dream Ben.”

Ben continued:

“Where was I? Oh yeah. After the dinner party I am suddenly a kid again back in northern Wisconsin in one of our yellow rental boats on Spider Lake, with my best friend Matt. We are rowing to our favorite fishing hole on the west side of the lake. We see the capuchin monkey climbing the old wooden water tower at the lake’s edge on the Rule estate, and Matt says to me “There’s that frigging monkey, I wish I had a rifle. It would be an easy shot.”

 
I agree with Matt whole-heartedly and I answer that “If we shot him, my dad would hear it. It would be better to vaporize him with a ray gun. “Set your phasers to vaporize.” I hate that little monkey but my dad loves the fur-ball, and he would kill me if he found out that we vaporized or shot him.”

The monkey continues to climb the tower and is up and out of site in a flash. Matt and I are starting to fish and a cool wind transforms the smooth surface of the lake into a rippled one-foot chop. Matt and I begin to see the western sky darken, and we hear the first rumblings of a thunder storm.

I say: “We better get heading back. I am not going to be turned into a skeleton rowing a boat.” And Matt laughs.

“That was a favorite standard joke which always came out when you heard thunder. Getting struck by lightning and turning into a skeleton could be applied to any endeavor, such as riding a bike, and it always garnered a belly laugh. Anyway—”

Matt and I are reeling in our lines, and we realize that we would never make it to the resort on time, because the storm looks like a real bad one and it is coming fast so we start rowing to the nearest shoreline which is at the Rule estate. We both know it is our only choice, and we knew it would probably get us into trouble with old man McCann.

“There was strictly no trespassing at the Rule estate doctor. Old man McCann the caretaker guarded it as if it was Fort Knox.”

Matt and I are now really rowing furiously directly towards the Rule estate and the storm is really coming on strong. We turn the boat over up against a large flat rock on the shore and hunker down under the boat for protection. The wind is now blowing wildly, snapping off large branches from the near-by trees. The day turns dark and grayish-green with the immensity of the storm. The bolts of lightening are striking everywhere all around us. The only view I have is the old Rule mansion and the grounds leading up to it from the lake. The wind is blowing so hard that the boat we are under is shaking.

As I look out from my vantage-point from underneath the boat, suddenly two connected bolts of lightning directly hit the mansion. It catches fire.

The orange light from the now blazing mansion is mixing with the dark gray-green light of the storm casting an eerie light on the mansion grounds. The lightning is coming down everywhere. The wind is driving the rain horizontally and I am getting wet underneath the boat. Then, in the light of another huge lightning bolt, silhouetted in the fire-light, I see the monkey running directly towards us from the direction of the water tower. He looks like he wants to take shelter under our boat. He doesn’t see us until he is right there upon us. When he finally notices that we are there, he hisses and bares his vicious teeth in a freakish grin-snarl. Then a bolt lands very close. So close you can smell the ozone and the simultaneous thunder is deafeningly loud. The monkey screams. Then Matt and I scream.”

“That is when I wake up doctor.”

Doctor Levine was still writing in his note pad. He had composed himself since his last interruption with the mention of the organ-grinder, and he asked, “Do you think that is the dream in it’s entirety Ben?”

“I think so doctor. That is pretty much all I can remember. It doesn’t make any sense to me. The second half of the dream is really just a memory. The storm, the fire, and the monkey all happened when I was eleven years old when I was living at my father’s resort up in Rhinelander Wisconsin.”

“Ben, can you remember when you began dreaming the dream?”

Ben thought about the question. It had never occurred to him when he began dreaming the dream. He honestly could not answer the question. “I can’t remember when it began. I have been dreaming it for so long that I really don’t have any clue when it started.”

“Let’s try to narrow the time frame down if we can Ben. You say that in the dream you are an adult at a cocktail party after the bus accident, so we can assume that you began having this dream as an adult. Would you agree with this statement?”

“I guess so doctor, but I think the storm part has been around much longer.”

Doctor Levine scribbled more in his pad and then sat back in his chair. He thought for a long moment and said; “Ben, this is what I can tell you about dreams in general, and more specifically about the dream and its relation to psychotherapy.

As you know dreams have been around and have been baffling people since the beginning of time. Many of the prophets in the Bible had sacred revelation, or prophecy revealed in dreams. The author Robert Louis Stevenson got his idea for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from a dream. Discoveries have been revealed in dreams such as the molecular structure of the benzene atom in which the scientist had a vision of a snake biting its own tail.

Sigmund Freud once called dreams “the royal road to the unconscious,” and Carl Jung said “dreams are a way of communicating and acquainting yourself with the unconscious.” While both of these men had differing viewpoints of how to interpret dreams, they were agreed that the path to the unconscious was through the analysis of the remembered dream. Repetitive dreams are an indication that you are missing the point of the dream.

The dream itself is telling you to “wake up” that is, to wake up and remember it; and by not remembering or getting the point, you are stuck in a rut that is leading you around and around until you do so. It is my belief that you are missing some point in your dream Ben, and that is how we will begin to approach your problem.”

Ben felt in his gut that the doctor was right. There was some missing point and he knew it. Each day as he woke up from the dream he had an uneasy sense of something missing, like a jig-saw puzzle with one missing piece, but he never quite understood what he was feeling. “Doctor Levine, I think you are right. I think I am missing something.”

 
“Ben, we are nearly out of time, but before we meet again I want you to try something. Remembering a dream in it’s entirety is a known, albeit erratic process. What I want you to do first is this; I want you to keep a pad of paper and a pen near your bed, and when you wake up, write down everything you can remember about your dream. Try to include any random thing that might not seem important to you. Hopefully, after a few nights of writing your dream down, you may piece together some enigmatic point you have been missing. You may find out very quickly what your unconscious mind is trying to tell you, and if so, the dream will simply go away. How about we meet again in four days, say Wednesday. Make an appointment with Ms. Beck on your way out.”