What Dreams May Come (3 page)

I had to think of something else; it was the only answer. The dream would change, they always did. I walked toward the altar, following the drone of a voice. The minister, I realized. I willed myself to feel amused. That might be fun, I told myself. Even in a dream, how many men receive the chance to listen to their own eulogy?

I saw his blurred, gray outline now, behind the pulpit. His voice sounded hollow and distant. I hope he’s giving me a royal send-off, I thought, bitterly.

“He is,” said a voice.

I looked around. That man again; the one I’d seen in the hospital. Odd that, of everyone, he looked most clear to me.

“Haven’t found your own dream yet, I see,” I told him. Odd, too, that I could speak to him without effort.

“Chris, try to understand,” he said. “This isn’t a dream. It’s real. You’ve died.”

“Will you get off that?” I began to turn away. •

His fingers on my shoulder once again; solid, nearly pinching my flesh. That was odd too.

“Chris, can’t you see?” he asked. “Your wife and children dressed in black? A church? A minister delivering your eulogy?”

“A convincing dream,” I said.

He shook his head.

“Let go of me,” I told him, threateningly. “I don’t have to listen to this.”

His grip was strong; I couldn’t break it. “Come with me,” he said. He led me to the platform where I saw a casket resting on supports. “Your body is in there,” he told me.

“Really?” I said. My tone was cold. The casket lid was shut. How could he know I was in there?

“You can see inside it if you try,” he answered.

Unexpectedly, I felt myself begin to shake. I could look in the casket if I tried. Suddenly, I knew that.

“But I won’t,” I told him. I twisted from his grip and turned away. “This is a dream,” I said, glancing across my shoulder. “Maybe you can’t understand that but—“

“If it’s a dream,” he interrupted, “why don’t you try to wake up?”

I whirled to face him. “All right, that’s exactly what I’ll do,” I said. “Thank you for a very good suggestion.”

I closed my eyes. All right, you heard the man, I told myself. Wake up. He’s told you what to do. Now do it.

I heard Ann’s sobbing getting louder. “Don’t,” I said. I couldn’t bear the sound of it. I tried to back off but it followed me. I clenched my teeth. This is a dream and you are going to wake up from it right now, I told myself. Any second now I’d jolt awake, perspiring, trembling. Ann would speak my name in startled sympathy, then hold me in her arms, caress me, tell—

The sobbing kept on getting louder, louder. I pressed both hands against my ears to shut it out. “Wake up,” I said. I repeated it with fierce determination. “Wake up!”

My effort was rewarded by a sudden silence. I had done it! With a rush of joy, I opened my eyes.

I was standing in the front hall of our house. I didn’t understand that.

Then I saw the mist again, my vision blurred. And I began to make out forms of people in the living room. Gray and faded, they stood or sat in small groups, murmuring words I couldn’t hear.

I walked into the living room, past a knot of people; none of them were clear enough for me to recognize. Still the dream, I thought. I clung to that.

I walked by Louise and Bob. They didn’t look at me. Don’t try to talk to them, I thought. Accept the dream. Move on. I walked into the bar room, moving toward the family room.

Richard was behind the bar, making drinks. I felt a twinge of resentment. Drinking at a time like this? I rejected the thought immediately. A time like what? I challenged my mind. This was no special time. It was merely a depressing party in a bleak, depressing dream.

Moving, I caught glimpses. Ann’s older brother Bill, his wife Patricia. Her father and stepmother, her younger brother Phil, his wife Andrea. I tried to smile. Well, I told myself, when you dream you really do it up right, no detail overlooked; Ann’s entire family down from San Francisco no less. Where was my family though? I wondered. Surely I could dream them here as well. Did it matter, in a dream, that they were three thousand miles away?

That was when a new thought came to me. Was it possible that I had lost my sanity? Perhaps the accident had damaged my brain. There was a thought! I clutched at it. Brain damage; weird, distorted images. Not just a simple operation going on but something complex. Even as I moved unseen among these wraiths, scalpels might be probing at my brain, surgeons working to restore its function.

It didn’t help. Despite the logic of it, I began to feel a sense of resentment. All these people totally ignoring me. I stopped in front of someone; faceless, nameless. “Damn it, even in a dream, people talk to you,” I said. I tried to grab him by the arms. My fingers moved into his flesh as though it were water. I looked around and saw the family-room table. Moving there, I tried to pick up someone’s glass to hurl it against the wall. It was like trying to grip at air. Anger mounted suddenly. I shouted at them. “Damn it, this is my dream! Listen to me!”

My laughter was involuntary, strained. Listen to yourself, I thought. You’re acting as though this is really happening. Get things straight, Nielsen. This is a dream.

I left them all behind, starting down the back hall. Ann’s Uncle John was standing in front of me, looking at some photographs on the wall. I walked right through him, feeling nothing. Forget it, I ordered myself. It doesn’t matter.

Our bedroom door was closed. I walked through it. “This is insane,” I muttered. Even in dreams, I’d never walked through doors before.

My aggravation vanished as I moved to the bed and looked at Ann. She was lying on her left side, staring toward the glass door. She still had on the black dress I had seen her wearing in the church but her shoes were off. Her eyes were red from crying.

Ian sat beside her, holding her hand. Tears ran slowly down his cheeks. I felt a rush of love for him. He’s such a sweet and gentle boy, Robert. I reached forward to stroke his hair.

He looked around and, for a moment which seemed to stop my heart, I thought he was looking at me, seeing me. “Ian,” I murmured.

He looked back at Ann. “Mom?” he said.

She didn’t respond.

He spoke again and her eyes moved slowly to his face.

“I know it sounds insane,” he said, “but… I feel as if Dad is with us.”

I looked at Ann quickly. She was staring at Ian, her expression unchanged.

“I mean right here,” he told her. “Now.”

Her smile was one of straining tenderness. “I know you want to help,” she said.

“I really feel it, Mom.”

She couldn’t go on, a great sob racking her. “Oh, God,” she whispered, “Chris …” Tears filled her eyes.

I dropped beside the bed and tried to touch her face. “Ann, don’t—” I started. Breaking off, I twisted from her with a groan. To see my fingers sink into her flesh …

“Ian, I’m afraid,” Ann said.

I turned back quickly to her. The last time I’d seen such a look on her face was on a night when Ian had been six and disappeared for three hours; a look of helpless, incapacitated dread. “Ann, I’m here,” I said, “I’m here! Death isn’t what you think!”

Terror caught me unaware. I didn’t mean that! cried my mind. I couldn’t take it back though. The admission had been made.

I fought against it, straining to repress it by concentrating on Ann and Ian. But the question came unbidden and I couldn’t stop it. What if that man had told the truth? What if this wasn’t a dream?

I struggled to retreat. Impossible; the way was blocked. I countered with rage. So what if I had thought it? What if I’d considered it? There was no proof of it beyond that brief consideration.

Better. I felt vengeful justification. I began to touch and prod my body. This is death? I challenged scornfully. Flesh and bone? Ridiculous! It might not be a dream—that much I could allow. But it was certainly not death.

The conflict seemed to drain me suddenly. Once more, my body felt like stone. Again? I thought.

Never mind. I thrust it from my mind. I lay down on my side on the bed and looked at Ann. It was unnerving to lie beside her, face to face, her staring through me like a window. Close your eyes, I thought. I did. Escape through sleep, I told myself. The evidence isn’t in by any means. This could still be a dream. But God, dear God in heaven, if it was, I hated everything about it. Please, I begged whatever powers might attend me. Release me from this black, unending nightmare.

To know I still exist!

HOVERING, SUSPENDED, RISING inches, then descending in a silent, engulfing void. Was this the feeling of prebirth; floating in liquid gloom?

No, there’d be no sound of crying in the womb. No sense of grief oppressing me. I murmured in my sleep, wanting to rest, needing to rest, but wanting, too, to wake for Ann’s sake. “Honey, it’s all right.” I must have spoken those words a hundred times before waking.

My eyes dragged open, the lids feeling weighted.

She was lying by my side, asleep. I sighed and smiled at her with love. The dream had ended, we were together again. I gazed at her face, sweetly childlike in repose. A tired child, a child who’d wept herself to sleep. My precious Ann. I reached out to touch her face, my hand like iron.

My fingers disappeared inside her head.

She woke up with a start, her gaze alarmed. “Chris?” she said. Again, that momentary leap of hope. Shattered when it quickly grew apparent that she wasn’t looking at me but through me. Tears began to well in her eyes. She drew up her legs and clutched her pillow tightly in her arms, pressing her face against it, body shaking with sobs.

“Oh, God, no sweetheart, please don’t cry.” I was crying too. I would have given up my soul if only she’d been able to see me for a minute, hear my voice, receive my comfort and my love.

I knew she couldn’t though. And knew, as well, the nightmare hadn’t ended. I turned from her and closed my eyes, desperate to escape in sleep again, let the darkness pull me far from her. Her weeping tore my heart. Please take me away from this, I pleaded. If I can’t comfort her, take me away!

I felt my mind begin a downward slide, descending into blackness.

Now it was a dream. It had to be. My life was unreeling before me, a succession of living pictures. Something about it struck me. Hadn’t I experienced this before, more briefly, more confusingly?

This was not confusing in the least. I might have been a viewer in an auditorium, watching a film entitled My Life, every episode from start to finish. No, amend that. Finish to start; the film began with the collision—was it real then— and evolved back toward my birth, each detail magnified.

I won’t go into all those details, Robert. It’s not the story I want to tell—it would take too long. Each man’s life is a tome of episodes. Consider all the moments of your life enumerated one by one with full description. A twenty-volume encyclopedia of events; at the very least.

Let me discuss it in brief then, this display of scenes. It was more than a “flash before my eyes.” I was more than just a viewer; that became apparent very soon. I relived each moment with acute perception, experiencing and understanding simultaneously. The phenomenon was vivid, Robert, each emotion infinitely multiplied by level upon level of awareness.

The essence of it all—this is the important part—was the knowledge that my thoughts had been real. Not just the things I said and did. What went on in my mind as well, positive or negative.

Each memory was brought to life before me and within me. I could not avoid them. Neither could I rationalize, explain away. I could only re-experience with total cognizance, unprotected by pretense. Self-delusion was impossible, truth exposed in blinding light. Nothing as I thought it had been. Nothing as I hoped it had been. Only as it had been.

Failures plagued me. Things I had omitted or ignored, neglected. What I should have given and hadn’t—to my friends, my relatives, to Mom and Dad, to you and Eleanor, my children, mostly Ann. I felt the biting pang of every unfulfillment. Not only personal but in my work as well— my failures as a writer. The host of scripts I’d written which did no one any good and, many, harm. I could condone them once. Now, in this stark unmasking of my life, condoning was impossible, self-justifying was impossible. An infinitude of lacks reduced to one fundamental challenge: What I might have done and how irrevocably I fell short of almost every mark.

Not that it was unjust; not that the scales were forced out of balance. Where there had been good, it showed as clearly. Kindnesses, accomplishments; all those were present too.

The trouble was I couldn’t get through it. Like the tug of a building rope pulled from a distance, I was drawn from observation by Ann’s sorrow. Honey, let me see. I think I spoke those words, I may have only thought them.

I became aware of lying by her side again, my eyelids heavy as I tried to raise them. The sounds she made in sleep were like a knife blade turning in my heart. Please, I thought. I have to see, to know; evaluate. The word seemed vital to me suddenly. Evaluate.

I drifted down again; to the isolation of my visions. I had left the theatre momentarily; the picture on the screen had frozen. Now it started up again, absorbing me. I was inside it once again, reliving days long gone.

Now I saw how much time I had spent in gratifying sense; again, I will not give you details. Not only did I re-discover every sense experience of my life, I had to live each unfulfilled desire as well—as though they’d been fulfilled. I saw that what transpires in the mind is just as real as any flesh and blood occurrence. What had only been imagination in life now became tangible, each fantasy a full reality. I lived them all—while, at the same time, standing to the side, a witness to their, often, intimate squalor. A witness cursed with total objectivity.

Still always the balance, Robert; I emphasize the balance. The scales of justice: darkness paralleled by light, cruelty by compassion, lust by love. And always, unremittingly, that inmost summons: What have you done with your life?

An added mercy was the knowledge that this deep, internal review was witnessed only by myself. It was a private re-enactment, a judgment rendered by my own conscience. Moreover, I felt sure that somehow, every act and thought relived was being printed on my consciousness indelibly for future reference. Why this was so, I had no notion. I only knew it was.