LIVING IN OUR SLEEP

Dave Pollard's environmental philosophy, creative works, business papers and essays.

LIVING IN OUR SLEEP

Jack had recently been having a recurring dream in which he was 17 years old, and passionately in love with a woman of about the same age named Marina. Marina was small, intense, long-haired, dark, brilliant, spectacled, and possessed (in the dream) of a Kafkaesque elusiveness - despite the vortex of emotion that swirled around them both, she seemed somewhat detached and aloof, so that Jack was at once entranced and terrified at the incandescence and fragility of their relationship.

When he awoke from these strange dreams, he would lay in a dazed state for as long as he dared, re-living the details as best he could remember them, almost nostalgically.

In the light of day, Jack was in fact thirty-something, and living with a thirty-something woman named Nikki who was as outgoing and down-to-earth as Marina was mysterious. What these two women had in common was exceptional intelligence - Jack had been astonished that this exceptionally attractive blonde, "far too beautiful to be so smart" as he had told her when they had first met at a charity volleyball tournament, had fallen for him immediately, totally, and pursued him aggressively and persistently until he felt the same for her. Their relationship had been built on a shared passion for learning and discovery, and common philosophical and political beliefs, which they had explored so ardently and exclusively right from their first conversation (which lasted well into the following morning) that it caused their mutual friends to run screaming from the room. Although Nikki was a very physical person, their relationship did not for a long time become more physically intimate than holding hands and falling asleep, exhausted from discourse, in each others' arms.

What puzzled Jack, during his reveries about the previous night's escapades with Marina, was that his dalliances with the lovely and enigmatic Marina were neither intellectual nor physical, and not at all (at least overtly) sexual. They were instead almost purely emotional?every moment, every word, every shared experience was charged with an emotional ferocity almost too intense to bear. His dream-self's love for Marina was based on almost a complete mutual abandonment of self, as if they continually wove diaphanous cocoons around each other that took their combined essence effortlessly through time and space where no one else existed. But they did so wordlessly, conveying meaning and knowing with a mere glance, passion and engagement with an imperceptibly lowered gaze. It was raw, wondrous, untrammeled intimacy without any physical or intellectual connection. And when Jack awoke he was trembling, breathing heavily, heart pounding and soaked in sweat.

These two women, Nikki by day and Marina by night, wandered in and out of Jack's consciousness oblivious to and unaffected by each other, and in some strange way Jack felt more fulfilled, more effortlessly happy than he had ever been before.

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A few days into the third month of these dreams, on a grim, rainy late Spring afternoon, his friend Spencer returned home late from work to find Jack, consumed with rage, in his, Spencer's, back yard, listening on Spencer?s wireless speakers to Rachmaninoff's Second Symphony. The speakers were concealed eight feet above ground in two evergreens just at the edge of the yard, where the forest began. Although it was not quite dusk, the heavy gray clouds had already forced on the light-sensitive coach-lamps that ringed the yard, so that Jack, two hundred feet away with his back to Spencer's house, was enveloped in an eerie halo in the falling dark and heavy mist. Arms raised and flapping around wildly, Jack was tromping around in the corner of the large, oblong yard. From the verandah, Spencer could hear him gasping, whether from crying or exhaustion he could not tell. The Rachmaninoff, which Spencer usually found uplifting, today seemed in concert with the gloom that permeated both his yard and his friend. Even Worf, Spencer's scruffy, short-legged mongrel, whose indefatigable cheerfulness was usually enough to break the most oppressive atmosphere, seemed unsettled and anxious as she witnessed the strange performance.

Spencer watched, sketched, and wrote:

Rage Despair

washes through us like a deluge. feeds on our souls, spreads through us

It is futile, it is sweet like a disease, sapping our affections.

But leaves behind just emptiness It drives us to suicide or to drink.

and guilt. It is the cause of It eats away at our sanity like a sound

and the salve for our weariness. we can feel but cannot hear.

It is the source of our raw insensitivity. We ease the pain and guilt

In our savage world, anger with understanding, but there is no cure,

and its passive partner pathos no remedy for it.

no longer even inspire tears. It is the cause of age.

He wrote the two verses side-by-side, in counterpoint, two portraits of the same subject with different brushes, lenses, tones.

When the music ended, Jack lowered his arms slowly and turned toward his small audience. The coach-lamps cast sharp shadows across his face, which had a look of unbearable grief and weariness. Rain poured down the front of his face, so Spencer couldn't tell if he was crying or not. Jack slowly hunched over, as if the symphony had suddenly taken all the tension and energy out of his body. He slumped down onto Spencer's nearby stone bench and, putting his elbows on the stone table beside it, hung his chin on his hands. Worf immediately galloped over to the rescue, and Spencer replaced the Rachmaninoff with the melancholy adagio of Ravel's Concerto in G. Somehow its modest atonality, tranquillity, and tentativeness seemed a way to ease the emotional intensity of the spectacle he had just witnessed.

As if in response to the change in music, the rain subsided abruptly to a light shower. Worf administered a tongue-washing to Jack's rain-soaked face and hands, and to escape this industrious rescue Jack rose and plodded back toward the house, with Worf in tow. As he came out of the rain he stripped off his jacket, took a glass of cider proffered by Spencer, and sat on the couch in the covered verandah. Worf took the seat between the two men. No words were spoken.

The silence was broken by Catherine's return from a night class in solar physics. She looked at Spencer, her significant other, who was gazing at water-droplets on a fern outside the verandah, at Worf, who had fallen asleep, and at Jack, hunched over, very wrinkled-looking and staring at the floor. She kissed them all, in that order, and announced "Pizza man just came up the driveway." Only Worf moved.

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Jack's dream that night was even stranger than usual. In the dream he pursued Marina through an eerie, neon-lit world of purple and turquoise ruins backed by a blood-red sunset. Everything happened in slow motion, as if the atmosphere they walked through was liquid. Marina wandered through the passageways and steps of the ruins, her hand extended back towards Jack. Jack would sometimes catch her, and they would walk hand-in-hand for awhile, and then Marina would pull ahead and her hand would slip away again, just out of reach.

Finally they reached a large square, and Marina stopped and sat. On the steps behind her were strange creatures of a myriad of types, all mute, mouthless, with large, expressive eyes. And suddenly Marina too had no mouth, but was speaking to Jack nonetheless. There was no unworldly space where her mouth should be?instead there were ideas, concepts, emotional and intellectual constructs and articulations that filled the space where her mouth would be, and the space between the two of them. The soundless expressions said:

This is not a dream like most human dreams. We have entered your dream and are fashioning it as a vehicle to communicate with you. We are not of your world, either your waking or sleeping world. Our physical selves, our containers, what you would call "bodies", cannot travel fast or far enough to contact you physically, and besides we are not sure if your physical world and ours even exist in the same plane. At any rate, we are very fragile, physically and emotionally, and if your real world is anywhere near as ghastly as your dream-world, we're not sure we could bear to see your physical existence anyway - we would wither away like flowers in your deserts. The violence of your dreams terrifies us, hurts us when we enter your dream space. But you have an understanding, a sensitivity, that makes you accessible to us when most of your species are not.

We often enter the dreams of other, gentler and more sensitive species that share your physical world. We have often communicated in dreams with the creature you call "Worf". She wants you to know that she finds you confusing, ridiculous, and charming. She also finds the name you gave her meaningless, and much prefers the name she calls herself, and which others of her species call her?

At this point, Marina said something in a strange language.

Unfortunately, we can neither say nor explain this name in your language. But it means?

Again, Marina shifted to the strange language. Suddenly Jack was overwhelmed by a jumbled flurry of emotions - compassion, joy, tranquillity, curiosity, faithfulness. Jack wished he had a language, or a name, that could convey so much, so profoundly, so simply. He replied simply with a question: "Why are you here?"

Marina smiled, and, still using the strange, wordless language, told him that Worf's real name, especially the "curiosity" part, would be a good name for him, Jack, too. Then, reverting to the unspoken, soundless English, she continued:

We are explorers, always seeking to learn and experience new things. We have learned so much about you from our shared dreams that we have come to love you. In some ways you are so pathetic, so bruised and desensitized by your brutal "real" experiences that you live inside a shell, and inside your dreams, more than in your physical world. But your real world is very brittle, frail, and your neglect and indifference to its plight is causing great suffering to all the species of that world. Surely you know this, but you do nothing. When are you going to, truly, wake up?

At that moment Jack did, in fact, wake up, jarringly, and found he was howling and crying at the top of his voice. Nikki was shaking him awake, gently, trying to soothe him but finding that her words were not reaching him. "Hey, hey" she was saying. "You were crying like a newborn baby who wasn't ready to leave the womb - what is it?"

Jack opened his eyes and looked into her exquisite, worried, tired, intelligent face, the face of the other woman in his life. Except now he wasn't sure if Marina was a woman, was a dream, was anything more than a tortured apparition borne of the guilt and anger that bubbled unceasingly just under the surface of his soul. He was so fearful of returning to the dream, with its immense burden and admonishment, that he lay awake the rest of the night caressing the shoulders of Nikki, who fell effortlessly back asleep in his arms.

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Jack would dream of Marina only once more. In their final meeting, they sat cross-legged in a field that reflected, in its colours and textures, the sky above them, a sky full of changing hues, suns and stars and strange monsters. They faced each other and held hands, and in Marina's face he saw and felt every emotion he had ever known and sensed a million others that he could only guess at, but was sure were felt by others less damaged and brutish than he. And she said words that might have been meant to inspire him, or comfort him, or teach him, or console him, or maybe just make it easy for him to forget her, get along without her, get on with his life when his situation and that of his planet was just too awful to dwell on:

There is hope. There is someone out there, out here, that loves you. It is important that you preserve your memories, don't forget what you've learned, especially emotionally. You must never give up caring, believing, dreaming, loving, even when you think it's too hard. You are what you feel, and nothing more. You are to others what you feel for them, and nothing more. Without love, without learning, without understanding, for those that feel, there is only madness.

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A week later, Jack and Nikki were at Spencer and Catherine's house to try Catherine?s new recipe - a Tibetan Salad-Meal that Catherine had learned about in her Vegetarian Cooking course (She had read about this course while enrolling in the Solar Physics course, and decided that they would be fun to take together). While Spencer and Catherine were preparing the feast, Jack and Nikki lay out in the back yard by the stone bench, listening to Lilith Fair music and enjoying the sun. Nikki was sitting, legs apart, with the heads of Jack and Worf each resting on one thigh, as she ran her fingers through their surprisingly similar, unkempt hair. Nikki was singing, Worf was sleeping, and Jack was saying:

"Do you think there are other forms of consciousness? The scientists say that evolution or non-evolution of life is a crap-shoot on each world, dependent on a million interconnected variables of climate, and catastrophe, and circumstance. But what if there's more than just "living" and "non-living" worlds. What if there's a whole gamut of consciousness-like things that exist on different planets or different planes or different states of matter, or of energy, or of some other form we can?t even imagine because we're so rooted in our bodies and our physical existence. Maybe there are consciousness-like things, or other states completely unlike consciousness, but just as different from unawareness as awareness?"

He opened one eye in the bright sun to see if Nikki was listening. She smiled at him, and, putting her arms behind her on the grass and staring into the cloudless sky, said languorously:

"I'm counting on it."