Dreaming God-Sized Dreams
I do not care for robots. And yet robots and machine learning comprise the best thinking of our generation. Cars that drive themselves. Drone warfare. Automated consciousness. Yipee.
Me, I can’t wait to go to bed. I dream of sleep while waking; while sleeping, I am dead to the world. I’m not depressed. I’m simply looking for a legal form of hallucination, and escape.
My husband and I met five years ago, while in the same book club. We broke off, to discuss the short stories of Tolstoy, and when we reconvened, both sets of our eyes were shining.
I was raised by my Polish aunt, and my husband, by his Russian uncle. What are the odds?
My aunt Anna, a devout Christian, told me a story, once, about how she purchased her piano, an Irmler. She had a young, handsome teacher, Piotr. After a year of lessons, she asked for help in buying her first piano, and Piotr took her out of town to an open field, where dozens of pianos had been placed (driven or dragged or wheeled), on exhibition, for sale. Many of them were made in Poland, and some—Zimmerman, Schimmel—in Germany.
I never forgot that image of a field of pianos—just as she never forgot her teacher, or the songs she learned to play—Chopin’s Etudes, Moonlight Sonata, Für Elise.
This year, I decided to enter a sleep trial. The researchers were paying top dollar to intensively study narcolepsy and dream states of consciousness. The trial was called DreamLogik.
I answered honestly during the intake interview: Do you regularly have trouble getting to sleep or staying asleep? YES. Do you have a problem with snoring? Has anyone ever told you that you gasp for breath when you sleep? YES. Do you experience tingling, creeping, itching, pulling, aching or other strange feelings in your legs while lying down that cause a strong urge to kick your legs for relief? YES. Are you so tired when you wake up in the morning that you cannot function normally during the day? TRY 30 YEARS.
When I received word that I’d qualified for the six-week trial, I quickly read all the literature the doctors sent. Intermittenly sleep-deprived and sleep-saturated, what I read initially didn’t surprise. Sleep disorders can significantly diminish health, alertness and safety; untreated sleep disorders have been linked to hypertension, heart disease, stroke, depression, and diabetes.
The first stage of the six-week study involved a polysomnogram: a noninvasive procedure that required spending two nights at the Center. During a polysomnogram, a sleep technologist records multiple biological functions during sleep, such as brain wave activity, eye movement, muscle tone, heart rhythm and breathing via electrodes and monitors placed on the head, chest and legs. My husband Tim was very supportive, offering to drive me there and pick me up.
Tim is a perfect sleeper. Nude, three-piece suit, case of beer, alcohol-free, crushing worries, the gravy train: it doesn’t matter, he’ll be out within minutes of making contact with a flat surface. The only time I can recall him struggling to fall asleep in the last several years was after the Lakers lost to the Knicks. I sang him lullabies and told him jokes. “A priest and a mobster walk into a bar . . . ”; “Tim + e= time.” Within 11 minutes, he was dead asleep, fists balled.
“I’d like to help research a cure for insomnia,” I told the intake nurse, when I arrived.
“So do doctors,” she said. “Thus Ambien. Thus Trazodone, Rozerem, and Sonata.”
“I’ve tried those,” I said. “I like Trazodone the best.”
I walked into the clinic a tabula rasa: I walked out two days later, drowsy and free, with the caveat that I was to be monitored for five weeks, as an out-patient.
I read the outtake information on the way home, while Tim drove. Apparently, my body had failed to enter into REM sleep for two consecutive nights. I entered the first three 90-110 minute cycles, after two hours of tossing and turning (NREM sleep), but according to the doctors, I hadn’t had a hypnagogic jerk—the feeling of falling—that characterizes the transition between NREM and REM. And no one knew why.
Notes from the attending physician, Dr. Harlan: “Medication recommended. CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure therapy) not needed. Thank you for your participation.”
Who am I to argue with DreamLogik? I picked up the recommended pills.
“Tell me your dreams,” I begged Tim, a week later. “Make me want to have them, or want to remember them, if I am having them.”
“Sure thing. Last night I dreamed I was being chased by a huge fireball in a corn field. It was licking my heels for a long time, and then it finally engulfed me, and my only thought was, it’s great to die instantly, rather than suffer! After that I dreamed I was discussing median home prices with Donald Trump in Gross Point, Michigan. He asked me to take his dog for a walk, but when I did, I realized we were in the year 2030, and the road was mostly occupied by cars without people in them. The dog was pulling on the leash so hard, and I started to panic that we wouldn’t be able to find a water source, as it was clearly overheating. Then the leash dissolved in my hand like stardust. I walked back to the house, and all my family was there. It was a surprise party, and yet no one seemed very happy to see me. I ate crab and felt very sad.”
“That sounds like real life, not a dream. Don’t you ever fly, kiss Catherine Deneuve, or invent cures for infectious diseases?”
“Have you watched the news lately, Darlene? The dream world has disappeared, along with the ozone layer. There is no more buffer, no category left of the surreal. Except science fiction.”
“You should meditate on Dali paintings before bed. That will restore a healthy division between waking life and nightmares. Clocks don’t actually melt, in real life!”
“Dreams aren’t paintings, Nobel Prize speeches or PSA’s. They’re repressed fears and desires. What did Freud say? ‘Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious.’ And that warehouse is equal parts brothel, FBI agency, and nuthouse. Trust me. You’re not missing much.”
“If you say so,” I said.
I have several totemic items I hold when anxious: my grandfather’s Purple Heart, from WWII; his fireman’s helmet, from when he returned, scathed but alive, and became within a decade, chief of a fire department; a lock of my hair from three years ago, when I lopped it off for Locks of Love, so that it could be used for cancer patients; and the poems of John Keats. You would think these objects would enter my dreams. But no. Not yet.
I am half in love with easeful death, I confessed to my therapist. And when I have fears that I may cease to be, I go to sleep. I also drink, and sing alone with my home karyoke machine.
The study concluded. I was back to my normal life, only doped up, again.
I called Dr. Harlan the following week. “I finally had a dream! I dreamed that the B in the Best Buy sign came crashing down, but that I narrowly avoided it. And then all of a sudden I was in a nightclub, holding three baggies of drugs—all sparkly powders. One was deep violet, one was royal blue, and one was electric green. Everyone wanted to be my friend, but only because I had drugs. I soon realized my folly, opened the bags, and threw a million dollars of crack cocaine in the air. Quickly, no one wanted to be my friend. I had realized the fickleness of public opinion. Then I woke up.”
“Darlene, that’s great! Are you taking the Lunesta?”
Only in this demented context—recently discharged from a sleep clinic—would my reckless junkie dream be celebrated, as evidence of REM sleep and other healthy diagnostics.
“Yes.”
“Any side effects?”
“Nausea, headaches, stomach pain, dizziness, foggy memory and poor concentration.”
“Hang in there, Darlene.”
I never called the doctor back to let him know the dreams went on from there. Within a month, I’d developed my own version of counting sheep—counting pianos. I imagined each piano that Anna had told me about being purchased, one by one, and hauled off the lot.
Then the medication would kick in, and I’d float away, into the imaginary. My dreams were epic, orgasmic, real. The drop-off was immediate, and the hangover, in the morning, while wretched—equivalent to drinking a liter of vodka on an empty stomach—only lasted three hours.
Underemployed for six months, I called Anna the following week to tell her the good news: I’d gotten a job as a newspaper reporter, at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. She encouraged me, as always. “I believe in you, Darlene,” she said. “You keep dreaming God-sized dreams.”
Virginia Konchan is the author of Vox Populi (Finishing Line Press, 2015), and a collection of short stories, Anatomical Gift (Noctuary Press, 2017). Her fiction has appeared in StoryQuarterly, Joyland, an