Suddenly and wholly, I was ten years old again. Playing in a backyard I never had, with a dog I did have. At once I knew it was Rogue, the vicious son of my favorite pet, a Rottie named Thor. Except he gamboled through the grass and playfully nibbled at my arm when I withheld his broken bone toy, browned and worn from what I suspected were years of hardship.
Rogue had run away after Thor died of cancer, that poor dog; his body riddled with disease, fighting itself, basically. By the end of it, his jovial temperament had turned irascible, his once boundless store of energy depleted, he retreated to his doghouse, a red and black abode with his name scribbled in white paint by a version of me I barely remember. There he remained, snapping at any person who dared come near, who tried to show physical affection, until the Great Canine in the sky called him home.
But here, in this dream, Rogue had returned, a changed pup, now ready to revel in the love of humankind. And boy! How he reveled under that baby blue cloud-packed sky, a version created by electrical impulses, the firing of neurons in my somnolent brain. Rogue’s sunbaked fur eased through my fingers as he stood over me, licking my face, the slobbering tongue much more pleasant in that state than a waking one. The smell of freshly cut grass filled one nostril while something sweet—apple pie or double chocolate peanut butter brownies—floated its way into the other. Laughing and shouting, even crying a bit, I was happy. So happy.
And then, thoughts of my mom assailed my head. Intrusive, the thoughts grew into a shadow, large and foreboding, that made me cold, blocking out a sun that impossibly radiated the perfect amount of ultraviolet light. Rogue shivered and tucked his tail (for in the dream, he’d retained his full tail because I was against clipping animals for fashion) between his legs. The shadow, I then realized, was cast by a man, a stranger with no face, features blurred by some sort of aphasia. He wore a long black leather trench coat and his long black greasy hair left streaks along his shoulders. A purple and gray striped tie hung taut around his neck and careened in an incipient wind. As clouds rolled in, fast as weightless tumbleweeds across a dirt road bereft of all life, his hands, gloved in rubber of the same pale lilac purple, lifted me, a feather in his arms (or perhaps, he was undertaker-strong) as I screamed. Where was my mother?
“Mom!” I cried over and over. Then “Rogue! Thor!” until the man with no face reached a car parked in front of the home in which I never lived. Before he threw me in the trunk of his scarlet ‘67 Camaro (how I knew the year and model is beyond me), I caught a glimpse of the pretentious house. One family. Two stories. Perfect white vinyl siding, a large, imposing porch. All fenced in, brown pickets. A stark contrast to the towering three family slum with the one patch of dying crabgrass upon which my dogs had once lived.
He stared, at least I think he did, at me in the trunk. Unable to move or bite or swipe or kick, all I could muster were more feckless screams which hoarsened my voice until my howls for my mom and my dogs became feeble meeps and peeps not even the keenest of ears could discern.
With a guttural grunt, he slammed shut the trunk hatch and, all at once, both dark and light surrounded me. White enveloped me as I opened my eyes. Bright and blinding and encroaching from all directions. When my eyes finally adjusted, I realized it was not the sun that obscured my vision. I was literally, on all sides, up and down, surrounded by white. For what appeared to be forever, white stretched on and on. An incandescent void.
A sweeping disorientation crashed suddenly throughout my being. I had no sense of direction if I was even standing. I thought I felt my eyes well with tears. The happiness I had felt moments before was now replaced with despondency and despair. And fear. In that moment, I wanted my mom so badly. Where the hell was my mother? I wanted warmth, her warmth, though at the time I felt nothing. No physical sensations whatsoever, light as the child carried away by Camaro man. The complete lack of anything unsettled me; I closed my eyes and tilted my head back and –
“You’re back already?”
My perception of time was off, but it felt like seconds since I’d closed my eyes. In front of me sat a man in a suit, balding on top, dark tufts of hair on the sides. The bespectacled man eyed me critically, as I did him. He looked like he knew me while I tried to figure out where he and the plain, thin wooden desk behind which he sat had come from.
“Oh dear,” he said, taking off his wire-framed glasses and placing them on the desk. He began to massage his temples. “Oh dear, dear, dear.”
“Where am I?”
“You, sir,” he started and then huffed a drawn-out sigh, “are in the dream void and I am your dream agent.”
My eyebrows raised involuntarily, and I again found myself overwhelmed by intense vertigo. Again, I closed my eyes and when they opened, I was seated in a chair across from the man, the dream agent. Immediately, I launched into a barrage of questions: “What’s going on?” “Am I still sleeping?” “Am I dead?” The dream agent smiled and shook his head. “No, you are not dead but —”
“So, you can wake me up?”
“You are not dead, but you are not sleeping. This place is an in-between, a top on your nightly journey to dreamland and you—as you know yourself, as you are now—are not supposed to be here.”
A desire to go on the offensive took over. “I don’t dream every night.”
“Yes, you do.”
“No–”
“Yes” He spoke curtly, but not altogether unfriendly. “Each night, we meet and decide on your
dream destination.” My lips barely parted to speak before he explained on. “Not you of course, but a part of you”.
“A part of me? Like my subconscious?”
“Precisely.”
We sat in silence for a few moments or hours—whichever—during which I pondered the dream that landed me here.
“So, Freud’s hypothesis was correct?”
The dream agent replaced his glasses and shrugged, his palms facing upward. How could he not know? Unless I was still dreaming, and he was only a distorted projection of myself and, if that was the case, then I was seeking answers from the person without any insight.
Silence befell us again. For how long, I am entirely unsure. He twiddled his thumbs for an eternity before speaking. “Would you like to know how it works?” he asked me.
My head nodded yes before I knew what I was doing.
The dream agent rose and made a “follow me” motion with his arm and instantly the desk and chairs vanished, and I was walking. Or, at least, my legs were working through the vastness of white
surrounding us; it was like swimming in the middle of the ocean, trying to get somewhere, knowing you’re moving (sort of), but all the eyes could see was uncompromising homogeneity.
“As I said before,” he began as we waded through the dense nothing, “every night, you come to me, and we decide on a dream destination.” He considered me a moment before continuing. “Like tonight we discussed many, many things before settling on a child, his dog, and the outdoors.”
It was as though he knew I wanted to discuss that dream. But first I had another question. “Why don’t I remember these discussions?”.
He considered the question for . . . some time and said, “Why do we remember some dreams vividly and others not at all?” It was more like a statement. I didn’t pursue further explanation.
“What did we discuss then, that led to that dream? That specific combination of images, smells, feelings?”
“Your childhood.” As he said this, the surrounding panoply of purity transformed. Now, I was in what I could only describe as a theatre, except the screen was everywhere all at once and I was both within and without the scene—little me, missing a front tooth, and a hand ruffling my hair—at the same time. “Both the good,” he continued and the images around us changed. A dog—Thor this time—then my mother, her dark curly hair dancing about her shoulders as she sang and cooked a meal. I thought I could smell Italian sausage, the spicy kind.
A salty pressure built behind my eyes, but I ignored it and said, “And the bad?”
The images, memories, again changed. Nights in a cold car, shivering. Staying with my mother at cramped, dirty apartments belonging to weird men. Arguments. Big brown sad eyes crying. My mother’s. The wave behind my own eyes released and my shoulders slumped, a relief.
“Desires. Old and new”
The big house from the dream materialized, majestic and no longer imposing. The house called to me as though we were old acquaintances eager to catch up. I took a few steps but moved nowhere. I forgot where, when or what I was.
A child ran out of the front door, leaving the screen door swaying in the light breeze, followed by a golden-brown Corgi, barking but looking happy. It felt happy. The child, a boy with familiar round brown eyes, hugged someone unseen and I felt a peculiar warmth encircle my waist and soon, I was on fire. Not with flames, but with love and . . . understanding.
By then, I was sobbing loudly. My façade of reticence siphoned away by what was yet to come—if it would come.
“But the ending,” I said, my words tripping over gasps for air, impeded by slowly receding sobs. “Why would you send me somewhere so . . . so . . . whole, magnificent only to have it end so . . . wrong?”
The dream agent smiled. He did that a lot, too much for the occasion. With a wave of his hand, everything around us, my future or what I hoped would be, gone as quickly as it’d come, replaced by that dizzying white brilliance.
He said, both pleasantly and matter-of-factly, “I can only send you to the desired destination. What happens, what you do when you get there is up to you. Think about it.”
I did. It came to me quickly and hit like a bag of those red bricks. Stay close, my mother had always cautioned, you don’t wanna get snatched up by a strange man. Always in a playful tone, a light voice, but it’d been so often that her biggest fear imprinted gently upon my mind.
I looked at the dream agent. He was smiling that out of place smile and nodding, but I smiled back.
“What happens now?” I asked. I felt like a child hungry for answers to questions too thick to chew and swallow.
“I’m not sure.” He took off his glasses and cleaned them with an expensive-looking cloth he produced from his back pocket. “This”—he pointed to me—“has never happened before. I suppose I’ll try to send you off to another dream. I’m not quite sure it will work, though, with the total of your consciousness here in . . .”
“The Spirit Room?” I interrupted. “I like that better.” He nodded. “The Spirit Room.”
“Where will you send me this time?”
“I think I know a place.” His smile this time didn’t feel cursory but knowing.
My dream agent lifted his arm to flick me off to a new world, but I called out, “Wait!” much louder than I intended. The outburst startled the man who now seemed much younger.
“Are you me?”
Again, he shrugged with his palms turned upward. His mouth twitched at the sides like he was fighting his ever-present urge to smile. And with a flick of his wrist . . .
Suddenly and wholly, I was ten years old again. In a plush bed I’d never slept in, in a pale blue room I always wished belonged to me. But all the same, it felt more mine than anything I’d ever known. Running water cut through the initial confusion and that was when I smelled it. Apple-scented shampoo and cherry blossom body spray. Always body spray, never perfume, but that didn’t matter. My ten-year- old stubby legs couldn’t carry me to the bathroom of this alien home fast enough. I slowed as I neared the open door to absorb the melodious notes wisping past the threshold.
I inhaled deeply, smiling a missing tooth smile, rounded the corner and . . .
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