Dream On

My brother and I were talking yesterday about the evanescence of dreams. He remembers no dreams from childhood except one that is exceedingly sketchy, while I remember several, including the vision I had in second grade when I was anesthetized and having my tonsils removed. My most vivid and lasting dream happened when I was eight or nine. I was floating down the first-floor hallway in our childhood home – hovering in a slow, stately fashion like a balloon in the Macy’s parade. I rounded the corner into the kitchen and looked at the telephone – a heavy, black model mounted on the wall. At the center of the dial, where the white disk with our phone number was usually affixed, was an unblinking eye, like a misplaced Masonic symbol. I remember this dream, I think, because it combines the mundane and the unexpected, like a Magritte painting. Nothing is so forgettable as a dream that is nothing but dreamlike – like a Dali painting – and nothing, in general, is so boring as another person’s dreams. Evelyn Waugh, in a diary entry from the autumn of 1962, explained why:

“One can write, think and pray exclusively of others; dreams are all egocentric.”

In spite of this, Waugh left a memorable description of a dream, recorded in his diary on March 21, 1943:

“A night disturbed by a sort of nightmare that is becoming more frequent with me and I am inclined to believe is peculiar to myself. Dreams of unendurable boredom – of reading page after page of dullness, of being told endless, pointless jokes, of sitting through cinema films devoid of interest.”

Even in his dreams Waugh was a snob. Veterans of Waugh will remember the torment Tony Last endures in A Handful of Dust: Deep in Amazonia, he must read Dickens aloud to Mr. Todd. The novel was published nine years before the diary entry, and I’ve always thought that scene among the nastiest pieces of literary criticism ever conceived.

Here’s another, more conventional sort of nightmare, recorded by John Ruskin in his Brantwood Diary on Oct. 29, 1877. Knowing what we know of Ruskin’s psychopathology, it’s hardly surprising:

“Half sleepless night again – and entirely disgusting dream, about men using flesh and bones, hands of children especially, for fuel – being out of wood and coals. I took a piece to put on someones [sic] fire, and found it the side of an animals [sic] face, with the jaw and teeth in it.”

Ruskin is also the source of one of the most frightening dreams I know, recorded in his diaries on December 27, 1875:

“Up in good time after sound sleep, though first disturbed by the ghastliest nightmare of dream I ever had in my life. After some pleasant, or at least natural dreaming about receiving people in a large house, I went to rest myself in a room full of fine old pictures; the first of which, when I examined it – and it was large – was of an old surgeon dying by dissecting himself! It was worse than dissecting -- tearing: and with circumstances of horror about the treatment of the head which I will not enter.”

I have never recorded my dreams. While they can be entertaining, they possess no other significance. I’m even reluctant to share dreams with my wife, for fear of boring her. Regaling others with our dreams possesses all the charm of trimming one’s toes in public. It’s slightly indecent. Part of the bittersweet fascination of dreams is their fleeting quality, like life itself.