The Night Companion
by Jeffrey Greene
Chapter 9: The Black Box
part 1
“Damn your black face, Hettie! Is that you?”
It was a high-pitched voice, dry and thin, a mocking impersonation of a Southern drawl. I waited, certain that my thudding heartbeat was audible, then heard a sheet being drawn back, and the speaker sit up. “Cathy?” Mid-western American now. There was a tense silence, and then I was startled by an eerily girlish giggle that died away in a wracking cough.
When the fit passed, the voice said wheezily: “Well, if you’re going to bash my head in, don’t keep me in suspense.” Another silence, and then he lay back down and sighed loudly. “Otherwise, go back to sleep, because awake you’re just wasting my time.”
The voice was familiar. I’d heard it in dreams, which so discomposed me that for a moment I couldn’t speak.
“Well, Tom — may I call you Tom? — I feel I know you, since we’ve met informally several times already. Mine’s Patrick, but you can call me Professor Morhan. I always preferred keeping a formal distance from my students.” He giggled. “Most of the time, anyway.”
“I’m not your fucking student,” I said.
“No, but you are fucking my daughter and, probably, my wife, too, so don’t you think you owe me a little respect? I’m still head of this household, a fact you may have forgotten in all your flurrious fucking.” He laughed wheezily. “‘Flurrious.’ I like that. Slip of the tongue and I’ve got a new word. Slip of the cock and you’ve got yourself some mother/daughter action. It’s good, huh? I admit I’ve fantasized about it. But they fired me for much less. Topping the maid is one thing... Now don’t tell me you’ve had a go at Hettie too?!”
I began to think that Catherine was right. I shouldn’t have confronted him now. I had to choose my words carefully, not let him bait me. “I feel I know you, too,” I said. “Besides the dreams, I’ve gotten quite a composite picture from your... well, can’t say loved ones, can I? Hated ones? Roland, now, he’d love to bash your head in.”
He snorted. “Poor Roland. I never liked that name. It has a fat sound, don’t you think? Carla insisted; it was her father’s name. It suited him, pork-fed, Jew-killing bureaucrat that he was. You’re right, though, Roland hates me, as only a hermit can hate, but I’ll accept exactly half the blame for what he’s become. As she’s no doubt cheerfully told you, my wife spent more time nursing drinks than children, and he grew up unmothered, unbrothered-and-sistered, and generally unaffiliated with the human species.
“As a father, I was appalled; as a scientist, curious. I asked myself: wouldn’t the dreams of someone so uncontaminated by the debris and clutter of the world be themselves unworldly? Might they be, in the purest sense of the word, otherworldly, their symbols and locations drawn from the noumena of the deep self?
“Oneirocine — the name I gave to the alkaloid in the mushroom I discovered — well, re-discovered. The shaman who introduced me to it is long dead. I brought it back from Brazil in 1966, which made it possible to explore that hypothesis. Of course, the ideal subject would have been a child taken from its mother at birth and raised in complete isolation, with no human contact, but alas, no Kaspar Hausers presented themselves. I had to make do with Roland, who was nine when I began the experiments, and already tainted by television.”
He was warming to his subject now. There was a suppressed excitement in his voice, and a swelling pride, but as far as I could tell, not a tremor of regret.
“It wasn’t until Roland tearfully told me himself that I realized my forays into his REM states were causing nightmares. I should have expected it. The infantile ego of dreams would naturally perceive any encroachment of the Other as a threat.
“At first the dreams of the people around me were like the poorly received stations on a transistor radio and, for a long time, I thought they were my own dreams. I would eat one of the mushrooms before bed, as eager for sleep as a child for Christmas morning, and blunder into fabulous realms of experience entirely foreign to me, peopled with strangers, in which I was always an observer, never an actor.
“I say fabulous, because I remembered them in the exhaustive detail of a waking experience, and my memory is particularly good: all the dizzying shifts in space and time, the names of people and what they said; not just a word or two, verbatim. Hardly surprising that I mistook them for my own dreams. Normal dream memory is patchy at best, and we’re rarely able to salvage more than a few crumbs of our nightly experience: the dream’s defining moment, a few words or a sentence.
“I thought the drug simply strengthened dream memory, and what seemed foreign was only the dreams lost through the sieve of normal recall. It does that, too, but it took a long time for me to realize that I’d been making nightly crossings into that most private place: other people’s dreams.”
Either the night had begun to yield to dawn, or my eyes were becoming used to the darkness. A scrawny, shirtless figure, with skin that seemed dimly phosphorescent, gestured from the bed, his bony arms weaving shapes that I could just see against the white wall. I’d been cold, and now I was drenched with sweat. I found myself hanging onto the words as an antidote to a nausea that I knew was imminent.
“One morning,” the professor went on, “my wife told me a dream she’d had the night before, and I knew for certain that I had not only experienced the same dream, myself, but remembered it in far greater detail. To dwell on my elation at that moment might confirm your bad opinion of me. Let’s just say the temptation to repeat the experience was more than my poor scientist scruples could bear. Perhaps I should ask what you would have done in my place?”
“Before or after I found out that it caused nightmares?”
“Point taken. After, then.”
“I’ve eaten psilocybin mushrooms, peyote buttons, dropped acid, and there were times when I felt like a random smear of screaming jelly, but I never regretted those experiences. There’s a certain pride in surviving Hell, even a self-imposed one, and I’m fairly open-minded about drugs. But this... to know that you were hurting them, not just strangers in hotels, but your own family. Unless there was some way to focus the drug inward, turn it on your own dreams, I couldn’t justify taking it. I’m curious how you managed to.”
“Oh, you’re curious, are you? Well, I daresay that if Cathy hadn’t turned traitor and given you the beginner’s dose in your tea as I asked, your moral tone might be less monochromatic. You’re sure you wouldn’t like to try it now? I guarantee you an experience unlike any you’ve had before. No? Pity. But go ahead and compare me with Dr. Mengele if it makes you feel better, even if I assure you that no real harm has been done.
The subject experiences some stress, as well as temporary exhaustion due to a disruption of the sleep cycles and frequent waking. He may doubt his sanity for a time and dread the onset of fatigue, but I’m fairly sure these symptoms vanish when he leaves the range of reception, which is about the diameter of a good-sized house.
“You’ve had some nightmares, which will recede in your memory as all the others have. That’s the extent of your sacrifice, Tom. Your dreams have been written down along with the several thousand others I’ve recorded in a multi-volume journal I plan to publish along with my paper on oneirocine and its psychoanalytic uses.
“I apologize for the invasion of privacy and for putting you through a few bad nights’ sleep, but you’ll forgive me for considering my own sacrifice a little greater. I’m lying here in the dark because the drug has permanently dilated my pupils. I have to wear sunglasses from sunrise to sunset, even with the shutters closed.
“At this point — and this is a recent development — I can’t keep much food down. It seems I’m slowly starving. Since last week I haven’t been able to get out of bed without help, and will be completely bedridden very soon. As my tolerance for the drug has increased, my hours of wakefulness have declined and, at this stage, I need twelve hours of sleep a day. The leprous appearance of my skin is due to a gradual loss of pigment, so I have another good reason to stay out of the sun. I give myself six months at most, then you can all celebrate.
“These are the physical contraindications of long-term oneirocine use in its raw form. The psychological side-effects are much worse. I don’t have enough neuroscience to say what’s happened, but I suspect the drug has leached out the serotonin in my brain, a neurotransmitter vital to dreaming.
“I first noticed it while staying in a motel in Wyoming some six years ago. I traveled as often as my teaching schedule would allow, with a suitcase and a typewriter, using a car by day and the drug at night, wandering through dreams unfolding and spreading around me like shimmering cities on the horizon. Since the people asleep in rooms on all sides of me were going through their REM states at different times, I experienced them as a kaleidoscopic continuum so dense with dreams that I had to set my alarm to go off every two hours in order to write them all down.
“The drug lasts about six hours, and apparently extends the REM-sensitive phase for the duration of its effect, so the deeper states of dreamless sleep, where, I suspect, the body truly rests, are postponed. For that reason, I would wake up feeling as if I’d done a twelve-mile hike, and drag myself through the morning, typing and editing the dreams, and then sleep for a hour before getting on the road again.
“I alternated taking it, one day on, one day off. It was on an off night in Wyoming that I woke up in a cold sweat, having had the oddest nightmare of my life. I say odd because nothing whatever had happened. There was no threat, no images, not even the most basic scenario. I had been in darkness, the absolute darkness of caves or the deep sea; I was the darkness. But this sense of self as darkness was not infinite. It was more the size of a small box or a coffin, a living, silent formlessness that strained to hear its own heartbeat, to feel, to see itself, and couldn’t. That’s what woke me up.
“I should say here that my own dreams — after about six years of frequent use — had become increasingly vague, the recall spottier, but I merely assumed they’d been pushed into the background by the searingly bright presence of other people’s dreams. I ate the mushrooms the next night and had the same nightmare, only this time it was far worse. Panic exploded me out of the blackness.
“I got up and looked out the window — I was staying at a roadside motel — and realized that the rooms on either side of me were vacant. I had already determined the limited range of the drug, but what came to me then was the sickening knowledge that the blackness was not a dream, but my own naked self, revealed as a writhing nothing, stripped of the forms of light that the dreaming brain projects onto it. The dire truth was that the drug had robbed me of the dreaming faculty.
“In the midst of daily life one is safe from the ‘black box.’ Life is one great distraction, and even deep meditation can’t reach that place of absolute zero. There is always, however thin, a corporeal tendril connecting one to the light. In the midst of sleep, the soul, self, whatever, awakes from the body’s oblivion and is protected from its own nothingness by the magic show of dreams.
“As in all processes of nature, there is nothing frivolous about dreams. In their chaotic approximation of waking life, they preserve sanity, whether or not the waking self remembers them. I knew then that I had no choice but to keep taking the drug. To stop using it would mean nightly exile to that broom closet of Hell. Other people’s dreams are infinitely better than no dreams at all.”
Copyright © 2021 by Jeffrey Greene
