Problematic Dreams

by Paul Revis

“You need to quit smoking, Bill,” said the doctor in that matter-of-fact voice that doctors use when they really want you to do something. Bill knew it was true, of course. Breathing was getting harder and harder to manage, a flight of stairs had become a challenge, yah, quitting was definitely on the agenda. “I’m going to prescribe this medication for you, and I want you to take it for three months. Symptoms may include, bla, bla, bla, disturbing dreams, lowered heart rate, bla, bla.”

At first the dreams weren’t all that bad: slightly disturbing, as the doctor had warned him, but nothing he couldn’t deal with. In fact, some of them were downright interesting. Bill found himself lounging on an island while the ocean around him burned with sixty-foot flames, and it didn’t seem to bother him. Cats the size of horses chased painted circus elephants ridden by bizarre clowns down the streets of New York while no one seemed to notice, and that didn’t bother him, either. Easy but odd dreams that he could rationalize or dismiss as merely... well, disturbing. Just as the doctor had said.

Then the night terrors began. The dreams were no longer just disturbing; they were horrifying. The danger that had taken place around him in the other dreams was now directed at him personally, and the worst part of it all, he couldn’t remember any of it. He awoke sweating; the bedclothes torn from the bed, drenched with sweat, even his dog cowered in the corner of his room with fear.

With the merely disturbing dreams, he could remember large segments of the plots, the actions, and even the people. He recognized many of them because, in dreams, the brain uses faces the eyes have seen before. We may not always consciously recognize the faces in our dreams, but the eyes have seen them before, and the brain has recorded them in that vast bank of useful memories it keeps to use against us later. The brain cannot make up faces it has never recorded, nor places that the body has never been.

Tiny snippets of those terror-filled dreams would come screaming back into Bill’s head several hours after waking, bringing back the fear in his mind, bringing out the sweat again. The look of sheer terror on his face actually disturbed his co-workers to the point of bringing it to the attention of his supervisor.

It took him several minutes of convincing to reassure his boss that there was nothing wrong, that it was just bad dreams. But it was more than that, far more. He called the doctor.

“They are, after all, just dreams, Bill, we have discussed this, and you did say that you understood the dreams could be very disturbing. Can we agree on that? Can we also agree that you must quit the nicotine habit? That this may in fact be your last and best shot at that goal?”

“Yah,” replied Bill, with almost no conviction. “You don’t know what it’s like,” he said quietly. “The dreams are ...” His voice trailed off. No one could know or understand what he saw during those terrifying moments that seemed so real. Why would he come back to consult the doctor if he didn’t have a valid concern?

And so he went home, still shaking as his mind began once again to recall some bit of a particularly terror-inducing dream from two nights previous. It stopped just when the axe began to cut into his forehead. Someone had thrown that axe, someone he knew well. He just couldn’t remember who it was. Friend? Family member? Co-worker? He couldn’t tell or, rather, he couldn’t remember. Somehow he knew it was important for him to remember who it was that seemed to want him dead.

“It was just a dream,” he kept telling himself, “it has no basis in reality. It’s nothing to worry about.” He smiled to himself, satisfied with his strong grasp on reality and logic. He ate a good meal that evening, had a glass of a moderately expensive wine, cleaned up for bed and stared at the dark ceiling for the rest of the night.

At one point he was sure he had fallen asleep. He thought that because he had gotten out of bed and turned to look at himself as he slept, watching himself snore fitfully for what seemed like hours. The snoring was loud and very annoying. He wondered why his neighbors didn’t complain about the noise. There had to be a way to stop himself from making such a racket. The neighbors were sure to call the military in to stop that infernal racket, he was sure of it. Wasn’t that Mrs. Jackson from two houses down screaming at him for the noise to stop?

“I’m dealing with it!” shouted Bill in return. “I’ll make it stop, Just give me a minute, you lunatic!”

He ran to the garage and found what he needed to make the infernal snoring stop. Running up the stairs, he swung the huge axe over his head and.....

Bill looked at the clock. Five minutes had elapsed since the last time he had looked at it, but now he knew who it was that wanted him dead, and why. Maybe it was the drugs, who knew? It didn’t really matter now, did it? But he did know that it needed fixing one way or another, and he was pretty sure he knew what the fix was.

Bill wrote a detailed letter to whomever, explaining just what it was that needed to be done and why, and to whom. He folded it carefully and slipped it into his best shirt pocket. Finally at peace, he went to the garage where he found the axe and a good length of sturdy rope which he slung over his shoulder.

He whistled a tune from his long-ago childhood that he suddenly remembered as he made his way to crazy Mrs. Jackson’s house. He was not surprised to find the door locked. A well-placed swing of the great axe took care of the problem rather quickly, and he went in and up the stairs to the old woman’s bedroom.

“Ah, back to sleep are you?” he asked with a grin. “Not that it matters at this point.”

Bill swung the heavy axe in a great arc; the blade entering the woman’s skull with what Bill thought was an interesting sound. Not at all the way he expected it to sound. Not quite the satisfying thunk he expected to hear. That and the nasty explosion of “who knows what that stuff is” when the blade hit. No, the whole thing felt just a bit off somehow, not the satisfying end of things that it was supposed to be.

“Had to be the darn drugs. They’ll do that to you,” he thought as he retrieved the letter from his shirt pocket and dropped it nonchalantly onto Mrs. Jackson’s lifeless body, made his way down the stairs and out the front door.

The first faint rays of sunshine were beginning to make their way out from the eastern horizon, and Bill knew he had only a very little time to finish his business before the rest of the town would be waking up in time for their busy day. He made the four blocks to the river just in time to catch sight of a sun-drenched orange cloud in the shape of a charming little rabbit that obscured the sunrise for a few short moments. As a child he had loved looking for familiar shapes in the clouds, and it was still fun to see them when he had the time.

He watched the cloud rabbit as he tied one end of the rope he carried to the steel beam of the bridge, and made a loop in the other end which he nonchalantly slipped over his head. He continued to watch the cloud bunny that seemed to be running now until another cloud of no particular shape began to merge with it and finally absorb it completely.

“Aw,” said Bill, and stepped off the top rail of the bridge.

* * *

Doctor Clover, the local coroner, said when interviewed later that day that it was without a doubt the oddest case he had ever investigated.

“It appears,” he said to reporters who had demanded answers, “that a Mrs. Cornelia Jackson has been discovered by concerned neighbors. She had an axe buried into her skull. The axe was thought to have been put there by a neighbor, a Mr. William Knaker, who left a note admitting to the crime, explaining the reason for doing so, and whose headless body has been retrieved from the river near his home. What this office finds so odd is that Mrs. Jackson appears to have been dead — apparently of natural causes — for what is believed to be four days or more. We’ll know more following the autopsy.”