Wilfred was neither a young man nor an old one, but "middle-aged" isn't quite the right term. He wasn't good-looking but he wasn't ill-featured either, and, again, "nondescript" seems inadequate. In that same vein, he was not what you could call happy and he wasn't unhappy. He was, in other words, hard to categorize. We should allow that he was at least aware of his own betwixt-and-between condition.
Be that as it may, one sunny day he found himself in a rowboat drifting down a stream, and his drift took him into what is technically known as a hypnagogic state, but more familiarly thought of as just a state midway between waking and dreaming. Now, the thing is, Wilfred, for some reason not immediately apparent though no doubt rooted in psychological reality, has always been skeptical, not to say suspicious, of appearances. But on that day, and in that state, the world around him, which had started out disappointingly banal -- blue sky, black water, grey rocks, green shrubbery -- began to glisten, as the forming dream populated the now lush banks with figures out of his past and present, but dressed up in antique costumes, like something out of Renoir: flirting girls, undershirted men, call-outs and laughter, a party afoot. Fantasy, of course, as the remnants of his waking mind would tell him, but that voice soon lost the struggle for control and he slipped wholly under the dream-spell. Until his boat hit the post of a pier, the dream shattered, and he woke back into the world of mere appearance.
Like most dreams, once over, it couldn't be remembered except in shards. But this time those shards stayed sharp and hard enough that he found himself wanting to go back to them, to reconstitute the dream. It was the memory of something not just shiny and bright, but complete or whole, in a way his waking life was not. Working with artists, dealers, collectors, not to mention fund managers or messenger boys, he was forever second-, third-, and even fourth-guessing meanings, gestures, looks, words, body-language. And that chronic doubt pervaded the rest of his life too -- relationships, friends, family, and beyond, to the most mundane choices and actions: why wear these shoes rather than those, why this way instead of that, why now not then, and so on. But in the dream that one lazy afternoon -- there were no questions!
So, he tried to dream it again. He couldn't, of course, not being in a rowboat on a stream, and even if he were it wouldn't be the same -- as with all of us, he can't make a dream, he can only have a dream. But what he found was that his interest alone seemed to strengthen the dreams he did have, as though he were exercising some dream-muscle, and even their waking remnants persisted longer and seemed more solid. They weren't always happy dreams, but they didn't need to be. The anxiety dreams, of things left undone, or left too late, or people disappointed or hurt -- these actually inspired him in a peculiar way, made him want to correct the errors, right the wrongs, in the next dream.
There always is another dream, yes, but what happened to Wilfred was that the "next dream" began to take on the status of a goal. His dreams had become so rich and detailed, so sensuous, that they started to rival "real" life. They quarried his past, filling the imagined scenes with figures and places old and new, near and remote -- mother, grandfather, first girlfriend, work colleagues and opponents, the home he grew up in, his first plane ride, the nearby park with the stream, schools, offices, etc. And some completely imaginary characters and sites, but those too were composites forged out of his experiences, including quite recent ones. The point is, the dreams were endowing these dredged-up experiences with such vivid immediacy that they made his waking life seem hollow in comparison.
His life took a strange turn then -- he began to seek out opportunities to dream. Early to bed, late to rise, naps in the day whenever he could -- these testified to a growing obsession. Even daydreams played a role. With these at first he would try to call up the internal dream-maker by conscious will, but soon learned to facilitate the dreaming imagination passively instead. And all were devoted to an idea, and desire, that he couldn't or wouldn't admit to himself but was nonetheless increasingly dominant: that of substituting the dream-life for the waking one.
The people around him were naturally concerned. At work, he was missing meetings and appointments, rarely seen in his office. He avoided friends and family, and often seemed distracted or restless when he was seen. He was losing weight. Finally, at one point he collapsed waiting for a light to change at a downtown intersection, and, against his only feeble objections, was taken in an ambulance to an emergency ward. Since he seemed to be in some undiagnosable difficulty, he was then admitted to a hospital bed for observation.
It was simply that the dream, like some sort of psychic black hole, was swallowing his life. Bodily upkeep had become just an annoying chore, and it was fine by him if others took it on. In fact, his body had become the event horizon of his dreaming self, the boundary from which nothing internal escaped -- for all intents and purposes he had become, quickly and astonishingly, catatonic.
That is, to external observers. From Wilfred's perspective, on the other hand, the relative absence of phenomenal disturbance and practical needs allowed the dreams, the lush, sensuous, immediate dreams, to expand to their fullest extent, to become essentially an endless tapestry of dramatic narrative with him as the central character, the protagonist. He had to trust the dream-maker, of course, and on rare occasions he came back to waking consciousness when that mysterious entity had gone too far, recalling something like the sweat-soaked nightmares of his childhood. But by and large, his balanced maturity provided such a fund of quotidian material to draw upon that the trust was not misplaced.
Alas, there was a flaw. It wasn't the lack of external care-takers -- he lived in a welfare state after all -- it was the lack of new, external input. So that after a while he began to notice a certain repetitiousness in the tapestry, same characters, same places, same situations. I say, "he began to notice", though of course being just a character in a dream himself, it was difficult to stand outside the dream and take a critical attitude toward it. Nevertheless, the repetitions had an effect, and that was to induce the appearance of a third dream component -- besides the assumed but never apparent dream maker, and the omni-present dream protagonist, there took shape a more shadowy figure, a dream observer, an internal critic in fact.
And the observer not only didn't help, it worsened things. Under that critical scrutiny, what had seemed at the start so rich and varied, so multifaceted in appearance, now began to suffer from the same defect that used to plague his waking life -- that the appearance was a mere facade, a papering-over of something else, something hidden beneath the surface. But with this difference -- then, the "something hidden" held out the promise or at least the hope that it might be deeper, more meaningful, and above all more real, if one could just get to it; now, there was only a fear that what lay beneath appearance was nothing, nothing at all, just that old, boring, terrifying void.
And so he came to the last, critical phase -- what was a collapse gathered momentum and became an implosion. All his memories, from childhood to those just before his recent retirement from waking life, all life experiences, were hollowed out. Images turned wobbly, sounds became tinny, neither one able to find a stable purchase any longer. In the black hole that had swallowed him he was rapidly approaching the singularity at its black heart -- extinction, in this case.
But then, oddly, it stopped. What halted the implosion, perhaps like the hypothetical "string" that ends a cosmic black hole's collapse, was a particular memory of a particular sensation: touch. He was at the death-bed of his father, a man for whom tactile experience had always seemed repellent, and who had always communicated that quite effectively to his only son, when he leaned in closer than he would ordinarily have done to hear what might be last words after all. His father's hand, taped and tube-draped, rose from the hospital bed and, surprisingly, shockingly in fact, touched his face, his lips. It took strong impulse control not to draw back, but he stayed still, riveted, and heard the whispery voice say just "Wilfred".
That was it, and he hadn't, couldn't, say anything himself. But all this came back to him now in a gush with the dream-memory of that one electrifying touch. It converted everything sensuous into modalities of touch. The sound of his name in that ragged voice seemed like another kind of physical contact, another kind of touch. Even the sight of his father's grizzled, emaciated face, with its trace of a rare, unexpected smile, seemed like contact too, as though vision had a tactile quality, the touch of light. It was the memory of touch, its physicality, that gave the phenomenal world as a whole a bottom, and so made it material, substantial again.
When next a white-coated figure touched his own taped hand, his eyes opened, and he too smiled.
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