The Dream Door

The biggest problem John struggled with wasn’t loneliness or broken-heartedness, occasional joblessness, chronic constipation or lifelong childlessness, but the inability to adequately describe his dreams.

He always felt there might be a great drama -- or at least a good film script -- in his dreams, if only he could capture the damned things.

His dreams were wacky, off-kilter, grotesque, spritely, erotic, ironical, visual, intensely wordy, overly-masturbatory and comical. They rocked him, crushed him, suffocated him, blasted him, shot him, and left him numb. Nothing in cinema could compare to his dreams, neither the wide-eyed clarity of Chinatown nor the aromatic funk of Body Heat. No music could adequately score his dreams, not unless John Williams decided to mate with Wagner to create a symphony for the birth of the Universe. Yet, upon awakening, they merely faded into ether.

For decades, John had kept a dream journal. His dreams were a ready source of inspiration, the wellspring for all his ideas pertaining to art and literature, sports and sex. He dreamt hungrily and woke up sweating. Reams of spiral notebooks rose to the ceiling, irritating his mother and perplexing his father. Codebooks to his soul, they contained the DNA of his imagination, impenetrable to all but their creator, a subscription list of one.

The journals were blueprints for screenplays never written, novels never inked, poems never read aloud. They were feverish mini-dramas scribbled by coked-up executives angling for a deal. John did the best he could, upon awakening, to scratch them down. Yet his terrible 4 a.m. handwriting -- deployed in the dark, with a sweaty hand -- defeated him time and again.

Life dragged on. He shared his dream content with anyone who would listen, which amounted to a few acquaintances. He resisted the lure of online journaling, suspicious of who might read them. The desperate scrawl of his hen scratch seemed a better fit for his dream scripts.

He came to believe the inadequacy of his journaling efforts formed the chief pleasure of dreaming. (How can one ask the inexplicable to explain itself?) John also came to believe his frustrations prevented fantasy from infiltrating -- and potentially poisoning -- his version of “reality.” He mulled these ideas over his morning coffee.

A rich relative who had long known of his obsession passed away, naming John in her estate. Ice, snow, pestilence, and other maladies prevented John from attending the gaudy funeral. Within a few days, a large shipping container arrived on his doorstep. John barely wrestled the thing into the house.

Detailed instructions arrived separately while the container occupied a third of his living room. With a few cuts, John managed to peel off the outer container to reveal what was inside: a large darkroom door with some cables attached. Instructions in hand, John examined the door, rotating it on its axis, thinking benignly of the Star Trek transporter room. Odd. He’d never developed film in his home and had no plans to start.

The manual told him to A) plug the door into the wall and B) load a memory chip (included) into the rear slot. This John did. He then lay down for a nap. He dreamt wildly, vividly, snapping awake after just an hour. Excited, he entered the door, swung it shut, and emerged from the other side. He removed the chip from the slot and plugged it into his laptop. Once he'd navigated to the designated Web site, he clicked open the chip icon.

His dreams began to play.

He saw a room built entirely of couches, some of them lit from within. Hitler complained in perfect Spanish about a complex bottle of wine. John’s mother and father had toothaches, so he made them tea. Then Barry Manilow appeared, and began to sing. He declined to teach John the lyrics due to copyright issues. The tea kettle and hot plate developed crushes on Barry, making John jealous. After a few more scenes, the dream ended.

He leaned back in his chair, baffled. The dream door had recorded his brain pictures! He inspected all the technology, which was simple and low-maintenance. The door had no visible wiring or connectors; nothing inside it touched him. John sat on the couch to ponder the possibilities.

Over the next several nights, he entered the dream door and immediately plugged the chip into his computer afterwards. He ceased journaling, as he could now experience his dreams in HD. He saw many strange things.

In one dream, he found a melon that was full of plums, and each plum was covered with small green ladybugs. He sampled a few of the bugs and found them delicious. Later, he tried stealing cake from a neighbor’s dumpster, but lied when the neighbor caught him, claiming he was only “checking it for raccoons.”

In another, he was walking in a tunnel filled with dead snakes of all sizes. He picked up a cobra, but found it to be alive. After a struggle, it bit him on the left hand. As John dressed for work, the bite became more painful, and he called a ferry to drive him to the hospital. A friend showed up, complaining of all the ways he’d injured himself in bed. Later, John drove his riding mower around someone else’s yard, inhaling white exhaust.

These images played out complete with sound. Some were competently filmed by the director in his head; others seemed to have been shot, written, scored, and edited by a complete idiot. John took long walks, trying to decide whether he was better off with the dream door. He thought perhaps not.

For one thing, he saw how nonsensical his dreams were. (After all, who would approach Cleopatra with a platter of hard-boiled eggs, and not ask to sleep with her?) For another, the task of interpreting dreams had forced him to consider them head-on. If he failed to close his hand around them -- to make them as real as the fire plug or utility pole in his front yard -- then at least he benefited from the questions they innocently raised. He had no quarrel with enigmas.

Deprived of journaling, he sank into a morass, dreading sleep. Day after day, he trudged into the dream door and plugged in his chip. His recorded dreams became a diary of madness. Pornography and violence, childhood friends and eroticized school teachers, all mixed together in a frothy brain stew, captured by means he could not fathom. He saw people long dead, pets long lost, events best forgotten, in razor-sharp detail. No dream lasted more than 11 seconds, yet there might be as many as 20 of them, stretching across hours. He explored defunct city halls and war-torn swimming pools, alien fire stations and backwards spelling bees. His mother cooked him breakfast; his father again taught him to fish. His grandfather was a shadowy figure on a twilit lake, calling from afar. John woke gasping for breath.

He decided, not unreasonably, that the dream door -- given in good faith by a good-hearted relative -- was perhaps not the best thing for his health. He took a sheet of paper and a Sharpie and wrote a note, which he affixed to the door with a strip of tape. He then stretched out on the couch to sleep, notepad and pen in hand.

The note read: OUT OF ORDER.