Slumberland
Doctor Pill
Of course, his parents had taken him to physicians and alienists when the dreams showed no sign of dissipating after several months, but instead grew stronger and more dominant. Alarmed by their son’s constant references to his “imaginary” world, and by the way the hallucinations affected his school work; disturbed by his deteriorating relationships with his peers and with his loving relatives, his mother and father had appealed to various authority figures for an explanation and banishment of his delusions. All in vain. Nothing anyone could say–from school teachers to priests to medical specialists–could convince the little boy that his dreams were unreal.
And so after a time, he wised up. Said nothing more about his weekly visits to another realm, beyond a blurted phrase or two when he invariably tumbled with a start from his nocturnal sheets. He tried to re-engage with ordinary life, with the dull routines of school and home and church. He exerted himself but failed to find much charm in the shabby appurtenances and tinsel attractions of the waking world.
But how could he, really, after all he had seen? Oh, he had learned how to fake an interest in what occupied everyone else, especially after the dreams had ended. (And what a painful transition that had been, into and through his dreary blank adolescence and young manhood.) But the sights presented to his opened eyes were washed-out and bland compared to those viewed from behind lowered lids every Sunday night.
He had ridden impossible animals across turbulent skies and from sun to sun across the Milky Way. Boats and cars and airships of every inconceivable stripe had ferried him from one locus of wonder to another. He had visited the Moon and Mars. He had swum with the sirens and helped any number of demiurges mismanage the diurnal workings of the cosmos. Seething jungles, tropical archipelagos, canyons with walls high as continents, sherbert-colored polar wastes, spiky caverns measureless to man: he had plumbed a vast range of strange climates and elastic geographies.
But most remarkable had been the abundant architecture of his dream civilization. Never had the greatest empire of any earthly Paradise boasted its like.
The builders worked big in Morpheus’s kingdom. And in what exotic materials! Porphyry and travertine, sandstone and marble, onyx and jade, chrysoberyl and ivory. Embellished with gilt, mosaics, scrollwork and mother of pearl inlays. Prinked out in a pastel palette or with pyrotechnic panache. Cyclopean ceremonial structures whose glittering, shadowy arcades and architraves, lintels and loggias, roofs and rafters, columns and corridors, porticos and patios, towers and tunnels, all stretched to infinity. (Once he had climbed a staircase all the way to the Moon.) But the sizes and textures and hues, although impressive, were the least of the attractions–and frights–of this world. The changeability of the constructions outweighed by far their grandiose dimensions.
Everything was mutable: roads could become caves, fireplaces open onto stairwells, floors become ceilings. Buildings–entire cities–sank into the soil, fell from the sky, dwindled and disappeared, or sprang from nowhere. It took a flexible mind to accept such a continuum, and the boy had prided himself on his adapatation to the dream universe (although of course he could still be shocked, right up to his final dream, a dire event whose significance had been betrayed by no grand conclusion or apocalypse.)
And the distinction between organic and inorganic hardly counted there: snowmen cavorted, beds sprouted legs, a boy became rubber, buildings tore themselves up from their foundations and ambled about. Nor did conventional rules of physics apply. Gravity was abolished, inertia coerced, cause-and-effect confounded.
How then could even a Coney Island rollercoaster or Central Park zoo be expected to entrance or delight?
Or, later, women, song, or wine?
The Doctor’s breath smelled of alcohol, and his high hat dislodged a shiver of snow onto the old man’s sheets, where the slush began to melt.
A cold stethoscope coined a minor discomfort against his chest, to match the greater within. “You’d better not be malingering, old man. I was at lunch, you know.”
“No, I think it’s my heart–”
The doctor withdrew in alarm. “Nurse, nurse, can’t you recognize a goddamn myocardial infarction when you see one! Call the ambulance!”
Ambulance? What did they need an ambulance for? (Although truth be told, that was one vehicle he had never yet ridden, asleep or awake.) Just give him the wonderful wand he had wielded in Shantytown, and he’d cure himself–
