Mar 26

Mar 26 The Art Of Effective Dreaming

The Art Of Effective Dreaming - book excerpt

Fay’s Saturday afternoon was made up of two car chases, one romantic idyll, a bag of flour, two litres of milk, sliced cheese on toast on an exotic island in the middle of the Caribbean, a loaf of bread, a lettuce, six tomatoes, a distant dream of flying into a silent night, and a tired argument with the girl who checked out the groceries. This girl was far too awake for her own good and wore a label saying “Hi, I’m…” Fay wanted to dream about that strange lack of name, but no-one should be that alert, so she simply paid for her goods and walked home.

Her slow stroll home included another car chase, not noticing the red lights and almost getting run over, a careful mental exercise where she pictured her dream hero, then at least six scenarios where she could be carried off by him. A block from home she decided that she was a modern woman and modern women don’t get carried off by anyone. He could carry her groceries, though. They were too heavy. They grounded her and she hated them for it.

She left her bags and her dreams on the kitchen floor and grabbed a piece of paper. Fay scribbled madly until she had cleared her mind.

1.

Everyday life is dull. No, that’s wrong. Everyday life is drearily, drably, impossibly dull.

You know, it’s made up of all those flat details realist novelists love to write about, and that sicken me to read. I try not to think about those bits of life. Enough to have to go to the toilet without having to write about it in agonising detail. Sure, I brush my teeth, but why recall it as something important? Why dignify it with reams of prose then claim to be doing something literary? Something boring, I call it. Something drab.

School was dreary, except for English. University was fun… while it lasted. And I spent those years feeling guilty at studying my fantasies. Why didn’t I do something useful like Law? Then I could have been paid a great deal more to be bored than I am being paid now. Even Catch-up Economics wasn’t enough to make up for a missed legal career.

See, life’s not only boring, it’s full of wrong decisions. I was a wrong decision, for a start. My parents should have had a boy. Or I should have been an orphan. I dreamed of that, years ago. One of those times I was sitting in my room, thinking, “Isn’t family supposed to be friendlier?” Too many TV shows. Too many pretend-happy families.

So of course I dreamed that I had been adopted and that someone, some day would discover me and whisk me to a romantic lifestyle. Shared rooms. Secret laughter and jokes. A little world that was my family. Only one thing went wrong. My life’s a mess. And all because, when I was nine, I looked like my brother and sister.

You can’t really blame me for trying to escape my world, can you? Actually, I’ve never worked out why everyone else doesn’t seem to want to. Maybe they dream less. Or maybe my dreams are only noticeable to me.

Maybe, maybe, maybe. I don’t believe in these maybes. I think that I just dream better than other people. What’s the current jargon? More efficiently and effectively.

The art of effective dreaming.

Sometimes my dreams are so life-like they’re a flicker away from reality. The other day I could just about see what’s-his-name giving me the green cloak. I was so astonished I stepped back awkwardly and tumbled. I can’t even remember why the green cloak was so important, or even which what’s-his-name it was. For the flicker of reality, he was shorter than my average hero, and that’s all I could tell. His context wisped away with the dream.

One day a hero will break through to my world, and I’ll be less lonely. Less bored.

One day. One day I’ll be able to throw away my Public Service approved footrest (for Public Servants with short legs who use keyboards a lot) and be with someone. I don’t know what I’ll do when this all happens. I’m not much of a doer. I like watching events, and talking them out. I’m not desperately into fast action and play. Sad, that.

I have a lovely little cove in my fantasy land, with a quiet cave. They are mine. When the world gets too much for me, I stand by the seashore and watch the waves. The cry of the seagulls keeps me company, and the gentle hush of the ocean. Sometimes I paddle, but I never swim. I don’t dare go past the ledge that drops down suddenly, some metres out. The pull is stronger there. The sea is dangerous outside the protected headland of my quiet, golden cove. There are a few bushes and plants and some shells, but I’ve never identified them. I’ve played with pebbles, and even the occasional shell. Mostly I sit there and find my peace.

Sometimes I sit there at night, and watch the stars. A few times I’ve slept in the cave. That’s when I really needed the peace. I use the cave when even going to sleep in the real world is too much.

Little things mean a lot in the cove, and none of them are dreary. They are all charged with huge significance, and it’s not a pretentious type of meaning that needs words and signs and signifiers and people telling you that something you have known all your life means something quite different. Meaning comes straight from the heart, in my little cove. It bypasses the brain entirely.

I don’t even need a brain there, or to be competent at anything. I just am. I don’t even have to like myself. I just have to be.

***

Fay was listening to the speaker.

To be more precise, Fay was attempting to listen to the speaker. The chair was deep and comfortable, and the table was at just the right height to tempt her into crossing her arms and falling straight to sleep. She was doodling to help herself stay awake. She started doodling structures that reflected the economics the guy was droning on about. They were pretty puerile structures, she reflected.

In fact, he was really a very boring speaker. The most interesting thing about him was that his voice rasped and was in dissonance with his face. “In dissonance with his face” she wrote under a doodle, to emphasise the thought. He had a friendly, slightly droopy face that looked a little sly on the odd occasion. Odd, she thought. That’s the word. She’d always thought that only fox-faced men could look sly. You know, the smooth, sleek, reddish-dark men, who are slightly intense and know exactly what they are doing.

Alberc was one of them. Foxy. Not female foxy, but male. Cunning and bright-eyed, and out to get certain results. These days he was a bit faded from his younger red-black self, having grown in age and prosperity. Alberc Bas had the paunch that a mayor must, and owned the big white house next to the market square.

Fay’s doodles stopped reflecting the outer world and started reflecting the inner, as she lost touch with the speaker entirely. She sketched one of the animal figures on the second floor of the house, standing out in white relief from the white plaster stucco that faced the main street. Her hand wobbled, and the graceful figure turned into a gargoyle, so she drew crenellations around it and it slowly became the castle.

This was the first time she had drawn the castle, though it had been a part of her world for a long time. It was spoken of in the village, the doings of great interest to everyone. Whenever Fay wanted a good gossip she invented tales about the castle staff, who were inherited retainers, or related to the villagers, or a mixture of both. Some of them were the younger siblings of farmers. In fact, until the gargoyle appeared by mistake, the building had been a gracious manor house in her mind, almost Edwardian in character. She had used its grounds for tea parties and picnics. Now it turned out to be unashamedly older and more important, though perhaps in need of some money spent on the battlements. A castle. Fortified and slightly crumbling. Like my mind, Fay thought.

The town was more recent than the castle, for it was no walled town, and had no protective covering of its own. This surprised Fay. That made the castle older, perhaps ancient. She looked at her sketch of the west wall in pleased wonder. It was so nice when invention carried you into new knowledge.

She frowned at the gargoyle, her mind taking a sudden turn. It might be that the castle is absolutely dead ancient, she thought, In fact, it probably is, but that doesn’t take away from the sad fact that I cannot draw the stucco falcon and hare on the merchant’s house. Sorry, on the mayor’s house. I need drawing lessons. Betty got them – it isn’t fair. Her mind dwelled on the inequities of childhood.

A rustle distracted her, and she saw that the speaker had finished, and everyone else was shuffling out of the room. Her papers piled randomly, with the gargoyle on the top. Fay left also. She packed her desk up slowly, whispering “clean desk policy” as if they were a mantra to dispel the mood of the working day.

Visiting economists were useful because the day finished much faster. It finished much faster because Fay dreamed all the way through their talks. Even when she had to take notes and report on it, as she would in the morning, she somehow stayed conscious for just enough of it to do so. Her heart was reaching out to her fantasy land, however, and she could not wait to be on her way home.

The way home and to work, and taking a shower, and cooking, and ironing - these were the best times for dreaming. The best time of all, however, was just before sleep, because then, if she was lucky, a real dream would take up where her day-dream left off, and paint her little world in bright, bright colours. Her daydreams, strangely enough, were in black and white, like her sketches. All the colour came from that mystical moment between sleeping and waking. The green cloak came then, and the importance of putting it on.

During the day, it hovered near. It was at night that Fay remembered its significance. But she could only visualise it in her mind’s eye during the day. Deep down inside her was a half-expressed wish - and unexpressed fear - that one day she would remember the imperatives of the night. That her dreams would become reality. One day.

Until then, she kept on dreaming, happy, scatty, and thinking her life a great bore. Sometimes, she even believed she only dreamed to while away the time.

So why did she take the west wall of the castle home with her, and ponder it all through the half hour walk? Why did she sit down after dinner, with fresh charcoal and paper and sketch until her hands were black and her face smudged? And why was the result of the sketch a falcon, poised over a fuzzy and somewhat obscure animal? And why, when she went to bed, did she immediately imagine herself knocking at the door of the merchant’s house and asking to see Belle?