In Dreams

In Dreams by Chris Green

The girl at the next table in Bean Me Up is the spitting image of the one I was dreaming about not more than an hour ago. The dream comes back to me now. In technicolour. Cinema surround sound. There is no doubt about it. It is her. Everything about her is the same. The long, flowing dark hair, the smoky black eyes, the black blouson dress. She is the one from my dream.

I might have recalled the dream in greater detail first thing, but Sara’s car had broken down and she needed a lift to work. I had the day off, so I had no excuse. Usually a dream fades quickly and only small parts of it are accessible. The rest is gone forever. But not this one. It’s as if it were a recording. It is not just visual. It has sound, taste, touch and smell. It has body and texture. It evokes both fear and wonder.

In the dream, the girl leads me along dark labyrinthine corridors in a crepuscular Gothic house on the outskirts of a half-familiar town. Corridors upon corridors career this way and that in impossible explorations of infinity, staircases ascending and descending like those in an Escher painting. We are looking for someone called Eddie Poe. I do not know who Eddie Poe is or why we are looking for him, but the girl keeps talking about a key. We have to find the key. Has Eddie got the key, or does he know perhaps where the key can be found? The key will unlock a box, she says. A box where the dreams are kept. If we find the key and unlock the box, I will be destined to dream about her forever. She says this as if it is something I should want.

There is a gap now, like a few frames of the film are missing, but I pick up the thread again. Eddie is in one of the subterranean rooms. Eddie is insubstantial, other-worldly, like silence in a vacuum. He casts no shadow, but …….. he has the key. It is like no key I have ever seen. It is a twisted cylinder, a Möbius strip. How this impossible shape opens a box I cannot imagine. I do not remember it opening a box. The scenario jumps instead to a dream where I am dreaming about myself dreaming about her and then to a dream where I am dreaming about a dream where I am dreaming about her, and on and on, like a Droste Mise en Abyme.

In each new episode of the dream, the girl in the black dress leads me through an ever more complex series of cascading corridors. I feel a haunting blend of longing and trepidation. I cannot help but follow. Eventually, we are outside. We are in a city. Tall stone buildings. I can hear the thrum of traffic. But there is no traffic. The location keeps changing. We are by a river. A big brown river. Are we still looking for the box with the dreams in it? I do not get the chance to find out. In the material world, Sara is shaking me by the shoulder to tell me her car won’t start.

The girl at the next table looks across at me. Is it a look of recognition or is it a look of suspicion? I have never been good at reading body language. Sara is always telling me I misread her signals. Have I been staring at the girl through my reverie? I think I detect a smile. I lean over and am about to speak, but like a vision of the night, she vanishes. One moment she is there and the next she isn’t. Her place is occupied by an old woman with a tartan shopping basket and a sad-looking poodle. This is altogether too weird. Did the barista slip something in my macchiato?

I don’t often go to the pub at lunchtime, but I know I will find Ross Cody at The Gordon Bennett. The squat little man with the curly grey hair and the John Lennon glasses will be sat at a table reading a sci-fi thriller, nursing a pint. Ross is a fount of occult knowledge. What he doesn’t know about weird goings on is not worth knowing. He is versed in Shamanism, the Kabbalah. Voodoo, and some other stuff and is bound to know about dreams. Before he sank into his present dipsomania, he worked as a supernatural adviser on films for the cult film-maker, Lars Von Trier.

‘Hello Victor,’ he says. ‘Long time, no see.’

I agree that it has been too long, and over a pint of Broadside, I tell Ross about my experience.

‘One line of thinking is that every face you see while dreaming you have seen in real life at least once,’ Ross says. ‘It is someone who you just don’t recognise. Maybe you passed them nine years ago on a busy street or stood behind them nine hours ago in a cinema queue. Our brains are better at remembering faces than we think.’

‘I think I would have remembered if I had seen this girl before,’ I say. ‘She is not the kind you see every day. She is startlingly striking.’

‘On the other hand, Vic, we might see people in dreams that are not actually people. Our brain can create characters that are totally fictional and things there is no way we could have ever seen. And we have the ability in dreams to do things that in waking life we could never do. We might even see people we will meet in the future.’

‘Which side do you come down on?’

‘It’s hard to say, but I think your unconscious can create people and somehow they become real.’

‘So, I’m not going mad, then.’

‘No. But if I am right, you will almost certainly see her again. In dreams. And probably in waking. You might find that this girl, who might only seem to be a phantom at the moment, gradually comes to life.’

Ross’s guess is right on the money. That night, the mystery girl turns up in my dream world once more. This time, she calls round to my house in the middle of the night and lets herself in. Sara and I are asleep. She puts a chloroform-soaked handkerchief over Sara’s mouth. It meets with initial resistance, but Sara is quickly sedated.

‘Allow me to introduce myself,’ she says, taking the strange key from the previous night out of her bag. ‘I’m Rhonda Queen. Now come on, Victor Malpas. We’ve got work to do.’

I want to protest about what she has done to Sara. Do I want to be destined to dream about someone who is ruthless, I wonder? But it is a dream wonder and has no substance. In the dream world, Rhonda has absolute power over me. I descend once more into the surreal netherworld, ready to do whatever she says we have to do and go wherever we have to go to find the box of dreams that the key unlocks. All other thoughts are gone.

We walk through some ancient ruins, set in a desolate landscape. The night sky is illuminated by a million stars. A full moon hovers. It is blood red. Daliesque rocks lurk in the distance, along with the fuselage of a long-forgotten passenger jet and a sand whale. An all-enveloping silence pervades. We pass through a crumbling stone archway decorated with a Medusa head. On the other side of the arch, a pageant of small black snakes slithers across a chessboard patio. Snakes from the Medusa’s head? The board is illuminated now. The top left-hand square is green instead of black. Suddenly I can hear music. I look around me to see that Rhonda is playing a clarinet. Or is it an oboe? A dwarf dressed as Robin Hood appears from out of nowhere and hands me a mandolin, and I join in the refrain.

‘There are unearthly delights to be found inside the box of dreams,’ Rhonda says, when we have finished the tune. ‘We will find it soon. Then you will be my amante notturno.’

At breakfast, Sara seems a little dazed. She looks as if she hasn’t had a good night, so I do not mention my dream, and with her Fiat fixed, she leaves the house before me. It is probably one of the days she opens the salon early for a special customer. For a brief second, I entertain the thought that the special customer might be Rhonda.

I dismiss the idea, but I remain agitated. Details of my dream keep coming back to me. The half-recognised tune we were playing was that Doors’ track. The one with the line faces come out of the rain. The Robin Hood dwarf was really freaky. And the mandolin. I didn’t know I could play the mandolin, but my dream persona seemed to know exactly where to put my fingers. Ross said in dreams one can do things that in waking life you have never been able to do. And see people you have never seen. But the dwarf had said, if you’re not a fish, how can you tell if a fish is happy? What did he mean? And the sand whale. It was a whale, and it was in the sand. Yet I had touched it. It was sticky, wet, slimy to the touch, like an eel just out of the water. How can a dream be so bizarre but appear so real? What does it all mean? What is it that is happening? Why is it happening? None of it makes sense. And why would the dream vamp be interested in the devotion of a middle-aged married man? What do I have to offer? What would be in it for her, besides amusement? What is in it for me apart from the loss of free will?

I am so distracted I almost prang the Prius when I pull out in front of a bus at the Scott McKenzie roundabout. At work, I cannot concentrate. I send emails without messages and accidentally delete my inbox. Then there she is. The girl from my dreams. Over by the photocopier. In a charcoal skirt and white blouse. The same sweeping hair and smouldering obsidian eyes. Even the same shoes. She is the one. No doubt about it. I am dumbstruck. How can this be? What is she doing here at my workplace?

Nikki Jackson from Accounts comes along and sees I am gaping at the girl.

‘That’s our new marketing specialist, Rhonda,’ she says. ‘I see she’s making quite an impression on you, Mr Malpas. Let me introduce you.’

‘Hi, Rhonda. This is Victor Malpas from our legal department. Vic, this is Rhonda Queen.’

‘Pleased to meet you, Victor Malpas,’ Rhonda says, looking me right in the eye. ‘I expect I shall be seeing a lot more of you.’

When I come to, I am unable to explain to Nikki why I fainted.

‘It could have been something I ate,’ I say. ‘We had eel for dinner last night. I’m not used to eel, so I’m not sure how it should taste but I did think it tasted strange.’

No one remembers your name, when you’re strange starts to run through my head. The Doors’ song from the night before. On the mandolin. With the girl. With Rhonda.

‘Something is puzzling me,’ Nikki says later. ‘Rhonda says that she knows you. In fact, she says she has known you for a long time. She thought it strange you did not recognise her.’

I pretend to take a call on my mobile.

‘Yes, I know,’ I say, responding to something the imaginary caller is telling me.

And ‘What did you think about that?’

Suddenly, to my amazement and horror, Rhonda’s voice comes on the line. ‘Hello Victor,’ she says. ‘How have you been since our ……. meeting?’

All the blood drains from my face. Nothing could have prepared me for this. Now she is talking to me on my phone. All the encounters with her so far have been what I would think of as impossible, out of the realm of everyday life, but this cranks up the level of impossibility a notch.

‘See you later,’ Rhonda says. ‘I have a feeling we may find the box tonight.’

Sara wonders why I am home early. I tell her the network was down at work. Several times during the evening, she asks if everything is OK. The TV is on in the background with the sound turned down.

‘In Dreams is starting in a moment,’ Sara says. ‘And it’s the final episode. Shall I turn the volume up?……. Is something wrong?’

‘I’m just tired,’ I say. ‘I don’t think I slept well last night.’

‘We could have an early night instead, and watch it another time,’ she says, snuggling up to me.

‘There is something wrong, isn’t there?’ she says when I don’t respond to her overtures in bed. ‘I don’t know why I buy underwear from the Dora Larsen catalogue if you are not going to be interested when I wear it.’

With this, she turns over. I put off going to sleep as long as I can, but tiredness overtakes me and eventually I drift off. Rhonda, of course, is waiting.

‘The reason we haven’t been able to find the box until now,’ she says, ‘is because it’s invisible.’

‘That does make it difficult,’ I say.

‘Not only is it invisible, but it only exists, given certain very specific conditions. Atmospheric conditions, phases of the moon, planetary alignments and all that. But the good news is that I believe we have these conditions tonight.’

Again, I feel a confusing mix of apprehension and arousal, aware that as she puts me under her spell once more, apprehension is going to lose out. Her sweet sorcery breaks down my defences.

It is hard to describe how you see an object that is invisible, but as Rhonda has pointed out, under particular circumstances, it can be done. If you are thinking invisibility cloak, you are barking up the wrong tree. You cannot expect to understand matters like invisible boxes in the realm of night from a purely scientific viewpoint. Suffice to say the box is colossal, and to my amazement, Rhonda’s Möbius strip key fits the lock perfectly.

Once the box is opened, things cannot be the same. Change is inevitable. A thousand and one dreams escaping from an invisible box that has been locked for years is a sight for the senses. All eleven of the senses. It is like the moment of creation. Matter, antimatter and cosmological turbulence.

I feel a nudge in my back, and I awake with a jolt. Usually, a dream fades quickly and only small parts of it are accessible. The rest is gone forever. But this one is different. It is no longer a dream. I turn over to find the woman on the pillow lying next to me looks exactly like my dream date. Everything matches. The same long flowing dark hair and smoky black eyes right down to ……… It is Rhonda, the girl of my dreams. In the flesh. In the here and now.

‘No matter how unlikely the proposition,’ she says, ‘dreams can come true. Reality is constantly in flux. Forever changes. Prepare yourself for strange days ahead.’

But, the unanswered questions, I want to protest. What? ……. How? ……… Why? ……… And, where is Sara? Has Rhonda simply taken the place of Sara?

Rhonda reads my thoughts. ‘You will get answers to your questions, but not until you are ready for them. In the meantime …….’

Later, while Rhonda is out, I try to do some investigation of my own, but find I am locked out of my phone and my laptop. My login details simply do not exist. I no longer know what is real. All my boundaries have become blurred. Reason is out the window. My life has become a Chinese puzzle. A gallimaufry of interlocking riddles. Phantasmagoric, illusory, scary, seductive, surreal, hypnotic, disturbing. These contradictory qualities are all in the mix. But is this in any way relevant? Isn’t it more a question of whether we are talking dream or reality? Does everything have to be one or the other, or without contradiction, could something perhaps be both dream and reality? Over a cup of herbal tea on the bench at the bottom of the garden, I attempt to gather my thoughts. But new wisdom does not happen this way. You merely regurgitate thoughts you’ve already had and end up getting nowhere. Revelations tend to arrive unopened when you least expect them. Maybe there are no answers to your question.

When I return to the house, the light on the answering machine is flashing.

‘This is Crystal Swift from Caprice,’ the message says. ‘We can arrange an appointment for Victor’s procedure as early as next week, Rhonda. Could you call me back to discuss dates? Meanwhile, I will try you on your mobile.’

Just a minute. Isn’t this the dream I had where Nikki Jackson slips something in my macchiato in Bean Me Up and takes me along to ……….

Copyright © Chris Green, 2024: All rights reserved