Richard Matheson: What Dreams May Come

The conflict seemed to drain me suddenly. Once more, my body felt like stone. Again? I thought.

Never mind. I thrust it from my mind. I lay down on my side on the bed and looked at Ann. It was unnerving to lie beside her, face to face, her staring through me like a window. Close your eyes, I thought. I did. Escape through sleep, I told myself. The evidence isn’t in by any means. This could still be a dream. But God, dear God in heaven, if it was, I hated everything about it. Please , I begged whatever powers might attend me. Release me from this black, unending nightmare .

HOVERING, SUSPENDED, RISING INCHES, THEN DESCENDING IN A silent, engulfing void. Was this the feeling of prebirth; floating in liquid gloom?

No, there’d be no sound of crying in the womb. No sense of grief oppressing me. I murmured in my sleep, wanting to rest, needing to rest, but wanting, too, to wake for Ann’s sake. “Honey, it’s all right .” I must have spoken those words a hundred times before waking.

My eyes dragged open, the lids feeling weighted.

She was lying by my side, asleep. I sighed and smiled at her with love. The dream had ended, we were together again. I gazed at her face, sweetly childlike in repose. A tired child, a child who’d wept herself to sleep. My precious Ann. I reached out to touch her face, my hand like iron.

My fingers disappeared inside her head.

She woke up with a start, her gaze alarmed. “Chris?” she said. Again, that momentary leap of hope. Shattered when it quickly grew apparent that she wasn’t looking at me but through me. Tears began to well in her eyes. She drew up her legs and clutched her pillow tightly in her arms, pressing her face against it, body shaking with sobs.

“Oh, God, no sweetheart, please don’t cry.” I was crying too. I would have given up my soul if only she’d been able to see me for a minute, hear my voice, receive my comfort and my love.

I knew she couldn’t though. And knew, as well, the nightmare hadn’t ended. I turned from her and closed my eyes, desperate to escape in sleep again, let the darkness pull me far from her. Her weeping tore my heart. Please take me away from this , I pleaded. If I can’t comfort her, take me away!

I felt my mind begin a downward slide, descending into blackness.

Now it was a dream. It had to be. My life was unreeling before me, a succession of living pictures. Something about it struck me. Hadn’t I experienced this before, more briefly, more confusingly?

This was not confusing in the least. I might have been a viewer in an auditorium, watching a film entitled My Life , every episode from start to finish. No, amend that. Finish to start; the film began with the collision- was it real then-and evolved back toward my birth, each detail magnified.

I won’t go into all those details, Robert. It’s not the story I want to tell-it would take too long. Each man’s life is a tome of episodes. Consider all the moments of your life enumerated one by one with full description. A twenty-volume encyclopedia of events; at the very least.

Let me discuss it in brief then, this display of scenes. It was more than a “flash before my eyes.” I was more than just a viewer; that became apparent very soon. I relived each moment with acute perception, experiencing and understanding simultaneously. The phenomenon was vivid, Robert, each emotion infinitely multiplied by level upon level of awareness.

The essence of it all-this is the important part-was the knowledge that my thoughts had been real. Not just the things I said and did. What went on in my mind as well, positive or negative .

Each memory was brought to life before me and within me. I could not avoid them. Neither could I rationalize, explain away. I could only re-experience with total cognizance, unprotected by pretense. Self-delusion was impossible, truth exposed in blinding light. Nothing as I thought it had been. Nothing as I hoped it had been. Only as it had been.

Failures plagued me. Things I had omitted or ignored, neglected. What I should have given and hadn’t-to my friends, my relatives, to Mom and Dad, to you and Eleanor, my children, mostly Ann. I felt the biting pang of every unfulfillment. Not only personal but in my work as well-my failures as a writer. The host of scripts I’d written which did no one any good and, many, harm. I could condone them once. Now, in this stark unmasking of my life, condoning was impossible, self-justifying was impossible. An infinitude of lacks reduced to one fundamental challenge: What I might have done and how irrevocably I fell short of almost every mark .

Not that it was unjust; not that the scales were forced out of balance. Where there had been good, it showed as clearly. Kindnesses, accomplishments; all those were present too.

The trouble was I couldn’t get through it. Like the tug of a building rope pulled from a distance, I was drawn from observation by Ann’s sorrow. Honey, let me see . I think I spoke those words, I may have only thought them.

I became aware of lying by her side again, my eyelids heavy as I tried to raise them. The sounds she made in sleep were like a knife blade turning in my heart. Please, I thought I have to see, to know; evaluate. The word seemed vital to me suddenly. Evaluate .

I drifted down again; to the isolation of my visions. I had left the theatre momentarily; the picture on the screen had frozen. Now it started up again, absorbing me. I was inside it once again, reliving days long gone.

Now I saw how much time I had spent in gratifying sense; again, I will not give you details. Not only did I re-discover every sense experience of my life, I had to live each unfulfilled desire as well- as though they’d been fulfilled . I saw that what transpires in the mind is just as real as any flesh and blood occurrence. What had only been imagination in life now became tangible, each fantasy a full reality. I live them all-while, at the same time, standing to the side, a witness to their, often, intimate squalor. A witness cursed with total objectivity.

Still always the balance, Robert; I emphasize the balance. The scales of justice: darkness paralleled by light, cruelty by compassion, lust by love. And always, unremittingly, that inmost summons: What have you done with your life ?

An added mercy was the knowledge that this deep, internal review was witnessed only by myself. It was a private reenactment, a judgment rendered by my own conscience. Moreover, I felt sure that somehow, every act and thought relived was being printed on my consciousness indelibly for future reference. Why this was so, I had no notion. I only knew it was.

Then something strange began to happen. I was in a cottage somewhere, looking at an old man lying on a bed. Two people sat nearby, a white-haired woman and a middle-aged man. Their dress was foreign to me and the woman’s accent sounded strange as she spoke to say, “I think he’s gone.”

“Chris!”

Ann’s tortured crying of my name ripped me from sleep. I looked around to find myself in swirling fog, lying on the ground. Standing slowly, every muscle aching, I tried to walk but couldn’t. I was on the bottom of a murky lake whose currents swelled against me.

Inanely, I felt hungry. No, that’s not the proper word. In need of sustenance. No, more than that. In need of something to add to myself, to help me re-assemble. That was it. I was incomplete; part of me was gone. I tried to think but found it beyond my capacity. Thoughts trickled in my brain like glue. Let go, was all I could think. Let go .