Evald Flisar - My Father's Dreams

There were two wings on our floor, one for men and the other for women. This was another thing that seemed out of place. Surely there should have been some married couples there, and some families with pre-school children. There were none. This was most unusual. When, at breakfast, I mentioned my doubts to an unkempt girl who amused herself by throwing porridge all over the floor, she shrieked:

“This is not a holiday home, you dummy! This is a home for people who have gone bonkers. What’s wrong with you? Haven’t you been to mental gymnastics?”

Mental gymnastics, as it was called, began on the third day after my arrival. I was taken to a special room and asked to lie down on a narrow table. There followed a routine medical examination of the kind I had seen Father do hundreds of times: they took my blood pressure, listened to my heart, measured my lung capacity, shone a small light into my throat and asked me to say “aaahhr”. When satisfied that I wasn’t dying of a mysterious illness, they wedged a thick stick of firm rubber between my teeth. They pressed my hands to my body and strapped me to the table so hard that I could not move. Then they attached small receivers to my temples, as if they were about to play me some music. The man who appeared to be in charge, asked for my name.

“Right, Adam,” he said. “Close your eyes and imagine you’re walking through a pleasant wood.”

Later I tried to record the details of this pleasant walk in the notebook I had been given, and in which I had been asked to write down anything that occurred to me, dreams, passing thoughts, opinions, whatever. I realised that I could not remember a single thing, except for a sudden blow to my head and the burning heat that immediately followed. The rest was blankness.

Mental gymnastics was then repeated every third day, but in the meantime there were other developments. They began to give me pills; every day at nine, one and six o’clock I had to swallow with a full glass of water two pinkish tablets. At first I protested, explaining that I had neither a headache nor any other condition that would warrant medical treatment, but gradually, feeling that the pills made me less anxious, I began to look forward to these daily rituals, even asking for a higher dose, which I was denied. I began to notice that Eve was no longer in my thoughts all the time; the smile on my face was slowly loosing its grip. The manager’s prediction had begun to come true earlier than expected.

Every morning at ten I was called into a little room where a man and a woman asked me questions and recorded my answers in little notebooks. They asked me about school, Mother, Father, Eve. The books I had read. About my interests, and what made me happy. But above all they wanted to know about dreams. When they began. How long they usually lasted. Are there dreams in which I realise I’m dreaming? Do I ever start dreaming on purpose? Can I decide to wake up while dreaming?

The woman wanted to know if any objects or animals appeared in my dreams. I told her about chickens, eggs, rooster, human bone, a snake, a frog-like being on an oak leaf, the dark-haired girl and her pretty blond friend. I mentioned that Father and I entered one particular dream together. I did not say a word about Abortus. Nor did I mention Father’s bonsai. I spoke only about what I felt could be dreams. And about what I knew were dreams. The man wanted to know to what extent dreams about Father and Eve differed from one another. How they started. Where I normally found myself when I woke up. Did I find them exciting? Did I ever wish they would come back while I was awake? Could I live without them?

In a few days they were joined by another man, much older, white-haired, slightly stooped and grumpy. His questions were insolent and I refused to answer most of them. Had I ever seen Mother’s sexual organ? Had I ever caught Mother and Father making love? Do I ever dream about Mother? When did I start masturbating, and how often do I do it? Who do I love more, Mother or Father? Do I hate Mother? Would I prefer Father to live with another woman? Am I afraid of death? How do I imagine my future? Do I think I am more intelligent than my school mates? Had I ever taken any drugs. Do I ever think about suicide? How would I describe life, ugly or beautiful?

And so on, day after day. Some things I told them many times over. Some they could not get out of me. About some I lied. I was not convinced by their assurances that they merely wanted to help me. I felt they were burrowing into me for their own amusement, or because they were obliged to by the rules of their work. They did not really care about what would become of me. For them, I was just a case, and by the look of it a very interesting one, for the number of people who wanted to interview me steadily grew. Some even came from the city in large gleaming automobiles; I could see them parking in front of the building. And when they finished their conversations with me, they did not leave straightaway, they would hang about in front of the building, exchanging views, gesticulating wildly and defending God knows what points of view.

My diary, in which I was supposed to “free-associate”, as they called it, remained almost empty, for mental gymnastics had slowed down my thoughts to such an extent that I could record no more than occasional flashes from “the unconscious”, for example, “I hover above the waterfall of the golden sea of autumn which refuses to tumble me into the depths in which alone my wishes might be fulfilled”, or, “the sky above the mountain resort watches me with the silent sadness of a mariner deprived of his boat”, or, “when I finally sail across the sea of memories, no trace of me will remain anywhere”.

My examiners pounced on these words as if they represented the first glimmer of hope that my problem may one day be solved. What exactly did I mean by the mariner deprived of his boat, and what were the wishes I wanted fulfilled? I was becoming very tired, and increasingly reticent and detached; finally I stopped answering altogether. They begged me, threatened me, promised the earth, but I would not budge; I had decided to give them nothing more. There was nothing more; they had cleared me out.

So it seemed like a waste of time when the manager of the mountain resort, in whom after two weeks I still could not see the head of a psychiatric hospital, announced that he had organised a small conference of specialists who would look at my case from all possible angles. As far as I was concerned their angles had nothing to do with me, but the manager insisted that it was very important to arrive at a diagnosis; especially now that the treatment had been going on for some time. Extra chairs were brought to his office, enough to accommodate eight invited specialists in diseases of the mind, and some students and house doctors. All in all enough people to make me feel like an exotic parrot whose feathers had to be plucked one by one to see if the parrot’s itching was caused by bedbugs or lice.

It was ten in the morning and the sun was shining through the window straight into my face, lighting it up for interrogation. I was perching on an uncomfortable chair next to the rear wall, where I had been placed on display, so that those gathered would not mistake me for one of their own. The manager sat at his desk on my left, with the expectant audience of know-it-alls spread out in front of the window, with their faces in the shade. I could feel their eyes on me, so I closed mine to avoid meeting theirs even by chance; I could always say that I was bothered by the sun. And so, with eyes closed, I spent the greater part of their discussion of my “hypertrophic dreams”. The definition was Father’s, but the gathered experts had obviously failed to come up with a better one.