Mark Leyner - Gone with the Mind

Those sounds we hear at regular intervals in our dreams (that some have likened to the sounds of the Ōtsuzumi drum in Noh) are actually the black-box pings of our own errant minds.

Dreams are subject to all the wanton dissimulations of the mischievous psyche, which produce distinct levels of latent and manifest content. I have a recurring dream about my childhood hero, Mickey Mantle. I’m in Yankee Stadium, sitting in a box seat at dugout level right near home plate, and Mantle comes up at bat, and he launches the first pitch deep into the center-field bleachers, and he turns, and, in slow motion and in that slowed-down distorted voice, he beckons to me to come join him in his home-run trot around the bases. So I immediately start trying to clamber out of the box, and it’s one of those frustrating sequences in a dream where, for some inexplicable reason, you can’t seem to get your body to do the simple thing you’re trying to get it to do, and it takes what seems like innumerable attempts and an impossibly protracted period of time to pull myself over that railing, and then when I do finally succeed in climbing out onto the field, my wallet must fall out of the back pocket of my pants, because I feel for it later in the dream and it’s not there. So, I’m maybe ten feet behind Mantle and I’m trotting behind him to first base, and he looks back at me, and he seems really crazy, he has this floridly psychotic look on his face, and then he doesn’t make the turn to second, he just keeps going, he just continues along the right-field foul line, and soon we’re out of the stadium entirely, and we’re running and we’re running, and he’s getting further and further ahead of me, until I can’t see him anymore, but I’m still following that same vector, and now I’m going through all these shifting landscapes — city, country, mountains, jungle, desert. And I realize a funny thing — every couple of minutes, I’m passing the exact same things: a bus stop, a strip mall, a factory, a farm stand, the ruins of the same Mayan temple, the same couple of Bedouins at an oasis, the same sad clowns, the same group of tantric sadhus with their three-pronged trident staffs, marigolds, and red hibiscus flowers, the same gas-station minimart with its baleful Indian chief…then the whole sequence all over again. It’s like the looping, wraparound backgrounds they used to use in early animation and racing video games. And I realize— as I’m dreaming — that the production values of the dream totally suck, that obviously I can only afford a handful of shitty locations and have to keep using them over and over and over again. So not only is my chagrin about the repeating locations the most phantasmagorical part of the dream — because realistically in a dream one can obviously “afford” any location — it is also the part of the dream most laden with meaning for me, depicting, as it does, the shame I feel about my financial fecklessness and perennial insolvency.

The Imaginary Intern was vehemently opposed to the inclusion of dreams in the autobiography. He was completely, intransigently hard-line about this. We were always talking about the need to renounce counterrevolutionary forms, and the Imaginary Intern maintained, and he was unswerving about this to the very day he disappeared, withdrew, quit, whatever you want to call it…he maintained — he was adamant about this — that expository dreams were counterrevolutionary, that they comprise the same form as anecdotes and vignettes, which we both despised as “literary” and which we were both violently opposed to including in the autobiography. We had discovered during the, uh…during the, the gestation of the autobiography, that it was the segues and the interstices, the oblique and incidental details, all the throwaway, offhand remarks and obiter dicta that invariably ended up being the most meaningful, the most weirdly hyper-cathected stuff — just our favorite stuff — in the whole book. We pledged to abide by the injunction “Tell, don’t show,” and its corollary “Diagnose, don’t tell.” “We are not writers,” he’d say. “We are clinicians.” Dreams are simply a means of smuggling literary modes and motifs into the autobiography. Dreams (i.e., narrative dreams) “wave the red banner to oppose the red banner,” meaning that they have a specious allure, they seem “all trippy and schizzed out,” but they utilize counterrevolutionary expository elements. Literary content, he’d say, is “a nodular accumulation of yellowish, cheesy sebaceous material that can harden into large plaques.”

The Imaginary Intern claimed to only have nonexpository dreams (or “dremes,” as he called them). He said — and again, his diction tended to be very juvenile and somewhat ghetto, so I’m paraphrasing here — he said that his dreams were a sort of kinesthesia of mathematical torsions and arabesques and fractals, and could never be represented in language, that they eluded and exceeded rational transmission, that they were pure quivering, contingent thought in its barest provisionality…an evanescing froth that represented the abolition of meaning in favor of form.

The whole question of whether or how a dreamt-up entity dreams is a fascinating one that I actually pursued with him at great length…and, uh…I was thinking this is something you guys might want to possibly explore further with me in the Q and A later… (The “guys” remain emphatically uninterested.)

There was definitely, I have to admit, an anti-Semitic strain to some of the Imaginary Intern’s ideas about this, to some of his beliefs. He’d occasionally use the word Jewification. He’d talk about the Jewification of dreams through the importing, the transplantation of literary motifs, etc. This would usually happen when we were both high on oxycodone…although I know that’s no excuse. (MARK glances guiltily at his MOM, then back at the fast-food workers.)

Did either of you guys happen see that movie Lake Little Lake that was on TV…I think it was Saturday…on Lifetime…pretty sure it was Lifetime…this past Saturday night… Lake Little Lake? Did you guys see that?…No?…

I’ve never seen a movie that makes being chemically castrated seem so appealing.

Neither of you guys saw that…last Saturday…no? (MARK sighs, flagging somewhat, seeming, for the first time, a little discouraged.)

I’m trying, Mom…I really am. (MARK’S MOM mouths the words I know you are.)

Sometimes when we were drinking, the Imaginary Intern would mumble ominous things to me…his back turned…a silhouette…But he was crying this one time.

“What’s the matter?” I asked him.

“I’m worried about you,” he said. “You have a powerful death drive — it’s a nostalgia for a lost harmony, a desire to return to a pre-Oedipal fusion with your mother’s breast. Have you been having any fantasies of castration and self-destruction lately…fantasies that you’re finding it harder and harder not to act upon?”

“Why? Would that be bad?”

“It’s completely normal. Relax.”

“A child’s been abandoned on a merry-go-round in the middle of the night in a desolate, crepuscular de Chirico — like landscape. The seats on the merry-go-round are not the usual horses, they’re hagfish, pygmy marmosets, Madagascar sucker-footed bats, that sort of thing. There are no other human beings anywhere, with the exception of a woman (the child’s mother, we’ll soon learn) who recedes in the distance, arm in arm with a disreputable-looking guy in a white wifebeater and greasy blue overalls, a cigarette lodged above one ear. Suddenly two glowing dots…these two tiny punctiform gleams appear in the distant black sky — the rabid eyes of some sort of winged reptile which grow larger and larger as the creature gets closer and closer, and the calliope music grows louder and more dissonant and more demented. I can see now, of course, that this terrified child is me, because he’s tiny, he has wispy blond bangs, and he’s dressed in this ridiculous multicolor brocade Nehru jacket. Suddenly the creature is upon the child, he’s torn him open with one savage slash of his glinting talon, and he’s yanking loops of intestine from the child’s abdomen as he screams in agony for his mother, who, as we hear the Velvet Underground crooning ‘She’s a femme fatale’ in the background, disappears into the horizon with her louche drifter boyfriend.”