NIGHTMARES AND BUGBEARS
It begins with a spiral staircase –
impossibly tight,
impossibly narrow.
Even light could barely pass through.
Nevertheless Phoebe slipped
between the steps
and hung over an abyss.
She tried to call out,
but could not make a sound.
Then she was outdoors.
Dominating the landscape
was a snow-covered graveyard,
like a painting by Friedrich
but even more Gothic,
with towering headstones
all crowded together –
silent and reproving.
She found herself talking to a handsome man.
They talked for hours.
But she blinked and he was gone.
Frantically she searched for him,
but to no avail.
There was a cave.
Inside the cave it was dark and cool.
The mouth of the cave was not visible.
There must have been an entrance,
an exit,
but there was no light to point the way out.
Phoebe could not see any part of the bear
except her eyes
which glowed softly in the blackness of the cave.
Her voice was tender.
Her words were honeyed words.
She cooed them
like a mother soothing a frightened child.
“Do not be afraid.”
A single claw gleamed in the light
cast by her glowing eyes.
Razor sharp,
it glistened and sparkled like a star in the night sky.
But Phoebe was afraid,
deeply afraid.
She tried to stall.
The bear was patient.
She wanted Phoebe to understand.
Most of all, she wanted her to bare her neck,
and not be afraid.
The sky was clear and blue
as she climbed the hill,
Zephyr’s kiss upon her cheek.
At the top she reclined on the grass
only to discover a decaying corpse
lying beside her.
An elderly woman in a wheelchair
was rocking a baby doll in her arms.
She was cuddling the doll
as if it were a real child.
Phoebe found the scene quite disturbing,
so she told herself
that the woman was merely senile.
Then the doll was a baby.
At first,
Phoebe thought the baby’s head was too large
for its body,
but upon further examination she concluded
that the head and body were in proportion.
What was so strange about the baby
was that it was much too large.
It was grotesquely large.
Phoebe discovered a tiny furry animal.
She tried to protect it in her cupped hands.
Despite her care, the creature was soon missing.
She searched for it
all the while reproaching herself for its loss.
She was in a labyrinthine mansion.
It was her home,
but she couldn’t find her room.
It was not where she remembered it to be.
Much futile searching followed.
It was very frustrating.
She desperately wanted to get to her room.
Many people were scattered
here and there
throughout the house,
but no one could help.
She wandered through rooms
that led to other rooms,
each room offering two
or three
or four doors,
each door leading to yet another room,
leading her deeper and deeper into the house.
Phoebe cradled the young man’s head in her lap.
A golden-haired child stood nearby.
“Do not be disillusioned,”
she said with tender wisdom,
but Phoebe did not know whether the child
had addressed her
or the young man.
Phoebe used to dream about the young man a lot.
As she got older it became rare.
But whenever it happened,
the old pain came rushing back.
She could hear singing,
but she was too far away to make out the words.
There was a great bonfire on the beach
and around this people were dancing,
dancing in the moonlight
with the waves crashing on the shore
and the stars glittering overhead.
In their bare feet they danced.
It was a bear dance.
Two dancers in the circle unclasped their hands
inviting her to join them.
Phoebe was listening to music on headphones.
It was making her sleepy.
A stranger sat down beside her. He smiled.
She reached out and touched his cheek,
but his flesh was hard and smooth and artificial.
She was frightened.
“What is he?” she wondered. “He isn’t real.”
His cheek felt like the cheek of a mannequin,
not a man.
Phoebe tried not to betray the fact
that she had discovered his secret:
He was a fake!
Then she thought his cheek was more
like that of a corpse than a mannequin.
Her fear increased.
On the outside, he looked alive,
but on the inside, he was dead.
She knew she had to run,
but at first,
fear rooted her to the spot.
Nevertheless she knew she had to run –
and run she did,
the moment he averted his eyes.
Phoebe was on the subway,
headed uptown on the local,
and there he was.
He was quite unmistakable.
Though the car was crowded with passengers,
no one else seemed to notice him.
She wondered at this,
for his appearance was alarming.
Did no one see those leering eyes,
those shaggy limbs,
those horns and hooves?
And he smelled like a whole flock of goats!
Why was she alone aware of his presence?
Then it struck her.
It struck her right in the chest
and she nearly lost her balance.
Pan flashed a malicious grin her way.
As the palpitations in her chest increased,
her breathing became labored
and she began to tremble.
Then the car became insufferably hot.
A thick haze formed in the stifling air,
threatening to engulf her.
She became feverish and flush.
She fought to maintain consciousness
as waves of heat washed over her.
Each wave crested higher,
crashed harder,
and exerted its crushing pressure
against her forehead
until her senses were distorted.
Everything went out of focus.
The sound of the lurching train was muffled.
Its rattle and clang seemed to reach her ears
from under water.
When at long last the train came to a stop
and the doors swung wide
she made her escape.
She fled out of the car,
up the stairs,
and into the street,
gulping the cool night air
like a half-drowned creature.
Pan’s attack was complete.
He glowered and gloated with goatish ill will.
Since that night
Phoebe often felt his presence
in crowds and among strangers.
Phoebe was in a place of wild natural beauty.
She saw a large turtle with a badly damaged shell
and many animals and insects
which seemed to be fleeing.
She climbed down into a small waterfall.
The handsome man appeared
and she climbed back up.
She thought he was impressed by her agility.
He embraced her.
It was very pleasant.
Then she dreamed that she woke up in the morning
and he was beside her.
They smoked in bed
and then she went to the kitchen
to make coffee.
It was the sultriest summer.
Phoebe’s dream melted over the sides of her bed
like one of Dali’s clocks.
It dripped and spread wantonly
in pools of bizarre subconscious imagery.
Meanwhile her slumbering body grew damp
in the late morning humidity.
Her dream was hot and soft.
It was a torrid dream,
a voluptuous dream.
She writhed in the drowsy no man’s land
that lies between sleep and waking,
lost in the throes of her feverish dream.
She stood on a balcony,
high above the city streets.
A dangerous man was there.
He clasped her in his arms
and held her over the rail.
It was a precarious position.
Phoebe could see the city lights
all around her
like stars.
She felt secure in his arms,
even as she was in
danger of
falling.
She was on a ship.
The view was breathtaking –
bright blue sky,
lush forest,
snow-capped mountains –
It was sublime.
Phoebe strolled along a road beside a busy parkway.
The sound of the traffic was muffled by the trees.
The evening was clear and cool.
And the moon was huge,
unnaturally huge.
It filled half the sky.
Bathed in the moonlight of that magnificent moon,
Phoebe felt a rare moment of peace.
She entered a luxurious apartment building.
The palatial lobby featured twin staircases
that sides.
wound on both
down story
from second
the
Was this her home?
She looked for a sign
by the elevators and mailboxes.
She walked up the stairs and down.
It was vaguely familiar –
like something that just hasn’t happened yet,
or something that might have happened,
but didn’t.
It was an old-fashioned date.
Phoebe wore a frilly white dress.
The handsome man took her to a theater.
Yet she could not recall anything
before that moment.
Within the dream she wondered why
she had no recollection.
The apartment was on the sixth floor.
It was a studio –
a single large room with a high ceiling.
What struck Phoebe as peculiar was that the wall –
the one that communicated
with the outside world –
was constructed entirely of red bricks and,
more peculiar still,
there was a huge rent in the wall.
Her first thought was of the inconvenience
such damage would pose.
There would be no protection
from the cold, rain and snow.
As she was contemplating the absurdity of living
under such conditions,
she noticed the only window.
It was located high on the wall
several feet above her head.
She thought that it was an impractical location
for a window.
While it would admit light into the room,
it would not permit the room’s occupant
to look outside,
at least not without climbing
on top of a piece of furniture.
However,
it was the rent in the wall that intrigued her.
It rather suddenly struck her as important
that the rent
had clearly been made from the inside.
She could tell by the way the bricks jutted outward
rather than inward
as they would have done
if the wall had been breached from the outside.
She felt that she was quite clever
to have deduced this.
Phoebe was at the Guggenheim
waiting for an event to begin.
She stood at the top of the spiral ramp
and looked down at the rotunda
where strange and fantastic animals
were wandering amongst the guests.
An enormous beast then appeared
and headed straight for her,
snapping its jaws just inches away.
She was quite annoyed that,
with all the people there,
it decided to eat her.
She tried to tell herself not to worry
because it was only a dream,
but then she reasoned that it would still hurt,
so she should probably wake up.
The next thing she knew she was awake in her bed.
Yet it dawned on her that she wasn’t really awake.
She was just dreaming that she was awake.
She also knew it was time to really wake up.
So she did.
Phoebe had the feeling
that nothing she had ever experienced was real,
that what she called her life was just a dream.
This was not a thought.
It was a just a feeling.
She was reminded of a parable:
Chuang Tzu dreamed he was a butterfly.
When he woke up he didn’t know
if he was a man
who had dreamed he was a butterfly,
or a butterfly
who was dreaming he was a man.
Sometimes Phoebe felt like
she would wake up in some other life
and everything she thought was her life
would turn out to have been a dream.
Phoebe became cool,
then cold,
until finally she was frozen
and numb.
Reason,
meanwhile,
was indifferent as a rock.
“No one is who he appears to be – not even me.”
Her dreams were more solid than reality.
A layer of insulation
dropped down around her.
And she dreamed too much.
She dreamed so heavily that she never
felt rested in the morning.
The fog was so thick
that Phoebe kept forgetting where she was.
It would have been so easy to get lost
except that people were forever
materializing out of the fog
and reminding her
of where she was
and why she was there.
They were quite insistent about it.
Phoebe watched their lips move,
but she couldn’t hear much through the fog.
It wasn’t a bad fog,
not at all.
In fact, it was soft and comforting.
She would have liked to let it
envelop her completely,
but the people who came out of the fog liked
pestering her with their frantic mute harangues.
If only they would have left her alone –
alone with the soft sinister fog –
if only they would have given her
a moment’s respite,
she would have allowed the fog
to wrap itself around her.
Phoebe would have gone deeper into the fog.
She would have let the fog have her,
but the people who were the enemies of the fog –
and of Phoebe –
wouldn’t let her go.
Phoebe had just given birth to a baby
and she wanted to see it,
but no one would tell her where it was.
She was in a strange house and she sensed
that the birth attendants had taken the child.
Phoebe searched through the house.
She had a son and she needed to find him.
When she awoke,
she was so confused that for a few seconds
she believed it was all true.
Her heart was racing.
It took a long time for her to go back to sleep.
If only Phoebe didn’t yearn to communicate,
she could slip back into the cave.
The shadows were seductive.
She would start to get drowsy
and they would draw her in.
In Phoebe’s dream
she was driving her VW bus
and pulled into a service station.
She was on a trip,
or at least
she thought she was.
She stood on the threshold of a small room.
Inside – people were playing on drums.
The scene was vaguely familiar,
as if it had happened before.
After the cosmic laughter came
the ethereal lightness –
a bit of a lag between body and soul.
Phoebe swayed to the music.
The space around her was palpable –
thick,
but light as foam.
She delighted in its gentle resistance.
In one eternal moment she knew
the joy of physical existence,
the miracle of matter in motion.
Nine days later Phoebe had a lucid dream.
She was in an unfamiliar house.
To leave the house,
she had to squeeze herself through rooms
so filled with furniture
that she could barely fit
between the furniture and the wall.
It was a railroad-style flat.
Once outside she took a walk in the dawn hours.
“This could all just be a dream,”
she said to herself,
without for a moment thinking
it might actually be a dream.
It was a purely academic comment,
a philosophical exercise
in Cartesian doubt.
Nevertheless she decided to check,
to prove to herself that she wasn’t dreaming
by reviewing the previous moments in her head
with the intention of saying to herself:
“There, you see, all is as it should be.
There is nothing out of the ordinary.”
But when she reflected on the previous moments
she realized
they were the bizarre experiences
of the dreamworld.
She instantly became aware
that she was in a dream.
This realization pleased her.
She was content to dwell in the dreamworld.
She felt at home there.
She felt like herself there.
Then there was a little boy with her.
They started talking
and Phoebe woke up.
The library was a quaint building
surrounded by trees
at the end of a narrow curved sidewalk.
Phoebe liked to walk there
on sunny days
and rainy days alike.
It was quiet and cozy inside.
The librarian always smiled
a grandmotherly smile.
There were tables and chairs
and a card catalog made of wood.
There were comfortable armchairs
with faded upholstery.
And there were stacks of books in the back.
Amongst these stacks Phoebe sat
cross-legged
on the floor.
But it was no ordinary book
she took from the stacks this day.
Phoebe always knew that books were magical,
but she never really took it all that seriously.
After all, books were only magical in books,
not in real life.
Then she discovered she was wrong.
Amongst the stacks of battered cloth
and paperback books
one volume made its presence known.
It looked ancient,
yet it was clearly new.
When Phoebe opened it,
she recognized the frontispiece
though she had never seen it before.
The words were in an obscure language
she had also never seen before,
yet she knew their meaning.
It was as if a light had been turned on.
She was drawn back in time
thousands of years
and became a different person.
“Who am I?”
Her identity wavered
and she slammed the book closed.
She was sitting on the floor,
the book in her lap.
It was gone. She had lost it.
She quickly reopened the book,
but alas,
it was just an old book of fairy tales.
The tiny room was at the top of a tower
that didn’t really exist.
Phoebe had apparently climbed
the dark stone stairwell that led to it.
Though no such stairs existed either.
Illuminated by oil lamps and moonlight,
the room was comforting and eerie.
Massive tomes,
ancient and coated in dust,
filled the bookcases that lined the walls.
More old books were stacked and scattered
on antique carved tables
and layers of Turkish carpets.
It was a magical room,
a room full of secret lore,
and it had allowed Phoebe to find it.
Phoebe dropped her keys.
When she crouched down in the street
to pick them up,
the dangerous man brushed past her.
She became frightened.
Then she reassured herself that it was a dream
and dream events could not harm her.
It was evening.
On a large patio
overlooking a backyard
was a festive family gathering –
food, laughter, conversation.
Phoebe was alone at the end of the patio
looking at the night sky.
It should have been dark,
but instead the sky was vibrant
with pink
and violet
and every shade in between,
each dazzling shade
coming into being
and passing away –
the colors
blending,
eddying and pooling
like liquid,
like pink magma,
like molten amethyst.
As she marveled
at the beauty
of the colors,
the sky
became vast,
cosmically vast,
the colors more brilliant
than any she had seen
while awake.
Phoebe was at a train station.
As she moved through the crowd
an old woman clung to her,
impeding her movement.
Phoebe told her to let go,
but the old woman said
she needed to use Phoebe
to move through the crowd.
Phoebe was annoyed.
“I need to be able to move freely!”
The woman was not inclined to let go,
so Phoebe put her hand on her throat.
She was petite and her neck was so narrow
that Phoebe’s own small hand
nearly wrapped around it.
She applied a little pressure,
just to let her know she meant it.
The old woman relaxed her hold somewhat,
but not completely.
Next Phoebe took hold of her slender wrist.
It was tiny.
She turned it slightly to the side
so the old woman would know
she could break it easily.
Finally the woman relinquished her hold.
Phoebe didn’t think much of this episode.
The old woman was so easily dislodged
that there was no cause for concern.
Phoebe had no fear of her, no malice toward her.
She would hurt the old woman if she had to,
but she wouldn’t hurt her any more
than was needed to free herself.
Phoebe had power
and she exercised it without emotion.
She did not exult in this power.
She just accepted it as natural.
Phoebe resumed moving about the platform.
It was extremely crowded.
A vendor was set up in the middle of the platform.
At first she didn’t look at the wares
because the train appeared to be coming,
but it was an out-of-service train
and it didn’t stop for passengers,
so Phoebe looked at the vendor’s wares –
beautiful dangling earrings,
silver rings with colored crystals,
gossamer scarves and gypsy skirts.
She noticed all the lovely colors
and textures of the fabrics.
She was trying to get home,
but not especially distressed
at the numerous delays.
There is a world of perfect order,
a world of stasis,
unvarying.
There is no movement,
no change.
Souls are here.
Are they trapped here?
Are they here by their own choice?
No one knows.
But they’re here and,
since this is a world without change
or the possibility of change,
without motion or emotion,
they do not,
indeed can not,
will themselves to be anywhere else.
There is an image of this world.
It is an imperfect symbol
of a perfect world.
How could it be otherwise?
This world of order and stasis and perfection
is an abstraction
and the imagination cannot conceive
of abstractions.
The imagination needs concrete images.
The image of this world is a box
with twenty-six compartments.
The box is white.
Each of the compartments in the box
contains a different letter of the alphabet.
The letters are black.
There is a compartment for the A’s,
a compartment for the B’s,
and so forth.
The letters are the souls.
They repose in perfect nothingness.
Then something happens.
That something is chaos.
In a world of perfect order,
any happening is chaos.
The box is shaken.
The letters spill out.
They are scattered,
jumbled up.
All is confusion.
The souls are now
in a new world,
for the world of perfect order,
their heaven,
no longer exists.
They are in an intermediate place,
a no man’s land that is neither
the heaven of order,
nor the corporeal world
of time and space
which is the real world,
the world in which everything is
always coming into being,
changing, growing, decaying,
and finally ceasing to be.
Some of the souls,
finding themselves in this limbo,
begin to move and to adapt.
They begin to speak.
They make words.
They develop an understanding of change.
Others are unable to adapt.
They remain silent and motionless.
Alas for these poor souls!
This place is temporary,
a way station between one world and another.
There is no going back.
They must go to the real world,
prepared or not.
The more adapted souls raise their voices
in behalf of their catatonic brothers and sisters.
What will become of them?
How will they survive?
They’re allotted a little extra time,
but precious little it is,
for some of the souls are unable
to comprehend their situation.
Nevertheless they must leave
this quiet white place,
this place of silence
and motionlessness.
Phoebe saw what was coming.
All too soon she found herself in the real world.
She was driving cross-country.
She knew that the only way to survive
was to keep moving.
She would be a nomad,
a wanderer in a world
that was not her true home.