Homeland Elegies(33)

I kept at it. I soon discovered that if I moved too much after I woke up, any memory of my dreams would vanish. Then it wouldn’t matter if I picked up my pad, because there would be nothing to note. I told Mary this was happening, and she suggested that it was only the angle of my spine that mattered. If I didn’t move my spine, she said, I wouldn’t lose the dream. Then she added that even if I did end up changing the spinal angle, all I had to do was find it again. The dream would return. I didn’t believe her.

“Just try it,” she said. “See if it works.”

Sometime around sunrise the next morning, I woke up, my head swirling with images. I rolled over to pick up my notebook. All at once, the pictures were gone. I remembered what Mary told me to do. Rolling back to where I’d been, I restored the angle of my resting spine, and just as suddenly, thoughts and pictures and feelings flowed into me unbidden. The dreamscape was alive again. All of it. I reached for the pad and started to write.

The next week, when I told Mary her suggestion worked, she seemed amused by my incredulity. Then she went on to explain that, if what she believed was true—if, in some substantial way, a dream was actually the experience of language in the body—then the spine, or central axis of our neurologic lattice, was likely where much of our dreaming took place, a cognitive sap running from the roots of the body up into the branches of the brain. I didn’t question her proposition or the metaphor she was using to paint it. The technique of retrieving a dream by re-creating the angle of my spine was proof enough to me that what she knew was real, whatever the reason.

I would stick with this form of nightwork for the quarter century to come. In time, I would come to concur with Mary’s thoughts about language in the body, and I would spend years and days making my own sense of just how such a language could be apprehended. Like Mary, I would closely study Freud’s early attempts to decode dreams—attempts glossed and argued over by the entire psychoanalytic tradition to follow—and marvel that his techniques still yielded worthy, enduring insights. I’m not prepared to make any grand claims here, though I will say this: living by the nocturnal glow of my dream life has proved rich, beguiling, instructive; it has given me ample occasion to question the nature of time, riddled as my dreams have been through the years with prognosticating encounters and apprehensions; but even these hints of the uncanny have not made up the most miraculous bounty of all this interrupted sleep. My dreams have taught me much about myself. I’m not sure I could sum up either the benefit or the challenge any better than Montaigne does in “Of Experience”:

I take it for true that dreams are honest reflections of our inclinations; but there is art to making sense of them.



*



That night in Scranton, I dreamed about an upcoming wedding. My father and I were arguing over the invitations. He wanted to use postage stamps that bore the images of various Christian saints. It made me angry. Then I was in the midst of a group of pilgrims on a stormy night. We made our way slowly along a narrow path on a steep hill. Many of us were clutching staffs to brace ourselves against the gusting wind. A few of the staffs had crossbars attached, but they were askew, not forming proper crucifixes. At the top of the hill, there was a grave, but everyone was surprised to see it was just an empty hole. The dead man had decided not to show. Someone complained this is what the dead often did in Kashmir. I awoke to a feeling of failure and threat.

At a coffee shop the next morning, I ordered a cup of tea and a Danish and sat down to work through the night’s dream notes. In the decade and a half since Mary’s assignment, I’d logged, annotated, and interpreted literally thousands of my dreams. The process I went through to make sense of them—as Montaigne puts it—still bore the influence of Mary and Freud. As Mary taught me to do with a poem, I started with the structure, then I worked through each of a dream’s salient details by free association. With the dream I’d had the previous night, the structure wasn’t obvious to me: a pairing of episodes without a clear thread to connect them—first the argument with my father about the wedding, then a procession up a hill path that led to an empty grave. No clear thread, I thought, though the sense of futility and failure I’d felt on waking—which lingered an hour into the morning—unified my experience of both parts. Perhaps working through the details, I thought, would prove more fruitful: the wedding seemed an obvious reference to one upcoming in my family. My parents had, themselves, been arguing about it just that weekend at Seneca Lake. My mother’s older brother—my uncle Shafat—was remarrying. His first wife—Bilqis, a Pakistani—had discovered he was having an affair with a white American woman and left him. Now Shafat was marrying the mistress. Mother was disgusted by the whole thing and couldn’t believe my father wanted to attend the ceremony; Father, for his part, thought my mother’s reaction childish. Shafat and Bilqis had never been happy together. What was the problem? Wasn’t it better for them to separate, especially now that one of them had found someone to be happy with? By invoking my father’s support for Shafat’s wedding and casting me in my mother’s role in their argument, the dream seemed to be alerting me to some sympathy I shared with my mother on the matter that I was unaware of.

Then: the hill and narrow path. Something about the path reminded me of pictures I’d seen of the Great Wall of China. As I noted this, I suddenly remembered—as if the simple act of writing summoned the memory—a hill in the Punjabi village where my father grew up, at the top of which stood the small mosque that my grandfather led when he was still alive. Was this the holy ground toward which we pilgrims were making our way? At the summit was an empty grave. I’d seen a dead body loaded onto an ambulance just the night before, an ambulance painted with the image of another holy hill, Calvary. The dream’s makeshift crucifixes and the empty grave suddenly seemed to cohere, summoning the tale of the abandoned tomb of Christ.