Animals. Keith Ridgway

Was I dreaming?

      —No, surgery is the dreaming, is the process you go through while asleep, while dreaming, and then, in the middle of that, you interfere, or someone else interferes, in the process. It’s not a good example.

      —No.

      —OK, have you ever used one of those online translation services? You enter a web page in French or German or whatever and it gives you an instant rough translation?

      —Yeah.

      —OK, well, imagine that what you remember from a dream is like one of those translations. You know it’s not accurate, sometimes the inaccuracies are quite funny, but it’ll do, it gives you a rough idea.

      —OK.

      —Then imagine that you pass that translation on to someone else who then translates it again. Their translation will not only be an additional step away from the original, but it won’t even be their original that it’s one more step away from, it’s someone else’s.

      —Why do they translate it again though?

      —It’s an example.

      —You need to work on your examples.

      —But don’t you get it? Dreams are like your own personal, bear with me, your own personal essence.

      —Oh dear.

      —And telling other people about them risks, I don’t know. You exhale your essence and they inhale it and then their essence is compromised by your essence.

      —Jesus.

      —Well, it’s not an easy thing to get your head around.

      —No. I get it. There is too much telling of dreams going on. Too much exhaling of essences. We need a reduction in global levels of essence. We need a new Kyoto Accord, except for dreams. Less dreams in the atmosphere. The Americans will want a derogation, you know. What with Hollywood and all. I mean, the American Dream for God’s sake. You can’t tell them to stop exhaling that.

      —And that’s another thing. The use of the word ‘dream’ in all kinds of stupid ways. Hollywood ways. Aspirational. My dream house; my dream job; my dream girlfriend, boyfriend. These are not dreams. Or, dreams are not these. Dreams are not good things. Or, they’re not fluffy harmless diversionary things. They’re the motors of self-awareness. They construct our individuality. If we share them we cease to be ourselves. We merge into a banal gloop of similarities. We get stuck. As human beings, we get stuck at this aggressive, self-obsessed, materialistic stage of our development.

      K looked at me for quite a long time without saying anything, half smiling, but trying to work out as well, I think, how much of this I actually believed.

      —Motors of self-awareness?

      —Well, why not?

      —OK. I won’t tell you my dreams any more.

      My concern about dreams did not diminish over the next number of weeks, but I didn’t mention it again. I realised that it was a difficult idea to voice, and I realise it still. But it has preyed upon me considerably. I have had to stop people, a couple of times, as they began to tell me about a dream. I’m relieved when I wake and can remember nothing. I become agitated and nervous when details do get through. And all the time, my mind struggles with the notion of a polluted pool of dreams from which we are all drinking, oblivious, trapping ourselves in a dead end of shared, second-hand signs.

      All this talk of dreaming. I rose through the water, fingers first, propelling myself towards the unmediated light, towards breathing. With the things that had been going through my mind you would think that breaking the surface and re-emerging into the air, into the direct sound of the world, would have seemed like waking from a dream, like coming from an unreal place into a real one. But it was not like that. Something had happened. In the tiny space of time during which I had been underwater, something had happened.

      The first indication of it was sound. I had thought that the roaring in my ears, the drumming and the crashing and the jumble of noise that I had been hearing, was the water – the water going past me; my disturbance of it; the filling of my ears and my nose; the press of it against my head and my body; the echo of my inner spaces, suddenly surrounded. But as my head cleared the surface and I drew my first breath, the roaring continued. And it was more, it immediately seemed to me, than a matter of water. I had surfaced facing down the pool towards the shallow end. I caught a blur of the small girl, and her father, whom I’d seen earlier. She was climbing out of the pool, and her father seemed to be almost pushing her, while his head was turned towards me, or rather, past me, towards the deep end, with an expression which suggested some not inconsiderable alarm.