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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 The ancient cultures were right: our dreams are a way of freeing us from our corporeal prisons so that we can wander for a while. We wander, every night, within ourselves. Even the most apparently banal dream-journeys, the ones we all take—hastening down a school’s long hallway to find the right room (where is it? where is it?), late for a test in a hard subject we know nothing of, the final for a class we didn’t even know that we were taking—leave us feeling as if we’ve gone a long way. It doesn’t matter to us that we know that others have gone there before. Or, rather—knowing this does not make the journey any less felt, does not make it seem to have been less urgently taken. But it matters, all right, in the sense that such dreams let us know that we are more like one another than we can believe when we’re awake, when our troubles seem so personal—when we cannot imagine that there’s anyone who’d understand what it feels like to be us. Adam Phillips speaks of dream-telling as a species of travel writing . Here’s where I went; here’s what I did. I was not much older than Grace was when she had the underwater dream for the first time—when her best friend was a little boy exactly her own age whose mother would call me soon after we had returned to Ohio to tell me that “they” had found something, that she was scheduled for exploratory surgery—on the summer day that I lost sight of my mother and grandmother at the beach. I remember it perfectly—the noise, the crowds I couldn’t see past, the feeling of the hot sand under my feet as I walked and walked—although it happened at least fifty years ago, and just that once, as far as I can tell. My mother and grandmother had been right there with the thermos of grape juice mixed with lemonade and tuna salad sandwiches 90 Dream Life wrapped in wax paper—and then they weren’t. I wandered, searching for them, for what seemed like hours. I don’t remember how I found them (with the help of a lifeguard? a policeman?), and my mother doesn’t remember that I ever got lost at the beach, so I don’t know how the story ends, except that I did find them, eventually, or they found me, and to this day I am afraid of crowds. To this day I dream of being lost in a crowd, pushing through people I can’t see past, trying to find someone, becoming increasingly desperate. To this day, in my waking life, I have to make a great effort to overcome my fear of crowds—about which I am nearly as phobic as my daughter is about the deep sea and all the creatures in it. ...
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