Photo by Christina Schmidt
The Raconteur’s Dreams
Briana Loveall
When I wake with a jolt, my legs tangled uncomfortably in sweaty sheets, the bad dream lingering like an odor, I rouse the sleeping form next to me. I whisper my husband’s name, quietly at first and then louder, shaking his shoulder until he climbs the ladder of consciousness and mumbles, What do you need?
I had a bad dream, I tell him like a frightened child. He’s told me to wake him when my dreams become too unbearable; he knows that I often just need to tell him what happened, as a way of shedding the layers of the nightmare like a snake skin, and leaving it behind. But even at his insistence, I still feel a guilty weight that I am a twenty-seven-year-old woman who has to wake her husband to still her terrors.
He pulls me in close to his chest, wraps his arms around me. Tell me about your dream, he says, and I do. I know he fades off, back to sleep, halfway through the telling. The important thing for me is to speak the dream away, to feel that I have some sort of control over it. Except that even after I have confessed the dreams to him in the quiet dark of our bedroom, he the silent dozing priest, I know that I will allow the dream, like an incubus, to impregnate the truths of my reality and give birth to an alternative life that I’m terrified of.
Once while one vacation, I stood on a rocky outcrop and watched my husband snorkel out into the ocean with some of our friends. The wind had picked up and the waves chopped and crashed against the cove where they swam. I watched him drift farther and farther out, saw him and the others he snorkeled with dip down beneath the surface in search of something. Each time they broke through the surface, I counted the number of heads, tiny flecks on the waterline. One, two, three, four; one, two, three, four; one, two, three; one, two, three. I swayed on the rock, forced myself to see what I knew I couldn’t, searched and searched for four, where is four, until the fourth head, his blonde hair like the splattering of yellow on a large watercolor, reappeared and I could breathe again. I had seen his death so often in my nightmares that it was too easy for me to imagine what the newspaper might say, the black ink splattered across the cool page like a bad reading with a psychic: Tourist drifts off to sea; search party ends hunt for body. My father-in-law picked his way over the sharp rocks to where I stood. He tried to say something but gave me a sheepish grin and edged away. I knew what he was thinking. What everyone who wasn’t me was thinking: that I was incapable of living my life without worry. I stalked off to the rental car and waited for someone to drive me back to the condo we were all sharing.
My first nightmare, the one that folds in with all those other hazy memories of early childhood, happens at my grandmother’s house. The nightmare is the first snowflake loosening the mountainside; it creates an avalanche of bad dreams that will infect the way I interpret the world. It’s the first nightmare that becomes a lifelong habit of living within the scope of my dreams. I stand in the California heat next to my grandmother’s mailbox. In front of me were white siding, green trim, and a perfectly manicured lawn. I don’t want to go inside the house. There’s a strange buzzing. It’s the only sound in the whole world and it’s sitting in my ear. I am small and my chest hurts and I take the necessary but reluctant steps to lead me through my grandmother’s gate and to her back door. The buzzing intensifies. Then my hand is reaching up to open the glass door, and my aunt smiles at me as she shoves pieces of my mother, my father, my grandmother into her blender, buzz buzzing. The blender shakes and I scream and scream.
The dream didn’t stop there. It bled into the morning and every morning that followed it. I rose and ate breakfast and got dressed and worriedworriedworried. My stomach hurts, I complained to my mother, until she took me to see a doctor. Drink this barium, lie still, the technician said, as he clicked radioactive pictures of my belly. Why don’t you want to spend the night with your cousin, my mother asked me. I don’t like Auntie, I mumbled, head down, afraid and worried that my dream of her blender wasn’t just a nightmare–that it had the capacity to manifest and walk beside me like living flesh. We can’t find anything wrong with her, the doctors told my mother.
I hoped that I would outgrow it.
I awake to the sound of cannons. My heart thudthudthuds. I struggle to open my eyes and untangle myself from the warm arms of my husband. There is a painful silence that follows loud noise and then a whoosh that accelerates like the lub-dub of my heart.
When my husband was thirteen, he’s had this happen to him once before. A tree fell on his parents’ house, against his bedroom. He woke to the sound of the crack as a large pine splintered and gave way to a weight that could not be sustained anymore. He jumped out of bed and ran down the hall, away from his room, while the tree crashed into the side of the house and was held there by its supportive beams.
Maybe that memory comes back to him in a whisper as he moves from sleep to bone-crushing reality. Maybe that’s why he pushes me off the bed, shoves me hard onto the floor before the tree crashes into our bedroom, the walls not strong enough to slow the massive force, and comes down on the dresser, the bed, my husband, and not me.
I’m dreaming, I’m dreaming. But I open my eyes—I am sleeping, I am—and feel the foreign branches poking and prodding, pushing into my scratched and aching body. I’m saved from the main trunk by two larger limbs; they nestle perfectly against my hips, allowing just enough room to wiggle from underneath, to look up and to my left where my bed, and husband, used to be.
The trees are thick this far into the forest. The trails blur into a collage of shadows and dappled light until I have the fleeting feeling that I’m trapped inside a kaleidoscope. My husband rides ahead of me, his orange dirt bike moving deftly over roots and rocks, navigating the trees and brush. I clunk and chug, struggling in and out of first and second gear, up hills and down, trying to maintain a constant speed around trails that wind in and out of tall pines. I imagine coming around a bend and not seeing the wisp of the exhaust that trails behind his bike. I can see it so perfectly in my mind, the search for tire marks that indicate where he fell, looking down a steep bank to see his body lying wedged between a tree and his bike. I can hear my desperate cries for him, the way I scamper down the bank, falling a dozen times, grunting and heaving to lift his bike off him, his eyes open, his pupils fixed and dilated, taking in the whole world but me.
My arms ache and then go numb from the hum of the engine. I become too tired to worry. Eventually he stops and I pull up behind him, sweat dripping into my eyes, making dirty trails down my neck, my chest. My camel pack, filled with cold water this morning, is already empty; he offers me some of his. I stand close to him, the tubing isn’t very long, and I drink greedily like a child at the breast while he gazes with affection. I drink in hard pulls until I’m satisfied, my stomach pleasantly full and almost painfully sloshy. When he sits down on the hillside of the trail, an area of tall grasses and wildflowers, I sit beside him, then nestle my back into the soft bed of the earth, the images of his broken body fading quickly. His body is warm beside me, his hand finds mine. Birds flit overheard, dream-like, ignoring our very presence as if to say, You are just a visitor here. And because I know that visitors can’t stay, I’m quiet. I absorb the colors of the forest, the way the greens fade to blacks, yellow overlays everything, and motes drift in and out of my vision. I let my eyes lose focus until I stare at nothing and everything, until all the world is a swirl of watercolors and I think nothing has ever been more beautiful than this.
I won’t be home for a few hours, I tell him. My husband smiles at me, a big and generous look that seems to transform his whole body into a languid mass of loving flesh.
Here, he says as I’m about to step over the threshold of our house, leaving the safe place behind, you forgot your coffee. He kisses me soft at first and then earnestly until I’m sure he’s going to pull me back into the house, tearing off my jacket and shirt, yanking at denim and metal hooks, until he’s reaching inside, knowing me, knowing every piece of what makes me his. But his hands stay at my waist and soon the kiss is over, he’s telling me to have a good day volunteering at the hospital, he’ll see me for lunch.
I arrive at the hospital, note my spot on level E of the parking garage and make my way up to the fourth floor of the children’s unit where I’ll receive the list of patients to work with. The hospital seems extra bright today. The hallways on the fourth floor are flooded with an early fall light, the window panes deceitfully cool, a reminder of the cold winter coming, a memory of the summer dripping away.
When I get to the room where the list of patients will be, I’m told there was a mistake and my volunteer services aren’t needed today. I’m irritable but put a smile on my face and count my blessings; now I can go home early and surprise my husband, maybe finish what our earlier kiss started. I don’t allow myself to drive as languidly as I did on the way to the hospital because I’m anxious to get back to him. I navigate in and out of cars with purpose, speeding just enough so I believe I’m making good time.
My spot in the driveway is taken by the white sedan I recognize as my best friend’s. She works just a few miles away from our house and frequently comes to visit me on her lunch breaks, and even though it’s too early for lunch she must have thought I’d be home today.
I hear them before I even open the door. I must have left a few windows cracked for some cool air to trap the smell of autumn in the house. The door squeaks open, I’ve been meaning to ask my husband to fix that for the last several months, it seems to get louder when it’s colder out, but they cannot hear me come in over the guttural noises issuing from their sweaty throats. And I can see them now, match the noises to the movements, watch as they strain into each other, flesh meeting flesh meeting flesh meeting flesh.
The night the police come to tell me that my husband’s dead, I’m swollen with his child. It’s a familiar dream, one I wake him up for often. I know when the dream is over I will wake him again, nudging him until I’m sure I hear the intake of breath, aching to know my place in the world is next to him, a part of him, willing his arms around me to warm me, and force the dream away. And then I’m opening the door to the cool dark world. The air is fresh and wet, while loud red and blue lights cast large shadows across the yard; my car looks like an elongated harbinger of grief ready to slink into my now open door. Someone is talking, the police, I haven’t even looked at them yet and they are talking, but I cannot hear them because I’m worried that the shadows are going to get in, that I will become tainted by that indifferent darkness. I cannot hear what the police are saying. I close the door.
After I’d stormed away from the cove, I sat in the rental car, arms tight, hands aching clenching breathing angry hard. He will come, he will come, he will come; I let the recitation numb my tongue. I heard the crunch of feet on gravel, he opened the car door and sighed. His hair was stiff with salt-water, his eyes ached with anger and sorrow and love, and I hated him and loved him and wanted to kiss him hard and hit him until his gut burned the way mine did. Do you want to talk, he asked. No, I said.
We separated for the evening and I went out with my mother. My husband joined our friends for dinner where I knew they’d judge me for what had happened at the cove. They’d frequently accused me of being controlling and limiting the amount of fun he was allowed to have. My mother and I sat before white bowls of soup and glasses of wine while she talked to me about what had happened. You worry because you love him, she said as she broke bread and dipped it in her broth. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you this happy, and I think you’re afraid of losing that. Forgive him, she finished.
I wouldn’t forgive him then. I did find out that my friends had later joked about my incessant and annoying worrying, and that my husband, standing next to them, had said nothing. My mother’s words stay with me. It had never occurred to me to think of love and fear as inseparable twins, and that the nightmares that bleed into my mornings and infect my day, might actually serve as inoculation to the pain of a possible life without him.
My dreams have transcended the images of my own personal horror; I see the terrors through the lens of my love for him. We’re supposed to wake up from dreams with our egos reset and ready to embrace reality. We’re supposed to compare the nightmare to the truth and feel relieved. I awake from the dream and dread the day. I become so fixated on the possibility of my dreams taking the shape of reality that I often do not feel I can discern the two. Lying in bed with him now, his arm hot and sweaty across my breast, my most recent nightmare fading in time to the rhythm of his breathing, I know it will be a long time before I fall back asleep.
It is because I love you, because I love you.
