Hawkman
04-02-2013, 04:54 PM
“You know, it’s really disconcerting to come down stairs, barefoot and bleary eyed, only to find a lion lounging about on your living room carpet.”
Dr. Finkelstein observed the recumbent speaker with raised eyebrows. They were not raised from surprise, merely as a function of peering over the top of his reading glasses. Very little surprised him these days; he’d heard it all; at least he thought he had.
True, lions in the living room were unusual, but not unheard of. He’d once had a South African patient who’d complained about lions in his house, but in that case the lions had turned out to be real enough to eat him. Consequently, Dr. Finkelstein no longer rushed into judgement about lions. Whereas he would once have tried to rationalise the lions as signs of deep seated and unresolved neuroses about father figures, or, as in the case of the South African, a manifestation of resentment against the British, nowadays, when they cropped up in conversations with a patient, the psychiatrist was inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. The lions needed to be contextualised.
“You were dreaming…” he said neutrally, with neither an interrogative inflexion nor the emphasis of statement. He left the phrase dangling in front of Pearce, like a baited line, and watched to see what he would do with it.
Pearce ignored it, or at least, seemed to. He continued to lie on the couch with his eyes closed.
“I mean, there it was, just lying there, a great furry animal sprawling in the middle of the room like a sandbank obstructing the safe passage of ships. I gave it a prod with my toe, but it didn’t move. Damned thing didn’t even do me the courtesy of acknowledging my existence with so much as a grunt.”
The psychiatrist required more information. “Was it dead?” he asked.
“No, I don’t think so. It just seemed to be asleep. I’m sure it was breathing.”
“Were you aware of any other sensual stimulation? Did the room smell of animal?”
“Not that I noticed. Is it important?”
Dr. Finkelstein shrugged noncommittally and indicated that he should continue. Pearce still had his eyes closed and consequently was oblivious to the invitation, but he resumed his narrative anyway.
“As I was saying; as I couldn’t get across the room without treading on it I thought I’d sit down on the sofa and use the beast as a footstool while I thought how to get rid of it. I mean, how do you get rid of a sleeping lion in your living room?”
“You might try calling the RSPCA.”
“I don’t think lions really fall into their remit. Cats and dogs—yes, definitely. Even farm animals, but I can’t see an RSPCA inspector turning up in a van equipped for the removal of a lion from your living room. Anyway, it turned out there were two.”
“Two lions? Now that is interesting. Where was the other one?”
“On the bloody sofa!”
“The sofa was bloody?”
“Not literally, just a figure of speech.”
“Ah…”
“But getting back to the lion…”
“Which one?”
“The one on the sofa. I hadn’t noticed it until I tried to sit down. There really wasn’t enough room for both of us; I couldn’t get comfortable, in fact, I could barely get my bum on the cushion.”
“So what did you do?”
“I tried to push it out of the way, but it was too heavy to move. In the end I think I tried to plump it like a pillow, you know, to try to get it to accept the contours of my body.”
Despite his years of experience Dr. Finkelstein was intrigued. “Weren’t you afraid of the lions? Didn’t you experience feelings of anxiety in their presence?” he asked.
“No, not really. I was surprised to find them there, certainly, and I was perplexed as to what to do with them, but I didn’t feel afraid. Strange, isn’t it?”
The doctor had to admit that it was. If he’d found even just one lion in his living room it would have given him cause for concern. Two would have scared him to death. The patient was – well, unusual.
“Apart from being perplexed, what else did you feel?” he asked.
“Inconvenienced,” said Pearce, opening his eyes. He tilted his head to look at the doctor for the first time. “Of course,” he continued, “it was about this time that I realised I was dreaming. The whole scenario was ridiculous. Although the room I was in was my front room, it wasn’t, if you know what I mean. I don’t have a front room like that or a sofa either, for that matter. I knew I must be dreaming so I woke up, at least my consciousness was aware that it was dreaming and tried to rationalise the experience in the knowledge that the situation was a dreamscape. But, it refused to give up, and for a while it tried to take charge of the dream to resolve the lion problem.
“And did it?”
“No. It decided that the best thing I could do would be to get up, smoke a cigarette, have a cup of coffee and check my email.”
“So in effect then, the lions are still there.”
“Don’t be silly. There never were any lions.”
To Dr. Finkelstein it was obvious that the inert and somnolent dream lions represented some kind of obstacle, but the nature of the obstacle had not yet been established, so he persevered. “But the lions in your dream must still be stalking your unconscious,” he said.
“Well, if they are, I haven’t seen them.”
“I take it then, that you are not in the habit of dreaming about lions and that they have made no reappearance in your dreams.”
“You would be correct to assume that.”
“Hmmm. The phenomenon of the ‘Lucid Dream’— that’s a dream the dreamer realises he is dreaming and consciously participates in, and even, as you admit to doing, attempts to shape— is not, of itself, unusual. It should not be confused with ‘The Waking Dream’, which is undertaken in a waking state, sometimes using psychotropic drugs and under the auspices of a guide or shaman. There is usually a definite purpose to the Waking Dream: self- knowledge, spiritual enlightenment or communion with the angels. Cultural imperatives tend to govern the nature and destination of such a journey. Carl Jung attempted to gain self-knowledge through waking dreams on his own, and spent some time in a psychiatric institution as a result.”
This snippet of information about Jung did not surprise Pearce, who’d once dated a slim, willowy female psychiatrist who’d popped mood stabilizers the way a sugar addict pops candy. He’d quickly established that she was positively barking. As a result of the experience, he’d learned that all psychiatrists have psychiatrists on whom they unburden themselves in an unhealthily incestuous psycle of mutual dependence. In fact, the only reason he was talking to Dr. Finkelstein was because it was company policy that he undergo a psych evaluation twice a year as standard, with the proviso that he endure additional counselling every time he shot someone in the line of duty.
“The Lucid Dream,” continued the doctor, “Is merely a dream which processes the jumble of unconscious thought in that brief window prior to waking. It is entirely possible to incorporate external stimuli into the dream, stimuli like sounds which the ear hears while the body sleeps. Sometimes the consciousness recognises scenarios in the dreamscape, and when the pattern varies from a known reality it will become aware and try to resolve or correct the aberration. This is when the dream becomes a Lucid Dream. Ironically, it usually stimulates the dreamer into full consciousness.”
“Well that’s all very interesting,” said Pearce, but what’s it got to do with lions?”
The doctor removed his glasses and subjected his patient to, what he believed to be, his most piercingly compelling stare. “The lions are symbolic,” he said, sententiously.
“Of what, precisely? replied Pearce with a wry grin, “Do I have some sort of unresolved issue with my parents, who, I’m supposed to believe, have been transformed into a pair of big sleepy cats who clutter up my dreams as a result of their having stunted my development through years of systematic cruelty and abuse, or are the lions some other representation of unyielding authority which blocks my career path?”
The doctor was mildly irritated by Pearce’s lack of respect for his professional opinion, and at the same time he felt slightly deflated by his prescient thunder stealing. However, he was acutely aware of what his patient did for a living and saw little point in wilfully antagonising a man, who not only could make him disappear at will, but could also convincingly forge all the relevant documentation which would give him a clean bill of mental health and confirm his operational status as, ‘active’. He glanced at the case notes and the heading ‘Inveterate Gambler’ caught his eye.
“You don’t have any money worries as a result of, shall we say, ‘misfortune’ at the gaming tables, by any chance?”
“Certainly not. I only play games that I can win,” said Pearce. He was starting to look bored.
Dr. Finkelstein saw little point in prolonging the interview any longer than was strictly necessary. Perhaps the lions were little more than the product of a naturally creative mind, the kind of mind whose creativity enabled someone like Pearce to escape from life threatening situations on a regular basis. When fuelled by a large meal ingested too late in the evening… well, who knew what it would dream up. Although he considered the lions to be symptomatic of some kind of personality disorder, people who did the kind of job which Pearce did so well, tended to be abnormal by any civilized standard.
“So,” he said, “is there anything else you feel you’d like to tell me about?”
“Not really. I was mildly curious about the lions, but everything else seems tickety-boo.”
“I don’t think you need worry unduly about the lions. They were almost certainly manifestation associated with some kind of obstacle either in your professional or private life, but as they seem to have forsaken you, for the moment at least, the problem they represented has almost certainly been resolved.”
“So what’s the verdict, Doc?”
“Operational status confirmed. Standard review in six months,” said the doctor and the thump of his rubber stamp on the personnel file emphatically concluded the interview.
The following morning Dr. Finkelstein was awoken by a lucid dream in which he encountered two somnolent lions in his living room. Naturally, it was a matter of grave concern to him that he was experiencing such disturbing and obviously profound manifestations of anxiety. Because he was not a cold, ruthless professional assassin like Pearce, the discovery of the lions had proved to be a deeply frightening experience which had left him feeling distinctly unwell. It was also the first time he’d ever encountered a contagious dream.
Just how contagious he wouldn’t find out until he’d consulted his Rabbi, who, incidentally, was also a psychiatrist. The Rabbi too experienced the dream, as did his psychiatrist. In fact the dream was later reported in a paper published throughout the world, as having been experienced by every mental health professional who’d been told of it, which as the paper was read by just about every practicing psychiatrist, meant that it was now causing severe mental distress to almost the entire profession.
Word eventually got back to Pearce that his dream was wreaking havoc amongst all the mental health professionals of the globe. It was as if he’d played the ultimate game of Chinese Whispers and he was reassuringly reminded of the famous Churchillian quote: “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”
He’d laughed and laughed and laughed. In fact he’d laughed so hard that he had a heart attack and died, but he’d died laughing. It was the way he’d have wanted to go.
Dr. Finkelstein observed the recumbent speaker with raised eyebrows. They were not raised from surprise, merely as a function of peering over the top of his reading glasses. Very little surprised him these days; he’d heard it all; at least he thought he had.
True, lions in the living room were unusual, but not unheard of. He’d once had a South African patient who’d complained about lions in his house, but in that case the lions had turned out to be real enough to eat him. Consequently, Dr. Finkelstein no longer rushed into judgement about lions. Whereas he would once have tried to rationalise the lions as signs of deep seated and unresolved neuroses about father figures, or, as in the case of the South African, a manifestation of resentment against the British, nowadays, when they cropped up in conversations with a patient, the psychiatrist was inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. The lions needed to be contextualised.
“You were dreaming…” he said neutrally, with neither an interrogative inflexion nor the emphasis of statement. He left the phrase dangling in front of Pearce, like a baited line, and watched to see what he would do with it.
Pearce ignored it, or at least, seemed to. He continued to lie on the couch with his eyes closed.
“I mean, there it was, just lying there, a great furry animal sprawling in the middle of the room like a sandbank obstructing the safe passage of ships. I gave it a prod with my toe, but it didn’t move. Damned thing didn’t even do me the courtesy of acknowledging my existence with so much as a grunt.”
The psychiatrist required more information. “Was it dead?” he asked.
“No, I don’t think so. It just seemed to be asleep. I’m sure it was breathing.”
“Were you aware of any other sensual stimulation? Did the room smell of animal?”
“Not that I noticed. Is it important?”
Dr. Finkelstein shrugged noncommittally and indicated that he should continue. Pearce still had his eyes closed and consequently was oblivious to the invitation, but he resumed his narrative anyway.
“As I was saying; as I couldn’t get across the room without treading on it I thought I’d sit down on the sofa and use the beast as a footstool while I thought how to get rid of it. I mean, how do you get rid of a sleeping lion in your living room?”
“You might try calling the RSPCA.”
“I don’t think lions really fall into their remit. Cats and dogs—yes, definitely. Even farm animals, but I can’t see an RSPCA inspector turning up in a van equipped for the removal of a lion from your living room. Anyway, it turned out there were two.”
“Two lions? Now that is interesting. Where was the other one?”
“On the bloody sofa!”
“The sofa was bloody?”
“Not literally, just a figure of speech.”
“Ah…”
“But getting back to the lion…”
“Which one?”
“The one on the sofa. I hadn’t noticed it until I tried to sit down. There really wasn’t enough room for both of us; I couldn’t get comfortable, in fact, I could barely get my bum on the cushion.”
“So what did you do?”
“I tried to push it out of the way, but it was too heavy to move. In the end I think I tried to plump it like a pillow, you know, to try to get it to accept the contours of my body.”
Despite his years of experience Dr. Finkelstein was intrigued. “Weren’t you afraid of the lions? Didn’t you experience feelings of anxiety in their presence?” he asked.
“No, not really. I was surprised to find them there, certainly, and I was perplexed as to what to do with them, but I didn’t feel afraid. Strange, isn’t it?”
The doctor had to admit that it was. If he’d found even just one lion in his living room it would have given him cause for concern. Two would have scared him to death. The patient was – well, unusual.
“Apart from being perplexed, what else did you feel?” he asked.
“Inconvenienced,” said Pearce, opening his eyes. He tilted his head to look at the doctor for the first time. “Of course,” he continued, “it was about this time that I realised I was dreaming. The whole scenario was ridiculous. Although the room I was in was my front room, it wasn’t, if you know what I mean. I don’t have a front room like that or a sofa either, for that matter. I knew I must be dreaming so I woke up, at least my consciousness was aware that it was dreaming and tried to rationalise the experience in the knowledge that the situation was a dreamscape. But, it refused to give up, and for a while it tried to take charge of the dream to resolve the lion problem.
“And did it?”
“No. It decided that the best thing I could do would be to get up, smoke a cigarette, have a cup of coffee and check my email.”
“So in effect then, the lions are still there.”
“Don’t be silly. There never were any lions.”
To Dr. Finkelstein it was obvious that the inert and somnolent dream lions represented some kind of obstacle, but the nature of the obstacle had not yet been established, so he persevered. “But the lions in your dream must still be stalking your unconscious,” he said.
“Well, if they are, I haven’t seen them.”
“I take it then, that you are not in the habit of dreaming about lions and that they have made no reappearance in your dreams.”
“You would be correct to assume that.”
“Hmmm. The phenomenon of the ‘Lucid Dream’— that’s a dream the dreamer realises he is dreaming and consciously participates in, and even, as you admit to doing, attempts to shape— is not, of itself, unusual. It should not be confused with ‘The Waking Dream’, which is undertaken in a waking state, sometimes using psychotropic drugs and under the auspices of a guide or shaman. There is usually a definite purpose to the Waking Dream: self- knowledge, spiritual enlightenment or communion with the angels. Cultural imperatives tend to govern the nature and destination of such a journey. Carl Jung attempted to gain self-knowledge through waking dreams on his own, and spent some time in a psychiatric institution as a result.”
This snippet of information about Jung did not surprise Pearce, who’d once dated a slim, willowy female psychiatrist who’d popped mood stabilizers the way a sugar addict pops candy. He’d quickly established that she was positively barking. As a result of the experience, he’d learned that all psychiatrists have psychiatrists on whom they unburden themselves in an unhealthily incestuous psycle of mutual dependence. In fact, the only reason he was talking to Dr. Finkelstein was because it was company policy that he undergo a psych evaluation twice a year as standard, with the proviso that he endure additional counselling every time he shot someone in the line of duty.
“The Lucid Dream,” continued the doctor, “Is merely a dream which processes the jumble of unconscious thought in that brief window prior to waking. It is entirely possible to incorporate external stimuli into the dream, stimuli like sounds which the ear hears while the body sleeps. Sometimes the consciousness recognises scenarios in the dreamscape, and when the pattern varies from a known reality it will become aware and try to resolve or correct the aberration. This is when the dream becomes a Lucid Dream. Ironically, it usually stimulates the dreamer into full consciousness.”
“Well that’s all very interesting,” said Pearce, but what’s it got to do with lions?”
The doctor removed his glasses and subjected his patient to, what he believed to be, his most piercingly compelling stare. “The lions are symbolic,” he said, sententiously.
“Of what, precisely? replied Pearce with a wry grin, “Do I have some sort of unresolved issue with my parents, who, I’m supposed to believe, have been transformed into a pair of big sleepy cats who clutter up my dreams as a result of their having stunted my development through years of systematic cruelty and abuse, or are the lions some other representation of unyielding authority which blocks my career path?”
The doctor was mildly irritated by Pearce’s lack of respect for his professional opinion, and at the same time he felt slightly deflated by his prescient thunder stealing. However, he was acutely aware of what his patient did for a living and saw little point in wilfully antagonising a man, who not only could make him disappear at will, but could also convincingly forge all the relevant documentation which would give him a clean bill of mental health and confirm his operational status as, ‘active’. He glanced at the case notes and the heading ‘Inveterate Gambler’ caught his eye.
“You don’t have any money worries as a result of, shall we say, ‘misfortune’ at the gaming tables, by any chance?”
“Certainly not. I only play games that I can win,” said Pearce. He was starting to look bored.
Dr. Finkelstein saw little point in prolonging the interview any longer than was strictly necessary. Perhaps the lions were little more than the product of a naturally creative mind, the kind of mind whose creativity enabled someone like Pearce to escape from life threatening situations on a regular basis. When fuelled by a large meal ingested too late in the evening… well, who knew what it would dream up. Although he considered the lions to be symptomatic of some kind of personality disorder, people who did the kind of job which Pearce did so well, tended to be abnormal by any civilized standard.
“So,” he said, “is there anything else you feel you’d like to tell me about?”
“Not really. I was mildly curious about the lions, but everything else seems tickety-boo.”
“I don’t think you need worry unduly about the lions. They were almost certainly manifestation associated with some kind of obstacle either in your professional or private life, but as they seem to have forsaken you, for the moment at least, the problem they represented has almost certainly been resolved.”
“So what’s the verdict, Doc?”
“Operational status confirmed. Standard review in six months,” said the doctor and the thump of his rubber stamp on the personnel file emphatically concluded the interview.
The following morning Dr. Finkelstein was awoken by a lucid dream in which he encountered two somnolent lions in his living room. Naturally, it was a matter of grave concern to him that he was experiencing such disturbing and obviously profound manifestations of anxiety. Because he was not a cold, ruthless professional assassin like Pearce, the discovery of the lions had proved to be a deeply frightening experience which had left him feeling distinctly unwell. It was also the first time he’d ever encountered a contagious dream.
Just how contagious he wouldn’t find out until he’d consulted his Rabbi, who, incidentally, was also a psychiatrist. The Rabbi too experienced the dream, as did his psychiatrist. In fact the dream was later reported in a paper published throughout the world, as having been experienced by every mental health professional who’d been told of it, which as the paper was read by just about every practicing psychiatrist, meant that it was now causing severe mental distress to almost the entire profession.
Word eventually got back to Pearce that his dream was wreaking havoc amongst all the mental health professionals of the globe. It was as if he’d played the ultimate game of Chinese Whispers and he was reassuringly reminded of the famous Churchillian quote: “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”
He’d laughed and laughed and laughed. In fact he’d laughed so hard that he had a heart attack and died, but he’d died laughing. It was the way he’d have wanted to go.