I am dreaming, and I am in the dream

The Oneiroscopist by Edith Rimmington

An oneiroscopist is someone who studies dreams.  The strange figure in the painting was created by the British surrealist Edith Rimmington and, in my reverie below, I have allowed it to suggest the moment of falling asleep and the two-in-one condition of dreaming. 

The Oneiroscopist by Edith Rimmington, 1947

I am dreaming and I am in the dream.  I am sitting and I am without a body.  I am a diver and I am unable to put on my helmet: it will not fit.  Nothing fits with me.  I am one thing and another thing.  I am man and woman, human and bird, sea-borne and sky-dwelling.  In the moment of waking from a dream, I am myself and another creature.  I have both my own self and a wild, murderous, unfaithful other-being.  I have been doing what I could never do, would never do, have never done: I am dreaming.

I am about to go down, then I jolt because the metal around my neck pulls me short.  Again, I am falling.  I am giving in.  Falling asleep means climbing smoothly down the ladder into the ocean.  Each step dissolves my body into the water as it dilutes my individuality little by little.  First my foot, then my leg.  First my name, then my address.  And I am gone.  My life is gone and I begin a new existence.

I am inside my own mind and memory, a strange place of rag-tag facts and bright real moments.  I have the ugly foot of a bird and also the large kind hands of my grandmother, hands that rest on familiar broad knees.  The clouds are puffs of cotton stuffing and the sea is a smooth-rippled expanse of all-the-same.

One foot stretches into bony toes and claws and the other is heavy, so heavy that to go further down is the only possibility.  Down I go.  Time stops.  All of time is now.  It is my human self and my prehistoric origin both together.  I am bird and human, and I am flying through water as if it were a grey, troubled sky.  I am above and below.  I am dreaming, and I am the dream.

At first, I see nothing inside the dark of my head.  Then come the pictures rapidly flickering on the movie screen of my eyelids.  I am inside the body of the actors in the story.  Borrowing their eyes, I see the dream and I am seeing in the dream.  The deeper I go, the more I sink into the dream self.  This self is always able to split into two or jump to another body, another time.

Suddenly here I am back on the edge of the dream.  Here, the dream is the reality for one alarming, conscious, heartbeat and then, like a tide, it all returns: I am I, only I, only now.  It is all back in place and the tide of myself sweeps away the ladder between the worlds.  I grasp at the pieces as they are washed away into forgetting, knowing that the ocean will claim them and never return them to my consciousness. 

I sit up, holding my knees and peering intently into my closed eyes, a hood over my present moment.  I find again those scaly feet, one is still dragging with the weight of the dive, and I know myself to have not only a human face but also an ancient bird form, which extends into a brave, handsome beak.  I remember for a moment how I was the dream and the dreamer: man and woman, human and bird, swimmer in water and soarer in air, guilty of every human crime and also as blameless as a child.

All I have salvaged is this: the picture of a mermaid’s purse lying next to some diving equipment.  I know that it was part of the dream and yet it means nothing to me, a crazy artefact of memory from a lost, black tale no longer happening and no longer redeemable.  I squeeze my brain for the crux of the story I was part of, but it is gone.

Here is where I always sit, at any moment about to descend.  I am on the boat and I am in the water.  I am a human and I dream.  Often do I dream.  Sometimes I even dream that I am dreaming.  When I dive, I go very deep. 

One day I will never come back up.  What wonders, then, will I see?  There will be no need for my helmet and breathing hose or for my name and my address.  There will be no heart-stopping moment grasping onto the dry land of ‘me’ ever again.  In the end, I will go down fluidly and freely, further and further, and see such things that no waking or dreaming eyes have ever seen.