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Why Do We Dream?
When he was five years old, the little boy went through a disturbing phase in which he had the same nightmare every night. In this dream, he was living without any relatives near him, alone in a sad city beneath a rainy sky. A good part of the dream took place in a maze of muddy alleys that circled gloomy buildings. The city, which was surrounded by barbed wire and illuminated by insistent flashes of lightning, looked more like a concentration camp. The boy and the city’s other children would invariably end up at a scary house where cannibal witches lived. One of the children—never the boy—would go into the three-story building and everybody would watch the many dark windows, waiting for one of them to be suddenly lit up, revealing the silhouette of the child and the witches. There would be a horrifying scream, and that was how the dream ended, only to be repeated, in detail, every night.
The boy developed a terror of sleeping, and informed his mother that he had decided never to fall asleep again, so as to avoid the nightmare. He would lie still in bed, alone in his room, fighting desperately against sleep, determined to remain alert. But ultimately he would always succumb, and a few hours later everything would start over again. The fear of being the child chosen to go into the house was so great that he was unable to prevent the repeating of the narrative, unable to avoid falling into the same oneiric trap. His earnest mother taught him to think about flower- filled gardens as he was drifting off, so as to calm the beginning of his sleep. But after the dark curtain of midnight, the nightmare would return, relentlessly, as if the dawn would never be allowed to return.
Soon afterward, the boy started to have sessions of psychotherapy with an excellent specialist. The memories he retains of this period are of board games kept in an appealing wooden box in the consulting room. At a certain point the psychologist suggested, cleverly, that the dream might somehow be under control. And then the nightmare of the witches was replaced by another dream.
This one also had a disagreeable narrative, though it wasn’t a horror story so much as a piece of Hitchcockian suspense with surprising image editing. The gray thriller was experienced in the third person: the boy didn’t see the dream through his own eyes, but from outside, as if watching a movie about himself. The dream, which took place in an airport and always ended the same way, was again repeated every night. There was an adult companion with dark hair who was helping the boy to look for a deranged criminal. The boy couldn’t find the criminal and ended up leaving the place with his friend. But then, to his great anxiety, the “camera” moved to reveal his quarry, upside- down, hanging from the ceiling of the terminal hall like a huge spider in the gap between the walls . . . The most disturbing thing was not having spotted the criminal earlier, despite his having been there the whole time.
After some more play psychotherapy and more conversations about controlling one’s dreams, the boy developed a third dream narrative, this one no longer a nightmare but an adventure dream— still filled with peril but accompanied by much less fear and anxiety. It was about a tiger hunt in the Indian jungle, and the boy featured clearly as the hero, a Mowgli in British colonial clothing, watching from the outside, in the third person. The same dark-haired adult friend was with him at the beginning of the dream as they passed through the thick forest, until they sighted cliffs and a rough sea. On the right-hand side of the field of vision there was a tall island, small and surrounded by sheer cliffs, and in the background the sun was setting, brightly colored against a gray sky. Evening was closing in, and it was barely possible to make out his friend’s face. The boy spotted a causeway connecting the mainland to the island, and assuming that the tiger was hiding there, he suggested cornering it. The friend agreed, but explained that from that point onward, the boy would have to make his way alone. The boy advanced, rifle in hand, and started his crossing of the causeway, keeping his balance several yards above a tempestuous, foamy, lead-green sea. The clouds parted, the setting sun appeared, and the horizon was tinged in orange, red, and purple. The boy stepped onto the ground of the island and found himself face-to-face with the deep green bushland, his rifle raised, imagining he was pointing it at the tiger behind the leaves. And then, all of a sudden, he realized that the tiger was behind him, on the causeway. He was the one who was cornered.
Even before the fear came, the boy made a split-second decision to throw himself into the sea. Down he fell, and when he struck the water the dream suddenly switched to the first person, with a vividness that was heightened by the abrupt contact of his warm body with the cold water. He understood that he was dreaming, and with his own eyes he saw the dark sea surrounding him. For a moment, everything was like lead, and then he started to swim around the island. He was afraid, and the fear made him notice a huge shark swimming alongside him. The shock and the tension made time slow down—and then everything was calm. Between the sea and the sky, which were getting ever darker, the boy went on swimming calmly alongside the gigantic shark, and he swam and swam through the night, and nothing bad happened till the following day . . . Not long after he’d started to have the dream about the tiger and the shark, these oneiric narratives left the boy for good, never to return. The nightmares disappeared, the fear of sleeping passed, and nighttime peace was restored to the house.
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