The Dream Tense

Ever since a mean kidney infection forced me to take to my bed for five days last month, I have been determined to bake a cake in my mind.

I remove the encyclopedia-sized recipe book from the shelf above the stove and brush its warped cardboard cover with my fingertips, open it and gingerly leaf through the cracked yellow pages (a few stick together from spots of oil and brown sugar).

There is an Italian proverb: “Illness tells us what we are.” Well, the Italians got it right with the whole pizza thing, and in my limited experience, the same can be said of their proverbs—my tribulations with the renegade left kidney did, in fact, add up to something like revelation. The agonizing pain (hot knives being sharpened on stomach lining/ doubled over screaming like a dying rabbit/ “There was blood in your urine sample”/ clutching a sweating bottle of cranberry juice) coupled with insufferable boredom (anagrams: Abraham Lincoln→ Hairball Conman; Banal, Moral Chin; Anal Ranch Limbo; Clonal Brain Ham) really got me ruminating about bodies—how desperately we depend on so much incompetent tissue!

I select a recipe—some wild, fanciful invention (today it is raspberry mocha cake with double layers of dark chocolate mousse; yesterday, a rich ginger carrot cake with lemony cream cheese frosting, toasted macadamia nuts, and shredded coconut).


Western philosophy has had the brain pinned as the boss of these burdensome bundles of flesh for centuries. But look again, wise reader—look how barren and picked-over the salad bar of human pastimes becomes when we find ourselves bed-ridden; how when one disgruntled organ overturns his cubicle and takes to the streets waving picket signs threatening to burn the building to the ground, the whole operation falls to its knees and begs for mercy. Who is really in charge here?

I take out the bowls and measuring cups and begin to rummage for ingredients.

The goal is to not skip any steps,

Open the cupboard. Find oil, flour, sugar, cocoa, salt, baking powder. Set on counter.

and to never fast-forward.

Lick the spoon, remove cake from oven. No! Go back. Flour, sugar, salt lined up in a row.

I have described this peculiar mental ritual to friends as a “meditational exercise,” which is partially true, but probably more like a clever guise to conceal the true depths of my paranoia. They would never understand—O, the incredulous angles of their tilting heads! O, the faint glimmer of panic darting behind their nervous laughter like a fish in a glass tank!—if I tried to explain that in fact I am preparing for the eventuality of being rendered blind and deaf in an unthinkable accident in which my external sensory organs are mutilated beyond recognition and I am forced to retreat in to a fabricated reality with nothing and no one but my own cerebral capacities to keep me occupied.

No Boy Scout ever planned ahead like I do.


Carefully now… one foot in front of the other, across the tile floor to the oven. Turn the knob to 350. One, two, three, four steps to the refrigerator. Pull the magnetized metal door open; grope for the sunflower-yellow box of margarine, the sticky glass jar of raspberry jam.

But there is no arguing that in a scenario like that, the ability to bake a cake in one’s mind would certainly come in handy—as would, I imagine, experience in the fields of composing songs without instruments, painting without paint, or carrying on conversations with people who aren’t there.

Stirring the thick batter with a long wooden spoon, I wipe a stray wisp of hair from my forehead with the back of my hand.

The big pay-off, of course, will be sensuously wrapping my teeth around a heavenly forkful of warm, gooey chocolate… licking residual raspberry from my lips, eyelids sinking, mouth relaxing into an orgasmic smile with hints of buttercream in the corners… momentarily savoring the kind of divine happiness generally reserved for the well-dressed, too-thin women in Yoplait commercials.


Raise the fork slowly to my lips… Wrong! Go back.

I still haven’t made it past 1/2 tsp. of baking soda—it is impossible not to skip to the good parts!—but I persevere, like a stunned sparrow repeatedly slamming in to a window, chasing the dream that with that glorious bite of cake, at long last, the curse of corporeal being will be broken; the chains that now bind my happiness inexorably to the whims of fickle flesh will magically crumble. “Total Organ Independence”: that is my campaign slogan, and I think it is an admirable one. Who said we need eyes and ears, or legs, hands, genitals, or left kidneys to have a good time? Our heads came fully equipped with the most extraordinary state-of-the-art entertainment system ever invented. Limbless, senseless existence could be a vivid cinematic masterpiece experienced in real time, a never-ending lucid dream.

…Lucid dreaming, incidentally, is a skill I have absolutely no desire to develop—as a neurotic over-thinker, I fail to see the appeal in extending my daylight anxieties to the precious few hours in which we are allowed to abdicate our decision-making thrones; I like to dream for the same reason an overbearing business executive might discreetly slip out of the office every other Tuesday to a Dungeon to have his nipples twisted by a girl in a leather bathing suit—yet one that I take great interest in hearing others talk about.

My friend Ed is an habitual lucid dreamer. “You gotta be careful,” he explained to me in his sleepy southern drawl (odd, since he is from Albany) “‘cause you have to know that you’re dreaming, but you can’t be too conscious or you’ll wake up.” When Ed is driving, sometimes he does a quick double take at a road sign, snapping his neck back like it’s spring-loaded and firmly blinking his eyes open and shut three times. When questioned about this, he explained, much to my alarm, that it is a test to see if he’s dreaming: “If you look back and the writing on the sign hasn’t changed or melted or anything, it means you’re awake.” Since that conversation, I have never felt quite comfortable driving with Ed.

I would never want to control my dreams, if for no other reason than my tremendous affection for nonsensical excretions of the subconscious. Our brains are publishing houses that receive a thousand submissions from unknown authors every day. The volume of larval ideas that spontaneously generate and die inside our skulls every second is so staggering that we could not possibly examine every one—so generally, if a thought does not come neatly packaged and prefaced with a logical cover letter, the editor-in-chief of Brain Magazine rejects it before skimming the first word. Too often, I suspect, real genius is crushed to death at the bottom of the slush pile.
So I have taken it upon myself to cultivate a private garden of nonsense grown from the ethereal dream-thoughts that float up from that hazy blue space between waking and dreaming like the space between my bed and wall which I often fall in to in the middle of the night leaving my thighs and ribs constantly covered in bruises like the discolored skin of overripe fruit—intangible and strange, exquisitely delicate visions that dance away like ghosts of butterflies the moment I swing down my net.
The trick is catching them. Dream-thoughts run scared like piss-drenched alley cats the moment you become aware of them, just like Ed cautioned. I am a hunter seeking elusive prey—a tigress with padded paws and unblinking yellow eyes, ears pricked, acute senses electrically charged with hunger. I walk into the mist.

The irrational apparitions I seek are all around us, but they hide in holes underground or laugh down from high tree branches most of the day. The patient dream catcher needs only wait for the fog of slumber to roll in; at this strange hour, all the stirring brainthings creep out in to the open to feed.

My first fruitful catch was the night I awoke abruptly from a dream as though an alarm had gone off, a lingering image of two chatting women imprinted on my eyelids like a developing Polaroid, their nostrils flared in annoyance at having their conversation so rudely cut short. They were speaking in the dream tense! my brain screamed urgently.

They were speaking in the dream tense: a language that only exists in dreams—a universal tongue that transcends all borders of geography, culture, and time, tapping in to some ancient archetypal understanding. I found this thought so profoundly beautiful that I could not fall back asleep all night.

(Interestingly, I recently found out that in Turkish, there actually is a dream tense, although not in the sense that I had originally envisioned it. Writer Orhan Pamuk explains in an interview, “In Turkish we have a special tense that allows us to distinguish hearsay from what we’ve seen with our own eyes: when we are relating dreams, fairy stories or past events we could not have witnessed, we use this tense.")

And just the other night I captured a stunning dream-thought in the middle of having half-conscious sex with my boyfriend. Delirious with exhaustion, sighing and fumbling slowly in the pale hours of early dawn, it appeared: What key are we in? At first I did not think twice about it, but the dream-thought persisted: D major with two sharps? But that didn’t seem right. Something more complicated…E major? Could that be right? B major? No, too many sharps now—too prickly.

I almost laughed aloud. The harder I tried not the think about it, the faster this inexplicable inspiration snowballed. Tempo—Adagio? Allegro con spirito? Naturally, the time changed in places. Perhaps we could be more aptly described in several movements: “Concerto for Girl and Boy in A Major, with Optional Bedspring Accompaniment. First Movement: Largo Sostenuto…”

You may have missed the hypocrisy of my aforementioned desire to be independent from my own organs juxtaposed with my present involvement in a committed relationship. But, as I never miss an opportunity to highlight my own ideological shortcomings, let me now illuminate this egregious failure for you.

My friend Jim’s mother has a three-legged-dog named Frank, an absurd abomination of nature only slightly larger than a squirrel and covered in white ringlets of ridiculous hair, with two vacant black eyes taking up half of his skull and below them a tiny snarling hole full of needle teeth. Jim hates Frank.

“Hey Frank,” Jim gesticulates with a manic grin, waving his hands in front of the confused creature’s cross-eyed gaze. “Fuck you!”

Frank wiggles his nub of a tail and whines hopefully.

Frank the Three-Legged Dog has become my all-purpose relationship metaphor. He is the girlfriend I never want to be. He waddles frantically in your wake, wheezing desperately, demanding physical contact.

“Your dog has emotional issues,” I told Jim with genuine concern the first time I visited his house, while Frank gaped up at us with frightening intensity.

“Have some self-respect, friend,” I directed to the anxious fur ball that had arranged itself in a needy puddle around my feet.

Relationships breed monsters like Frank. There is nothing worse in the world than feeling like a helpless half, and that is precisely what we are brainwashed into believing: that we are a pathetic heap of missing shoes, a sad army of Lefts flip-flopping lopsidedly through life, desperately searching for the Rights that will balance our awkward, inadequate gaits.

“Fuck you, Frank,” Jim coos. The pitiful wretch stares back at him with undying devotion.

My continuous struggle with mental cake-baking is all I can do to keep my inner Frank at bay. When I take that bite, I tell myself, not only will I be free of the need for my body, but for other people, too. In my ideal state, people come and go constantly—I am standing in a river with my pants rolled up around my ankles; they are the fish brushing past my legs, speeding cars on a highway, a silent roar. Every now and then I reach down and grab hold of one, watch its body wriggle and squirm in my hands and think, "My god, you are alive. I can feel your heart beating, lungs expanding, veins pumping warmth—I can kiss you; I can break you; you are all mine." Then I get bored and put it down, or occasionally it fights its way out of my grasp—and I am standing in a river with my pants rolled up around my ankles.

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(First written for a Personal Essay class at Bard College, Nov. 1, 2008)