Ontological Overwrites

I don't know about you, but I spent a lot of time during the pandemic idly scrolling through amusing nonsense. I started "following" this sort of pseudo-philosophical guru's stream--podcasts masquerading as lectures, shouting at other panelists for sport, that kind of thing. He styled himself an expert in meditation and argumentation, neurology and neurotic relatives. Like any good snake oil salesman, he could find a cure for whatever ails you somewhere in the back, granted a moment.

He got interested in lucid dreaming for a while. He consulted "experts," did various experiments and streamed them live, which made me wince, though I watched; eventually, he turned his attention to hotter topics, but I decided to give it a go. After all, we were all going through the motions while we waited to sicken and die back then, so any escape hatch was bound to be attractive.

As it turns out, I'm a lousy lucid dreamer. The real thrill is supposed to come, not from becoming aware that you are dreaming in the dream, but from bending the dream to your will. If you're seriously skilled, you can--allegedly--accelerate or decelerate the flow of time, show off all sorts of abilities ordinarily confined to the pages of graphic novels, even alter your appearance, or the world's. It promised intoxication.

All I got was awareness.

I learned to be exquisitely conscious of the fact that I'm dreaming, while the dream is unfolding, but I can't do anything extraordinary with that awareness. I cannot fly. I cannot summon a sasquatch or a unicorn or a swarm of gossiping pixies. Not so much as a corned beef sandwich on rye. I just keep my arms and legs inside the ride, and hold on.

Take this dream, for example. I'm waiting. She's got something for me.

"Where am I?"

Her good eye locks onto me. What's going on with the other, I can only guess. It's rather unpleasant.

"Think of me as customer service," she says, in a voice that curls my toes, "what seems to be the problem?"

"Do you ever feel like you were designed to attract weirdness?"

"Constantly. Look, you're clearly here to complain about something. I can smell it on you like your mediocre lunch. Let me have it."

"I have all sorts of problems. What can you do about them?"

What does it look like when spectral strangeness that has replaced part of a face takes offense? The good eye remains impassive, but the bad eye is not pleased with that impudent question.

"I'm sure they are all nourishing and delicious."

"Look, I know this is a dream. You'll find that I am annoyingly hard to impress, or frighten."

"Vanity is a problem. What are the others?"

Ouch. There isn't much to this, as far as dreams and nightmares go, so far. Not much attention to the setting, for a start. Just darkness and vague shapes wafting about. The place smells like a dirty chalkboard. There's drumming, more musical than ominous.

"Well, my job is a disgusting charade that could be stolen at any moment by a robot; I'm ill and it will all be over soon, but I want to see how parts of it turn out. Mostly petty revenge talking there, but I'm at ease with it. There are things I'm not fit to do any more that I miss. A deranged octogenarian who cannot tell reality from television and his allies are orchestrating the collapse of a world I was fond of, and I am a clumsy lucid dreamer."

The air between us thickens and rustles like black leaves. I see my mother's shocked face through the little window in the classroom door of my kindergarten. I do not know what I was doing in the corner to elicit that expression. I was probably eating paste or writing naughty words on brightly colored construction paper, or treating my strange new body like a laboratory or a toy. Whatever it was, she was appalled. I have never forgotten that expression, on a face that was enormous in my small world.

The image fades. The feeling does not.

"Shame. Such a classic. Not so fashionable in some places, but bound to come back into style eventually." Her entire face coalesces, then changes. It changes in ways I am not consciously choosing, but it changes in all of the ways I hoped it would. Her eyes are busy reading and highly legible. Her eyebrows are studious. I want to have a wordless conversation with her mouth.

"How did you know you ought to look like that?"

"Your expression told me whatever was just right. Watch the faces of people trying to decide if they approve of whatever is in front of them. There are tells."

An image appears, as before. I am looking closely at a mole on my cheek. Its margins darken and become irregular as I watch, quaking with anxious certainty that melanoma has arrived. I feel the hand of illness on my throat.

I have had experiences of acute, hypochondriacal panic a lot, especially during the pandemic. I'm riding another out as the image fades.

"You were afraid. You are afraid. Afraid and ashamed. Are you a devout believer? I don't think so. There must be other problems. Please, I need them." I feel a hand, perhaps hers, caress my cheek. It's warmer and more gentle than I expected. To my surprise, I am not moved.

Another image appears. She, wearing the face I wished she'd have, is sitting opposite me in a cafe with burnt orange wallpaper that makes me think of fast food. She is in black. Victorian, corseted black. There's an ornate hat. On the table in front of her is a fresh bowl of my Bubbe's borscht. Not a clumsy facsimile of her borscht. Not even a stylish rendition of her borscht, executed by a serious chef with access to good ingredients and ample time.

Her borscht.

Just think about it. You have heard all sorts of people play instruments. You have heard all sorts of people talking. You have watched all sorts of people dance, even when they shouldn't have.

You know the difference between something made or done by someone you love, and all the rest. It's the aroma, not the color or what I can see of the texture. I can smell her muttering about my Zayde's wandering eye as she adds paprika and salt to this soup. In the ripples created by the motion of the one with the nice new face's spoon, I can see the face of the sweating, irascible butcher who gave her the beef bones that she liked best. He included a discount in exchange for local gossip.

"What are you eating?" I might as well see if she knows.

"Memories," she says, lowering her spoon with care onto the pristine napkin next to the bowl.

She picks up the bowl with both hands, tilts her head back as if a dentist has told her to do so, and pours hot borscht down her throat like a woman who has ached for beets for years. There are soft groans of delight. She lowers the empty bowl onto the table and sighs her contentment at me.

She did not offer me a drop. It is as if I watched my Bube rise from the dead, begin to smell again of fried onions and the slowly melting toffees in the pockets of her beloved, threadbare, lilac cardigan, smile fondly at me, and then sink back into the dark, moaning and begging for aid.

"Why didn't you tell me that this is a nightmare?" I try to knock her hat off. I fail. You see what I mean: I can only watch, most of the time, and know that I am watching.

"You did not ask. Shame. Fear. Aching nostalgia for the dead and their remaindered worlds. What else is wrong? I'm still hungry."

"I can't believe you didn't offer me any of that magnificent soup. I would have enjoyed it in ways you cannot imagine. Are you feeding on suffering?"

Candor is a great thing in dreams. I am never worried what anyone will think of me, when I express myself in a dream. I'm aware of how wonderful that feels, given the awkward lucidity.

"You cannot imagine what I enjoy--and yes, to the dietary query." She returns to form, and we are in the chalky dark together again.

"You do not understand suffering. Think for a moment about how many of your prophets and sages and saints recommend world renouncing poverty, and spending most of your time with the poor, the sick, the ostracized, the disenfranchised, strangers, foreigners, prostitutes, beggars...do you know what they found out, the wisest of you, with those who suffer, not on occasion, but constantly? They drop everything that they cannot carry with them. So much pretense, inauthenticity, social theater; it all folds when you are unlikely to live out the month, or if you cannot see, or walk. Suffering reveals truths that excite and nourish me." Her misty eye glows.

"What truths?"

"Most of you are swarms of shame and guilt and fear and rage. The more passionate your devotion to terrible ways of being, the greater my intoxication. You're bread, after all. You watch yourselves rise, grow stale, and break."

"Why haven't you scared me yet?"

"We're getting there."

The darkness between us does not flutter so much as form an undulating swarm this time. We are shoulder to shoulder, serving thin soup and stale bread to the homeless. She's wearing a nun's habit under her disposable apron. I look down. Just some schlub. Not a priest, not a rabbi, not a professional basketball player or a physicist in the running for a Nobel, mind you. Just some guy, doing his part for the less fortunate.

"You look troubled, my son," she says to a guy who looks like he woke up on the floor a few minutes ago. His hair is wild. One of his eyes is clearly infected.

He reaches into a plastic tub of produce next to her elbow. He pulls out a pretty stout avocado, shakes it in her face, and shouts: "What the fuck do you call this? Are aliens laying eggs around here, that you freaks feed us?" He pulls a dirty exacto knife from the waistband of his hand-me-down sweat pants and goes for her neck. I hear it click just before he lunges. I press the button to alert security that I somehow know is under the counter.

She takes it in the neck. She takes him by the neck. She yanks his face in very close to hers and snarls, weirdly soft and clear: "What does it feel like, my son? Do you feel the thrill of a hunter bringing down an animal? Do you imagine that I can stand in for someone who wronged you? Is it like revenge? Was mommy mean?" She's holding him about four inches off the floor. He's literally swinging, gently, while his hand-me-down sweatpants fall off.

He bursts into tears. I rush over to apply the cleanest towel I can find to her wound. Security lumbers in, taking the whole thing very seriously, does sweatpants some none too subtle bodily harm, and drags him off. They tell me to get her to the infirmary on site.

We're making our way to the infirmary like a horse with five legs when I have to ask: "Why here? He was a little scary when I thought he was going to carry on cutting everyone in sight, sure. But it's over. I think you botched it."

She laughs. "Where are we?" she asks. We stop in the bright, mop weary hallway. Her left arm is still around my shoulders, her right holding that towel to her throat. It is a lovely throat, I'll give her that.

"A homeless shelter, no?" I look around as if I'm not sure myself.

"For me, it is a banquet hall. For you? The future. Be in a new way," she says, and I wake up.

I can smell my surroundings before I open my eyes. I can feel the exacto knife, pressed against my belly by the waistband of my sweatpants. I am not home.