Perchance to Dream

Normally, I do not remember my dreams. Last week, however, I dreamed a dream that has remained stiletto-sharp stenciled in my memory. Now, I do not know if dreams represent displaced or distorted or symbolized wish gratification, as Freud said; or archetypal deposits in the human collective unconscious, as Jung theorized; or the integration of new knowledge into the memory system, or a janitorial service decluttering the mind, or a spontaneous mashup of memory and knowledge and emotion and sensation, or a random and purposeless neuronal firing, as various cognitive scientists maintain. I do not know if dreams are warnings, such as the one Joseph received that sent the Holy Family fleeing into Egypt to escape the paranoid Herod, nor do I know if, as Ecclesiastes asserts, granting dreams any credence whatsoever is to “catcheth at a shadow, and followeth after the wind.” I do not know if dreams are the touchstones of our natural character, as Emerson and Thoreau claim, or if, as Barbara Kingsolver believes, dreams are simply “made out of what [we] do all day,” in much “the same way a dog that runs after rabbits will dream of rabbits.”

What I do know is this: last week I dreamed I awoke and began my slow somnolent shamble toward the Mr. Coffee machine downstairs. As is my habit, I paused to look out the stairway landing window onto my backyard, only to see that during the night it had snowed. I was heart-stung and crestfallen. Despite the arrival of spring, of the urgent green impulse of April, of the balmier temperatures betokening Earth’s yearning tilt toward the sun; despite the fact that no snow had been foreseen by the dopplered devices of the meteorologists, a deep layer of snow carpeted my backyard, and in the light cast by the moon I saw the traversing tracks of dogs and cats and foxes and rabbits imprinted in the snow. And in my dream I had my usual fantasy about where those creatures were heading and why; about the purpose—for I always assumed their passing purposeful—that motivated their nocturnal journey, part of which led through my backyard; about the intention secreted in those tracks.

And in that magicked whisking that happens only in dreams, I was suddenly outside, following those tracks, and they led me to a small-creature-only tavern, open only from sundown to sun up, enclaved among a densely wooded area north of town. The music of Three Dog Night and Fleet Foxes and Steppenwolf and Cat and Fox and Stray Cats and Atomic Kitten and Cat Stevens filled the tavern, slipped out the open-just-a-crack windows, and echoed among the trees and against the star-gemmed night sky. I peered in a window and saw the patrons drinking Jackrabbit and Red Dawg beer, or, perhaps, a glass of Dog Point or Rock Rabbit or Zeller Schwartzkatz wine. They discussed Snoop Dog’s soon-to-be-released album, Doggumentary, the follow-up to his successful Doggiestyle, and the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises, featuring Anne Hathaway as Catwoman—though most agreed Halle Berry was drop-dead, epically feline. Eventually, the talk turned to human beings, and it became scornful.

“Yet to be housebroken,” one dog said; “they soil the planet.”

“Mindlessly instinctual, subject to pack mentality,” said a cat.

“Impossible to train when they get older,” a fox observed.

“Always in the way,” a rabbit sighed, “always overhead.”

“And their Bible,” the dog exclaimed, “what’s with that `dominion’ thing in Genesis 1, and that `every creature that moves and lives shall be food for you’ crap in Genesis 9! Talk about your blood libel! What happened to the every seed-bearing plant and tree and fruit shall be food for you?”

“Yes,” said a scholarly-looking fox at the next table, looking up from his copy of All Creatures Great and Small; “Thoreau says ` No humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature which holds its life by the same tenure that he does.’ Humans! A rhetoric of discontinuity is all you can expect from them. All noise and forgetting. Armored in narcissism. Think prayer is a bullet point on an action agenda. Their metaphysics encompassed by the question , `Is there an app for that?’”

“Oh, they believe the craziest things,” the cat said; “space craft that will arrive to take them to paradise, or that guy with `the gaze,’ who can supposedly cure their ailments just by staring at them for a couple of minutes. I mean, jeez, back in the day, I was worshipped by the Egyptians.”

“Have you noticed how they use us as metaphors for things they find disagreeable or unpleasant?” the dog asked. “Take me, for instance: an unattractive person is a `dog,’ and there’s `a dog’s life’ and the `dog days’ of August. It hardly makes up for it when cool Randy Jackson says `Yo, dog!’”

“And what about `catty’ and `cat burglar,’” the cat said. “And that nine lives thing is a hoot. And you’d never find me on a hot tin roof.”

“Yes, and I’ve got to live with being considered sneaky and crafty,” said the fox. “Why, there’s even a play by this guy from Shakespeare’s time, Ben Johnson, called Volpone, or The Fox, and this Volpone is about the greediest, most devious guy you’d ever find.”

“Well, I’ve got `rabbit punch’ to live with,” said the rabbit. “My God, Stephen King uses the endearment `nuzzle bunny!’” “Plus, I’m like a label for being afraid and fearful. And they make fun of my, uh, propensity to procreate.”

“Sounds like sublimated envy to me,” said the scholarly fox at the next table.

“Thanks, Sigmund” the rabbit said.

“And then there’s Disney,” the dog said. “They humanize us, and our kids watch that stuff, and I worry they’ll become strangers to our species’ natures.”

“True,” said the cat; “though I got to admit I like the cat in Shrek. I mean, Antonio Banderas does the voice. He’s cool.”

The conversation waned, and their eyes shift to the screen of a TV mounted over the bar, where patrons can watch dogs trotting humans around an arena, cats playing Frisbee with lunging humans, an Iditerod race with human-drawn sleds, a lipsticked pitbull being interviewed by a fox with a thoroughly vulpine reputation for claiming FEMA has set up concentration camps, a bloviating pug with a propensity for alpha hypophamine uttering deranged nonsense about death panels and “Imam Obama” having no birth certificate, a wild-eyed screeching cat from Minnesota wants to sink her claws into un-American Americans, and a lachrymose, naugahyde-brown hounddog, sniffling and blowing into his hanky as he recounts his American Dream-themed rise from an obscure Ohio doghouse to leadership of the nation’s House.

And then, once again magicked whisked, I am back in my backyard, and I notice that among those animal tracks is stamped another set, immediately recognizable: the booted footprints of a human being During the wind-chilled night, someone, from somewhere, going someplace, for some reason it will never be given me to know, crossed my backyard. Those footprints. I struggle to understand their source or end or purpose. Those footprints. And I feel a string of familiarity, tugged, clenched, drawn tight. Those footprints. And for some reason I recall that the deepest circle in Dante’s Hell has no fire. It is all ice. It doesn’t burn; it is frozen. Those footprints. Straight-lined across my backyard. Left while I slumbered. Restless. Lonely. The urgent, ancient journeying, the insistent movement of creatures toward the end of etching the nebulous, half-locked away idea of themselves into a form they can identify as themselves. Those footprints. Tracings of a brief moment, a microhistory, undocumentable documents inscribed in the snow. Those footprints. Snow graffiti. Sheaves of evanescence. Citations that incite but don’t explain. Fragments, finally, unforged links of a pattern of meaning hidden to me, outside the range of my apprehension, perhaps, too, outside that of the one who made them.

Those footprints. And looking back, I saw my footprints leading to where I was standing. Looking forward, I saw unbroken snow. The night seemed to gather itself, to draw in its breath. It waited. And I awoke.