A writing experiment, my response to stories like Lovecraft's "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" and E.T.A. Hoffmann's "The Golden Pot.".
The old professor welcomed me to his office with a formal politeness that did not hide his clear desire to be left alone. He lifted a stack of files off the chair before his desk, somehow finding another place for them in the fortress of books that surrounded him. I introduced myself and he said that he had heard of me as a formidable student. Pleasantries behind us, I pulled out the stack of papers I had brought and laid them in front of him. They were interlibrary loan slips from four different universities, signed with four different names but all in the same handwriting, and in a range of languages that I knew only he of all the scholars in Boston had mastered.
“So,” he said, “you have found me out. Why have you done this? What business is it of yours how a retired scholar spends his time?”
I said, “I think I understand what you are doing, but I need to know.”
He sighed and then looked at me for an uncomfortable time. His expression shifted from annoyance to something I eventually recognized as pity.
He said, “I suppose I must. If you have already guessed, then you know it is the tradition for all sufferers from this affliction to pass on their stories before they leave this earth. The great book in which I had planned to reveal all will never be written, so you will have to serve as the conduit of my knowledge.”
He leaned back, crossed his hands over his stomach, and stared at the ceiling. Then he began to speak. He never once looked at me during the whole long tale. His eyes were focused elsewhere.
When I was eighteen years old, I fell severely ill. Some kind of fever, they tell me. For two weeks I lay on death’s door, hardly breathing, eating nothing, although sometimes they were able to make my limp body drink a little water.
Then my body recovered. My fever cooled, my breathing steadied, the pallor of death left my skin. Yet I did not awaken. I still lay in my bed, unreachable. The doctor feared my brain had been damaged. My grandmother summoned an exorcist who had learned his craft in the old country, sneaking him in while my mother slept. He examined me but refused to do the rite. He said, my grandmother told me on her own deathbed, “He is not possessed. He has gone away.”
I did not awaken until another month had passed. My younger sister injured herself and cried out in pain, and I ran to her and found her burned by hot oil. I was alert, coherent, able to run water on her wounds and then call the ambulance when my mother was too hysterical to speak in English.
People called it a miracle, and they held a special mass for my recovery. All the old women in the neighborhood came. Everyone assumed that I had been unconscious and remembered nothing, so they asked me no questions and I did not have to lie. But the old exorcist was right. I had gone away.
He paused again then, for several minutes. When he resumed, he said,
It is different for everyone. The monk Gregorius journeyed to a fortress that guarded the lands of light against the forces of darkness, a place where gold-helmed heroes did endless battle against armies of demons and the great fell beasts that served them. He was their physician, healing their wounds with outpourings of love.
The scholar al Halam dreamed of a long flight on the back of a gigantic bird and woke to find himself in a vast and beautiful city full of learned, cultivated men. There he frequented coffee houses and pleasure gardens where he debated philosophy with all the sages of past times. Their thoughts, he said, soared to heaven with their words. When they tired of debate, they listened to music, watched splendid dancers, ate of delicacies that took the physical body to the same heights as their learning.
For me, it was a garden.
I woke in a pleasant glade surrounded by leaves of a hundred shapes and shades of green, on a bed of moss dotted with tiny flowers. After I sat up, I realized I was thirsty. I heard water trickling, and brushing aside a branch I found the stone head of some grotesque creature with a gentle stream of water flowing from his mouth. After I had drunk my fill, I explored and found that this head was one piece of a crumbling stone fountain. Pushing through the bushes I found other faces, other bits of strange and marvelous sculpture.
I was drawn on. I never questioned where I was or how I had come there. In that place there are no doubts, no nagging questions. One simply goes on from one delight to the next. When I felt hungry, I found a grove of bushes hung with red and purple berries sweeter than a mother’s love. When I wanted to rest, I found more beds of moss softer than cotton, or carved stones that made splendid seats.
In that place there is no north or south. One simply moves toward what one wants and finds it. When I felt lonely and wanted company, I turned in that direction. I found a grove of vast trees with wide spaces between them where two dozen young people were dancing. They welcomed me among them, for of course they were lacking one man, and I danced and ate and laughed with them.
When I wished to be alone again I turned in a different direction and resumed exploring the vast overgrown ruin. In it I found a colony of scarlet birds nesting in the nooks of a vast relief carving depicting some ancient battle. They spoke to me in musical tones that I could understand, and they told me about the joys of flight and the secrets of the trees.
Later on I felt an urge for something different, so I climbed toward the mountains visible in the distance. I entered a grove of dark hemlocks where the rocks took eerie shapes, and voices whispered in the breeze. I reached a great rock shot through with veins of crystal and climbed atop it. Looking out over the valley I saw that the garden went on to the horizon, cut by gleaming rivers and dotted with striking towers. In the distance I saw a great storm looming up. As it came toward me the air cooled and the wind shook the hemlock branches. The voices did not now whisper, but shouted curses and warnings. Lightning burst forth and thunder boomed, and in the air I saw two great armies battling. The fury of their fight was astonishing, and when the storm reached me the rain and wind had the same fury.
But then it passed, and the garden gleamed in the sun. As I stood on the rock, looking around me in wonder, a wolf came out of the trees. It came up to me gently and nudged me with its long snout, scratching the ground with its huge paws. When I looked into its eyes I understood that it was summoning me to follow. I leaped away with it, and together we ran through the forest and across the mountains, deer and rabbits and animals I could not name fleeing before us. We came to a secret valley where we joined the rest of his pack, and I played with wolf cubs and shared their meal of warm flesh.
When I turned from the wolves’ valley I felt a sudden desire to be at once back in the familiar garden around the crumbling fountain, and so I found a route that brought me back quickly and easily from a journey that had taken over a day.
So it went the whole time I was there. I was never sad or bored, but went on exploring and learning, making friends with animals of a dozen kinds. For company there were my new friends, who lived in a town that surrounded a plaza where an event of some kind was always taking place, dance or play or musical performance. Among them was a woman who took me as her lover. After one of our dances she grasped my hand and leapt into the air, and we flew as falcons to a splendid chamber in a high tower where we passed the night.
You may be thinking that this was my dream, a boy’s dream so different from those of the monk and the scholar. And so it was. But consider that I was a boy, and not a bookish one. My passion was natural history, collecting insects and classifying snails. What did I know of paradise? I had read no stories of armies battling in the sky, knew nothing of ruined cities or the grotesque faces on ancient fountains. What did I know of love, who had never even kissed? And who ever had a dream so long, so consistent, so detailed? I believe the place I travelled to was real.
I believe the other worlds are vast, so vast that our earth is only a little corner of their vastness, and that is how all who journey there find places where their souls are at home.
I have spent the rest of my life struggling to return. All the work I have done, the languages I have learned, the studies I have undertaken, the travels to remote monasteries, all were part of my quest. Which has led nowhere. In all the years since then I have had only brief glimpses, mostly in dreams. This great career of mine, the books, the awards, they had meaning to me only as steps along a journey that I see now I will never complete. My colleagues often marveled at how long and hard I worked. But of course they could never understand what drove me.
He turned his eyes on me again and grew grimly serious. He said,
My body is failing, and soon I will go to my death. I tell you, with all my heart, do not do as I have done. Do not seek the path, for you will not find it. It is not in your power. It happens, or it does not; the door opens without your knocking, or it never opens at all. Find some other kind of life than the pathetic one I have lived.
I left him then. His advice had been sincerely given, but I knew I would not follow it. For I had also been given a glimpse of paradise, and knew I would never rest until I either found my way back or died as he was dying, a sad old man amidst the piles of paper that were all that was left of his dream.
