“Peering out his bedroom window, his eyes flattened into squinting slits, Mitchell Brant saw her.”
So begins The Eye-Dancers, but is this episode merely a dream or is it real? Or is it, in some strange, inexplicable way, straddling the sorcerer’s tightrope between the two worlds, with one foot in each?
This of course begs the question: What are dreams, anyway? And should we even preface references to them with innocuous terms like “merely”?
Marc Kuslanski, for one, would certainly answer with a resounding yes. Or, knowing Marc, he’d probably say, “affirmative,” but that is neither here nor there. Logical to the core, unwilling to grapple with the mystical or the unexplained, Marc believes that dreams are nothing more than a biological function, a by-product of sleep.
“We’re beings of electrical current, pure energy,” he explains in chapter four. “While we’re in our sleeping state, the brain needs something to do. It gets bored. So, it manufactures stories, adventures, even nightmares. It’s like a prisoner in solitary confinement. Nothing going on. No outside stimuli. So you need to create your own entertainment. That’s all dreams are, you know. Just the brain–your brain–killing time.”
Mitchell Brant, Joe Marma, and Ryan Swinton, Marc’s target audience for his mini-dissertation, don’t agree. They’ve each dreamed of the “ghost girl” three nights in a row (the reason they ask Marc’s opinion on the subject to begin with), and are convinced the dreams have significance. More than once, over the course of The Eye-Dancers, the characters are struck by the fine line that separates our dreams from our actual lives–to the point that they start to question where the one begins and the other ends. I suppose that’s a line we’ve all wondered about, at one time or another.
I’ve certainly had my share of dreams that have caused me to take a step back, examine, and delve into the heart of the matter. And I remember the day–a snowy, frozen January afternoon with the wind slamming into the house, the eaves whining in protest, the world a white snow globe, the flakes swirling, blotting out the yard–when my older brother told me about dying in dreams . . .
“You never see yourself die in your own dream,” he said. “Am I right? Or am I right?”
I looked at him, shook my head. He was wrong. There were multiple dreams I’d had, nightmares, where I knew I would die . . .
“But you didn’t see yourself die, did you?” he persisted. “You didn’t feel your heart stop. Didn’t feel the fangs gash into your neck. I bet you woke up right before it happened . . .”
I didn’t answer. It was as if he were inside my own head. He had nailed it to a T. Outside, a stiff gust of wind rattled the windows, invisible fingers seeking entry into the house, an escape from the cold.
“If you actually did see yourself die in your dream,” my brother went on, “we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now. When you see yourself die in your own dream–and I mean, really see yourself die, not wake up a second before you do–you really will die. Your heart’ll just stop, right there in your bed.”
“That’s dumb,” I said. “I mean, how could anyone know that for sure?”
“Ask around,” he said. “You’ll see.”
I did ask around, and eventually I realized my brother’s theory wasn’t rock-solid unassailable truth. But it stayed with me anyway, perhaps triggering a lifelong fascination with dreams–a fascination shared by many others. Dreams have been studied, speculated about, hypothesized, diced, sliced, and spliced for millennia, and surely, a thousand years hence, the field of oneirology will still be going strong. People want to know, have always wanted to know–what do our dreams mean? What do they represent?
Have you ever experienced such an unusual dream–not necessarily even a bad one–that, upon waking, you couldn’t help but ask yourself, “Why in the world would I ever dream that? Why would I even imagine something so completely bizarre?”
The rapid scene changes. The helter-skelter quality of the “stories” that unfold. The themes and dangers and desires that define the world of our dreams. What should we do with them? Anything? Or do we blissfully ignore them, relegating them to some neat, locked box, to be opened only when needed in passing–perhaps to amuse a dinner guest or scare a friend or impress a date–but never to be explored in depth, or grappled with in any meaningful way?
Maybe we tend to push our dreams to the background because, well–how else should we respond? We can’t let them cripple us or hinder us in our everyday lives. Perhaps more than that . . . even after all these years, all the scientific advances and data and studies, dreams remain elusive. No one can say, unequivocally, what they mean and why they occur. The answers are likely broad and layered anyway, dependent on the individual person and the individual dream in question.
Are dreams moving symbols, manifestations of our fears, needs, desires, memories, goals? Are they gateways to previous lives or vehicles for predicting the future? Could it be that they provide us with glimpses into the multiverse, our assorted lives sprinkled throughout alternate realities and dimensions? That they are, in effect, another version of reality and not actually “dreams” at all?
“You know what it felt like,” Mitchell Brant says shortly after he and the others have traversed the void and find themselves in the alternate-world town of Colbyville. “When she was in our dreams, it felt real.”
Who knows–maybe we even have it all upside down. Maybe, just maybe, there is another version of ourselves, somewhere, who, every night, “dreams” our lives here on earth, our days unfurling strand by delicate strand in the mind of our counterpart while they sleep. And maybe, while we are asleep, we, in turn, “dream” their lives for them–the two intersecting, interweaving, forever linked . . .
. . . in the wormhole of our dreams.
Thanks so much for reading!
–Mike