If I Stop Dreaming

If I Stop Dreaming John MacBeath Watkins

If I Stop Dreaming... What if you one day realized you were God...and everything was your fault?

By John MacBeath Watkins

"If I stop dreaming , the world will end," I told Dr. Motherwell. Motherwell was a plump, earnest man in his fifties who wore a white shirt and dark, narrow tie.

He had graying hair, the prison pallor I had come to associate with office

workers, and an expression of uncomprehending sympathy. "So, when you sleep…" 1

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If I Stop Dreaming John MacBeath Watkins "It's not that," I said. "It's in the daytime, when I'm interacting with other people in the world." "What are the nature of your hallucinations?" "Right now, I'm hallucinating that I'm talking to you." It sounded so sophomoric that I was embarrassed. "So," Motherwell said. "You hallucinate that you are living a perfectly ordinary life." "Exactly. And by dreaming it, I make it exist." I had not thought this would be so easy to make clear. I had a moment of euphoria, and thought I could hear someone playing 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow' on a theremin. That seldom happens anymore. "So, why an ordinary life? If by dreaming it is so, why not make yourself rich? Why not give yourself many beautiful lovers?" He paused a moment. "Wait, are you rich? Do you have beautiful women raining upon you like a plague of frogs?" "No, doctor," I said ruefully, "I can't imagine such nice things happening to me." "And so they don't." I nodded. "You…have considered the possibility that you are not, in fact, hallucinating, haven't you? What if the world exists beyond you, and you only have a small place in it? What if you strut your little hour or two, and then are gone, like the rest of us? How do you know the world will stop existing if you stop imagining your own small place in it?" "I realized what was happening a few years ago," I told him. "In college."

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If I Stop Dreaming John MacBeath Watkins "College?" A look of understanding and relief came over Dr. Motherwell's face. "Tell me, were any illegal drugs involved?" I hesitated. I didn't want him to get the impression this was just a doper's dream. "It was the one time I took LSD," I confessed.

I knew that ergot mold had been used for 2,000 years as a migraine cure, but I couldn’t get any, and besides, the side effects can be distressing and sometimes fatal. There was another drug I knew of that sent blood to the same parts of the brain, and that was LSD. Someone had told me people who tripped regularly didn’t have migraines. I thought it was worth a try. I already had hallucinations that went with the migraines. I would see a glowing aura around objects and people. I thought the hallucinations without the migraines would be preferable to those that accompanied the migraines. I took what was supposed to be a small dose, one that my dealer told me I could function while taking. Drug dealers, it seems, are not as trustworthy as pharmacists. Before long I was beginning to think it was a mistake to go to my classes on the drug. This is understandable, because the side effects of the drug that I considered undesirable were the effects the drug dealer was selling. No doubt my dealer thought he was doing me a kindness. In Lit, we were discussing Robinson Crusoe for some reason. It was a book most of us had covered in high school, if not junior high. There was this very smart girl, Leslie Norman, who thought it was just dumb that we had to do such a juvenile book. She had read it when she was a pre-teen. 3

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If I Stop Dreaming John MacBeath Watkins "…and before he swims out to the wreck," she was complaining, "he takes off all his clothes, right? Then when he gets there, he starts putting things in his pockets. The book's just not that well written, is what I'm saying." The thing is, with the aid of LSD I could see him taking his clothes off and swimming out to the wreck. I could see him putting things in his pocket. Before the lecturer could intervene and get us to look at why the book had become part of the mythology of our culture, which was the point of us reading it in English 101, I leaped in to tell Leslie (who was cute but abrasive) the profound vision the acid had just given me about Robinson Crusoe. "You're overlooking the implications of what Defoe is saying. He doesn't want to be too obvious about it, perhaps, because maybe it is also about himself." At this point every eye in the room was gazing at me, and I began to irrationally fear that the class would turn on me. But I was committed, and I had to tell them. "If a naked Robinson Crusoe is putting things in his pocket, Defoe is obviously telling you Crusoe is a marsupial. And female." The whole class began to laugh, baying like marsupial monkeys barking their hostility at a predator they have just realized cannot climb trees. Only the pinched, angry face of the lecturer was not an open mouth showing white teeth. I got up carefully from my chair, which fortunately was near the back of the class, and started backing toward the door. "Where do you think you are going, Evan Whistler?" the lecturer called to me.

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If I Stop Dreaming John MacBeath Watkins "Oh, just, um, out," I said, then turned and ran. (I would never return to that class and eventually dropped it.) I sat down on a bench in the red-brick square and read the relevant passages in the book. It turned out Leslie was wrong. Defoe said Crusoe took off his clothes and swam out to the wreck, then a few pages later said he swam out in his breeches and socks. The defect was as much in Leslie’s reading as in Defoe’s writing. I could see her reading about a beautiful young man taking off his clothes and swimming out to the wreck. Disappointment and anger had swept over her when Defoe clothed his hero a few pages later. It was then that she decided the book was crap. Why had she introduced pockets into the narrative? Pockets were obviously female. What would Freud say? This all happened about ten minutes into the class, so I had plenty of time before philosophy 201. I watched the fountain for a time. As I walked past a tall, slender modern sculpture with an eye carved all the way through its head, it leaned down and tried to confide something that I didn't quite catch. Someone seemed to be playing 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow' on a theremin. I stared for a long time at a strangeshaped stone on the lawn next to the square, thinking it was too complicated being a stone. "Red" Pinkney, the Marxist who sat next to me in philosophy, came along after I don't know how long and asked, "Are you coming to class, or communing with nature instead today?"

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If I Stop Dreaming John MacBeath Watkins I didn't trust myself to speak, so it seemed simplest just to walk with him and sit down. There were less than twenty people in the class, and this made it less intimidating than English Lit. We were discussing systems of ontology, metaphysics and epistemology. All of us construct the world with our minds, shaping sense data into a reality we can comprehend. But how can we establish a link between the world that is, and the world that we construct with our minds? It’s one of the classic questions of philosophy, and one of the thorniest. That's when solipsism came up. "If you argue that the whole world exists only in your imagination, you are taking the most logically unassailable position in all of philosophy," Professor Grey said. "Any proof brought against you, any physical action taken against you, is a figment of your own imagination." "Could we all be solipsists, imagining each other?" asked Red, always the subversive. "Trust me, I would not choose to imagine you, Mr. Pinkney," Prof. Grey said. "Ah, but I would," Red argued. "But then it would be like, like if we were all going off in our own bubbles," I said. “No man is a bubble, Mr. Whistler," Prof. Grey said. "No man is a pizza, either," Red muttered. I said nothing more in the course of the class that day. Instead, I listened to the discussion of solipsism. I realized that they kept saying "if everything was a figment of your imagination," and concluded that they were speaking to me. Then I realized that if 6

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If I Stop Dreaming John MacBeath Watkins the others in the classroom were figment of my imagination, this was me trying to explain things to myself. By the end of that class, I was convinced that I had dreamed the whole world. When I came down, you might suppose this conviction would go away, but it did not. I was still convinced the world was my own dream. At first I felt empowered. I thought I could change the dream and change my life. If I could imagine women being attracted to me, they would be. If I could imagine riches, I would have them. At that time, I had a roommate named Nate. He had the worst-smelling feet I'd ever whiffed. Nice guy, smelly feet. Anyway, I thought this would be a good start. I didn't have to put up with his smelly feet, and I could do more than make him leave his shoes outside. I could change the dream. That night in our dorm room, Nate was relaxing on the upper bunk while I was doing homework at my desk. I looked up at his feet and said, “Nate, wouldn't it be great if your feet didn't stink? He gave me a long-suffering look. “Dude, my shoes are outside in the window box and I washed and powdered my feet. What more do you want me to do? “Nothing, Nate,” I said, regretting that I'd hurt his feelings (which after all were in some sense my feelings.) “I'm just trying to dream up a way to help you.”

The next day Nate was crossing a street when the brakes went out on a dump truck and he died under its tires. I thought I was just willing his feet to stop stinking, but 7

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If I Stop Dreaming John MacBeath Watkins unconsciously I must have resented him so much that I wanted to eliminate him from the script entirely. It shouldn't matter. He was just a figment of my imagination. I dreamed him, and I stopped dreaming him. But I felt guilty for having eliminated him. All the people around me were created by me, which meant that all were somehow a part of me. I felt for them all, even the ones I didn't particularly like. They represented parts of myself that I didn't like. I won't bore you with my romantic history. It boils down to this: Any woman who would sleep with me would sleep with anyone, and did. I hoped for someone who would love me in particular, not men in general. It never happened. The rejection I took from others was me rejecting myself. The only creature on earth that loved me was my cat, Beatrice. I would hold her gently purring feline body to me and say, “I love my cat,” and know that in all the world only she accepted my love. She died recently, wasting away as her kidneys failed. The one thing I had created that loved me was gone. You will say, cats die, get another, but the same will happen again. It is because of the way I create the world. A solipsist is his own god, his own devil, his own heaven or hell. Cats die because I have made them to die. The flaws within me have made the world as it is, and shaped the way I live within it. I have to work in order to buy food, or I will experience the pain of starvation. I’m an actor, but not a good or famous one. My stage name is Silas Night, and my sinister face is enough to get me gigs as a villain. My dream of the world forces me to create illusions of evil to keep my body clothed and fed. That I have to do these things is a sort 8

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If I Stop Dreaming John MacBeath Watkins of mortification of the flesh, I have decided. Or, since the flesh is something I just imagine, perhaps mortification of the soul. I lived with the pain of this, knowing that all the misery in the world was a reflection of my own conflicts, that wars between nations were wars within myself. When I saw video of the airliners flying into the World Trade Towers, I had to ask myself why I would do that, what sick, twisted part of myself would create the hate-filled fanatics who seized the planes, what self-punishment was involved in killing thousands of my own creations, why I was killing part of myself. And why had I placed myself at a distance, seeing it on television instead of in person? I have tried to deal with my conflicts. I know there is good in me; I see it in the face of a smiling child, the flight of a heron, the beauty of the mountains, mist among the fir trees. But it is also a part of me that created tsunamis, famines, all the deaths from AIDS, wars that seem without end or purpose. Sometimes I try to do good. One recent experiment was to try and end the war in Sri Lanka. The result was the tsunami that killed people from Asia to Africa and brought a temporary truce. Even that whittled away as the conflicts within me reasserted themselves. You ask yourself, Dr. Motherwell, why did I not come to you or one of your colleagues sooner if my inner conflicts are causing so much pain for me and for others created by me. Remember that I know you are another creation of my own mind. I am essentially talking to myself here. I am here because this is the only way I can say these things to myself, and I'm hoping that I, in the guise of you, will tell me things I cannot otherwise tell myself. 9

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If I Stop Dreaming John MacBeath Watkins I am close to suicide, Dr. Motherwell. But I know that my dream will stop if I kill myself. Do I want this world to end? This awful, imperfect world that is the embodiment of my own wounded psyche is all I have, and all that the bits of me, such as yourself, have. Tell me, Dr. Motherwell, tell me the secrets I will not tell myself in any other way. How can I stop suffering?

Dr. Motherwell had listened intently while I told him this. "Suppose that you were an insignificant man, who wishes to be grander than he is,” Motherwell said. “Wouldn't you imagine yourself to have some secret importance that no one else can see? You take upon yourself all the troubles of the world, imagine that you are the cause of them, because it is more painful to accept that you are the cause of very little. I think you must learn to love the little life you lead, and not aspire to godhood. I think we will be able to do this, but first perhaps we should get you on some medications that might help with these delusions." "You are telling me that I'm insane?" Not what I had come to hear, or was it? "You live your life in a very sane manner, Evan. We just have to change the way you think about it, is all," Dr. Motherwell said. "I am not the creator of all the misery in the world. Only of my own. Yes, I suppose I did come to hear that," I said. Motherwell smiled. He was beginning to conclude that he could solve my problems. I reached into the satchel at my feet and pulled out a compact .38. 10

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If I Stop Dreaming John MacBeath Watkins "Thank you, doctor," I said, and cocked the gun and released the safety before putting the barrel against my sternum and pulling the trigger. I looked down at my chest and saw my body becoming transparent. I looked at Dr. Motherwell, and saw him sitting there agape, quickly losing substance. I could see a picture on the wall through him, then I could see trees through the wall, mountains through the building across the street, and stars through the mountains. Finally there was nothing more to see. I had destroyed my entire universe. I had never tried a sensory deprivation tank, but it must be very like the nothingness in which I found myself. Nothingness, nothingness, and more Nothingness and more Nothingness. It seemed eons were passing, or perhaps there was no time and I hallucinated time so it could pass. After eternity or something like it, hallucinations came to fill the void. The world was void, and there came the word, and the word was “Thorazine,” spoken in a quiet, gentle, confident voice by someone in my hospital room.

Since then, I've had very little trouble with migraines.

Finis.

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