I awakened in the middle of the night. The room was dark. It was another one of those dreams that seem so real while they last that even on awakening, it takes a few minutes to understand that what has passed through one’s mind are but shadowy forms. Why some such dreams appear so “real” that even after awakening I remain convinced they are of events that actually occurred, eludes me. Were the dream a happy one of peaceful places, warm friends, and gentle ebb-and-flow breezes I wouldn’t mind at all, let me tell you! Indeed, I rather fancy that it’s quite harmless to wake with a smile on the lips to keep enjoying the exquisite elixir of a relaxing soul-satisfying dream.
My dreams have not been those welcomed kinds of indulgent fantasies but rather seem drawn from the other end of the spectrum, full of moody crises and inexplicable emotional turmoil: I hear screams in my head during the night. On occasion I’ve awoken out of a deep slumber and sat bolt upright, convinced that the screams were real and immediately outside of my house! The night appeared quiet. To reassure myself, I would put on a robe and grab a flashlight. First I walked around the inside of the house—frankly, I did not want to go outside. Instead, I checked doors and windows to make sure they were closed and locked tight while peering nervously through windows to see whatever might be there, half-hoping I would catch a glimpse of something, anything . . . the other half of me hoping for complete silence and stillness with no living creature astir.
Then I would muster up my courage and flip on the front porch light followed by the motion detector light on the side of the house—and waited. I half-expected to hear footsteps running away as soon as I threw the light switches but there was no new sound. Finally, I screwed up my courage to the breaking point and haltingly opened the door, to peer outside. I would take a few baby steps forward and rely on my flashlight to probe the darkness, then hastily retreat inside. I can hardly say I gave the outside a thorough check but I was too nervous to do more. Besides which, it served my purpose. Had the screams emanated from anywhere near the house it would have been easy to detect a person or an animal. There was none.
This pattern of disturbing dreams continued over the next few nights, and I resigned myself to the fact I was experiencing some kind of nightmare. It had been many years since I was so troubled, back in my childhood years. The nightmares were by no means constant but I did succumb on occasion to horrible imaginings during dreams that sometimes caused me to scream aloud. My mother would come instantly and to sooth away my fears. I would fall asleep again and was never bothered again the same night.
The nightmares did not disappear entirely but they were infrequent enough as to be manageable. By the time I became a teenager they were largely gone, although particularly bloody horror film woulds trigger wild images and terrible deeds while I slept. Without revealing why to my friends, I began making up excuses to avoid going with them if the movie was of the bloody type, and in this way my nightmares finally disappeared.
Yet horror movies were not the only source of my troubled dreams. I’ve always had a great fondness for reading about the past and imagining what life was like. I was sometimes struck with the terrible cruelties people suffered during wars, famines, and epidemics, like the Black Death. The Inquisition with its ready reliance on torture fascinated me at the same time it horrified me. I tried hard to picture what it would be like to be arrested, charged with heresy, and then tortured into confessing. I could well imagine the screams of the poor soul in agony!
Then, years later and without warning, the nightmares began once more. I heard screams but did not know who was screaming nor where or why. I asked a friend if she would give me the name of her psychiatrist, to which she readily agreed. Next, I made an appointment but on that day I suddenly got cold feet. I was on the point of canceling, phone in hand. I thought to myself: “You’re normal and healthy in every way, Douglass! You have a good job, you work hard, you are a normal young man! Why make trouble for yourself where none exists? You know you are as sane as anyone!”
I believed it too but at the same time I knew it was cowardly; I preferred to retreat even though my decision to see a psychiatrist was the better choice. Reluctantly I steeled myself to go. In this way I became a regular patient of Dr. Sarah Maycomb, a woman in her mid-forties with gray hair and blue eyes, She had considerable experience and a sterling reputation for helping patients in need–someone like me. I was very glad I kept the appointment for, as events turned out, I needed her to be there for me as my situation worsened.
The screaming grew louder and closer—and not just screams but shouts and yells of every kind. Sometimes the dreams seemed to come forth from a battlefield and what I was hearing was the din of battle. The noise at times was overwhelming and deafening. When it reached an ear-splitting crescendo I would awaken with my eyes wide and my facial muscles contorted with fright. All the horrendous sounds still echoed in my head, even as I struggled to regain control of my senses.
At first the screams of men dying in battle would run together. It was as though dozens of people had begun playing a dozen different musical instruments all at once. There was no melody or beat, just a huge cacophonous blast of sound. Yet, as time passed and the nightmarish screams continued, I learned to distinguish among the sounds, strange to say. I began to make out individual screams from different voices. The scream of a wounded soldier on a battlefield creates a very different sound than that of a wounded animal such as horse or mule.
I could soon distinguish the differences that existed between men and women, young and old. The very reason for their sufferings somehow entered my dream world. These screams came from the mouths of living people. I began to feel their pain as well as hear their frightened sounds. I could enter their lives, sense their fear, feel their defiance, touch the love they had for their families. A mother’s love for her children was so special that her agony took on a special quality that set it apart from all others. I dreamed of slave auctions where children were ripped from the arms of their crying mother. I felt her anguish and felt her sobs until it seemed the tears were running down my cheeks!
Of course I was slow to reveal all this to Dr. Maycomb. I was convinced that there was nothing wrong with me so I delayed saying too much. She was a kind doctor and did not try me to force me to say more than what I was ready to share, but through probing questions she worked me round toward opening up. She did this by asking a lot of gentle questions that were easy to answer. Over time we formed a bond of trust that finally allowed me to speak freely of these troubling dreams.
She asked that I keep a journal and write down whatever I could remember after awakening in the morning. I did not initially warm to the idea—why should I try to remember those dreams which caused me so much fear and emotional distress? Nevertheless, one evening before retiring I laid a notebook and pen on a night-stand near my bed just in case I changed my mind. That night was a particularly bad one, with screams coming to me from so many places and many different eras, it was impossible to keep track of them all. I was truly living in hell, I thought to myself!
After awakening—and making sure I really was awake–I picked up the pen and began jotting down notes. It was raining heavily outside and the mood of the day weighed on me. I did not want to write while depressed but felt well enough to try and describe the nightmare. Later, Dr. Maycomb asked me to take these notes and expand them. Again I followed her advice. It must have helped me because my memories became sharper and I could recall far more details. I felt as though I could almost re-enter my dream state just as it had occurred, as I sat at my desk and wrote down the horrific sounds and images of the preceding night. From my journal, I include an example:
“I stayed up late, went to bed around midnight. The dreams started later, exact time unknown. Someone in my dream was being chased by a mob in a small town. I could not see the man’s face but knew it was a man. He ran desperately up one street and down another, through backyards and over fences, but the mob finally caught him. Some of them began building a bonfire as others tied his hands and dragged him back with a chain round his neck. Half a dozen men grabbed hold of his arms and legs and bodily lifted him over the fire. The kindling was just catching; the flames were yet quite small and only beginning to ignite the bigger pieces. Others in the mob fetched more wood to add to the fire and the man’s screams soon began, heart-rending shrieks that filled my mind with horror even as I slept.
“I felt like I was there and part of the crowd, though far back. Up to now, the screams always seemed far away, disembodied spectral sounds floating freely in space and time. With this dream, Dr. Maycomb, my vantage point changed. I was now part of the crowd, and the screams I heard had only a short distant to travel from the man’s lips to my ears. I could see his bulging eyes, feel his pounding heart, see him quivering and shaking as the flames of the fire crept ever higher and hotter upon his lower torso. His screams were agonizing piercing cries, the loudest I ever heard in any dream. Of course his screams awoke me.
“I was badly shaken and did not want to write in my journal but remembered my promise to you. After I had calmed my nerves and reassured myself that it was not real, I began writing. This is as much as I remember. The most terrifying screams are happening more frequently and becoming ever more real. I am afraid to go to sleep!””
Dr. Maycomb prescribed medication to calm my nerves and to help me sleep. I relied on the soothing effects of the tranquilizers for the next few weeks. The scariest dreams seemed to vanish into thin air. I felt great relief at being freed from the prison of my own imagination, until I realized I was no longer dreaming at all. I became increasingly irritable during the day; I found myself fussing and fuming over the smallest details and making life miserable for everybody else. My irritability grew and grew until I realized that taking pills to drown my fear was not working.
At my very next session I told Dr. Maycomb all this. She listened in silence. Finally, she said:
“Douglass, I agree with you. I do not know what is the underlying cause of your nightmares but taking pills is not the answer. If you are willing to try, I suggest we discontinue them. No doubt you will begin experiencing the same type of terrifying dream as before, but together we will work through them. If you are unable to get a good night’s sleep without hearing people scream, I think we must continue our therapy sessions until we have found out the reason why. Only in that manner can your mind be put at ease. That is what I believe, Douglass, if you are willing to try?”
I thought it over for but a moment and then readily agreed: “Thank you, Dr. Maycomb! Those are my thoughts too. Let us stop the pills. If the nightmares return, I shall be able to endure them for the sake of therapy and I will continue with my journal. Thank you and I will see you next week!”
The period of my life that followed seems like an eternity, but it was really a matter of only a few months, and I suppose quite predictable. As soon as the effects of the tranquilizers were washed away, I began dreaming again. It felt as though I was channeling the sounds of pain and fear of every human being who ever lived upon the planet, throughout all the centuries and throughout every land. There was such an infinite variety of cultures peopling my dreams that I never imagined existed! I had no idea of the amount of suffering that was constantly falling to the lot of humanity, or at least to the most unfortunate among us.
Like a moth to a flame, I chose a course of action that perhaps made the nightmares worse but I could not help myself–I began reading stories of wars and revolutions, social upheavals and bloody rioting. I delved into crimes of the most extreme kind committed by sick individuals who plunged themselves into the depths of horror and depravity. There was Jack the Ripper in London, followed by one crazed murderer after another. I consoled myself with the thought that these fiends were the worst aberrations of the human family but I was hard-pressed to explain away the unending succession of wars and violent crimes that have plagued mankind since time immemorial.
I felt justified in reading such accounts but it did not add the kind of clarifying light of understanding that could chase away my nightmares. To the contrary, my dreams, now bolstered with real incidents from such incessant reading, became ever more intense. If I read of the tortures of heretics under the Inquisition, that night I could hear their screams. I was traveling through time and space back to the places where these horrors occurred!
If I read of armies capturing enemy soldiers and torturing them unto death, my body traveled to the prisoners’ lonely cells. I was in the adjacent cell when the guards came to administer their beatings or drag the marked man out to another darkened cell for even worse torture. I could hear his screams and waited pensively until they dragged him back, could hear his moans and sobbing until quiet moaning gave way to eerie silence.
All of these strange scenes I would jot down in my journal in order to share with Dr. Maycomb for my next visit. I knew what I wrote was troubling but was startled when I saw the worried look that flashed across her face. We both had already agreed that I was a normal person subject to having bad dreams, but now I sensed she was increasingly concerned about my sanity. Between visits she engaged in research, consulted her textbooks, and talked to her colleagues but apparently I did not fit into a neat little niche anywhere. Dr. Maycomb finally explained to me she was concerned with two different aspects of my dreaming. The first was the underlying reason for why such dreams were occurring. She was of the opinion that it had to do with something in my early life, the way I was raised, perhaps a traumatic event, the memory of which was blocked.
At the same time, she began looking for a physical cause, an abnormal underlying pathology, genetic in nature. She began ordering one test after another. I had everything done to me, blood drawn, lab work, EKGs, and scans of every sort. I suppose they were looking for abnormal levels of something in my bodily fluids or some visible imbalance in my brain chemistry but nothing out of the ordinary popped up. Perhaps they figured there was a brain tumor in a region that affects dreams or emotions but nothing like that was discovered, thankfully. I was relieved, of course, but no closer to understanding why I kept on having these horrible nightmares.
Dr. Maycomb then confided in me her second concern, and that was regarding the specific nature of the dreams. Based on my descriptions, she was becoming aware of a progression that was occurring, a progression of detail, from vague undifferentiated noises to ever-more-exact descriptions of scenes as they actually occurred. She was familiar with theories of channeling, reincarnation, astral plane shifting, and various other psychic phenomenon. She gave credence to none of these but remained at a loss to explain how the details of my dreams appeared to be derived from real events. We discussed this matter many times. I told her it was merely due to my reading; that the realistic details were simply seeping into my dreams.
She accepted that explanation, though with a bit of a frown on her face. I got the feeling she didn’t really want to believe this, that it was not the right explanation. What else she might have understood from her medical training I do not know, but I had the strong feeling there was something about my explanation that did not satisfy her, based no doubt on what was known within her field about the nature of such dreaming. She did not press her objection or confide further in me, so I was content to accept the fact that my explanation was a perfectly reasonable one. And it was, until I started having nightmares—as real as any that had gone before—of people and places I had never seen in real life or in any book. Now if the details of my reading were truly the source for the details of my dreams, how was that possible?
I returned to writing in my journal:
“Dr. Maycomb,
At night my dream imagination roamed far and wide. It was as though my mind was deliberately seeking out pain and misfortune, fear and torture, agony and screams wherever and whenever they occurred, anywhere on the planet, any time and place. I was hearing it all! I was in touch with the totality of all this pain and suffering. Individual instances began coalescing; thousands of known instances of torture merged with thousands of unknown instances, where no one even bothered to record the final moments of men and women put to death in the most hideous manner.
“I had always believed in the goodness of people, always believed the pain-makers to be the exception, but now I felt wholly overwhelmed by realizing how often human beings have caused the most extreme suffering for their victims, enemies, heretics. Was this still the exception of the lone sick mind, the rampaging mob, the malevolent slave owner, the brutal general? Or was this a glimpse into the true nature of humanity itself? Was all of our talk of goodness and reason nothing but cleverly crafted illusion based on self-deception and reckless rationalizations for unspeakable deeds of monstrous brutality?
“Were we peace-loving creatures who cherished our children, practiced kindness to animals and compassion toward the stranger in need . . . or were we, in truth, a violent sadistic species repeatedly and savagely giving ourselves over to fits of uncontrollable rage and violence?
“The dreams now involved all the pain, suffering, and screams of all people who had ever lived, who had ever suffered such an ignoble fate. They were without number. In every age, in every place, their fears and pains came flowing unto me. The magnitude of their sufferings, the violence of their torture, the excruciating nature of the last minutes of their lives filled my mind until it could hold no more. I now understood what was happening. Somehow I had been chosen to be their memory, their way of recalling to life their frightened voices one last time.
“I was chosen to pass on their stories to the living who no longer remembered them or cared to try. I wasn’t just remembering them, I was becoming one of them! I knew who they were because they were me. The line between us, between me and them, was blurring and disappearing.
“The screams keep happening because we keep forgetting. We keep forgetting that when human beings are tortured, it is not them versus us. We are no different from them. They are our brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers, friends and lovers. When we draw this artificial line in space and time and say “that was then and this is now; that was there and this is here” we simply keep alive the conditions of ignorance and prejudice that produce the next round of torture and death, the next round of screams and suffering.
“It will never end until we dissolve that line separating us from them. They never had a chance to see the goodness life has to offer but we have a chance to understand them, to feel their agony. We have a chance to forgive ourselves for having done these horrible nightmarish things to our brothers and sisters. Their deaths can have meaning only if we remember them.
“Their last frightened thoughts, their last pleas for mercy, have purpose only if we are by their sides at their last hour of agony. We can only validate their hopes for a better future if we take our places by their sides: to comfort them, to be there to bear witness to what we have done in wantonly destroying members of the human family who deserved better, far better. Those violent emotions, those guilty actions of pain and torture must be accepted as our own. That beatification of blessedness that comes from unearned suffering, must somehow become our redemption through forgiveness and understanding.
“I do not know what else to tell you, Dr. Maycomb. I have worked my way through the meaning of my dreams. Lately I have had many good nights of full sleep and restful hours, but even should these nightmares return—as I know they will—I am not afraid of them any longer. I have prepared myself for them, indeed, I welcome them. I am not some stranger from afar viewing a massacre I should have tried to stop. I am with them who will soon face that massacre. I am with all those waiting for the torturer to begin his ungodly work. I am with those from whom screams will be coerced to satisfy the bully, the psycho, the conqueror who put the accumulation of wealth ahead of the lives of people no different than themselves.
“I’m not scared any more, Dr. Maycomb, and with your consent, I am ready to stop our therapy sessions. Should I need your services again, I will not hesitate to call. If you in your research choose to pursue another line of investigation regarding my condition, please feel free to do so. I will always welcome further discussion of this matter, but hopefully as friends. Thank you for encouraging me to look directly at my dreams and ask why, for now the answer has become apparent to me. For all those human beings who have suffered needless humiliation, despair, and physical agony at the hands of their fellow human beings, I sign off now in their names as well as my own.
All the best,
Douglass
Postscript:
Douglass died a few weeks later. After not showing up for work, friends started searching for him. They found his body the next day. His clothes appeared slightly singed as if by fire and there were some unexplained muscular contortions in body and face, along with traces of blood. He appeared to have suffered some sort of collapse or insult to his dignity but the medical examiner was never able to pinpoint an exact cause of death. His final entry read only:
“I must change places in order to redeem my soul.”
Most strangely of all, around his lips a small smile animated his soul as though it had occurred just at the moment of death. A great sense of calm and peace floated forth from his visage as though an artist had driven away all shadows of fear or trouble from his life. He left a journal on the night stand next to his bed, addressed to Dr. Maycombe. Other than the single line, above, I closed the journal without reading it. I made arrangements to make sure Dr. Maycombe received it but what secrets the journal contained, or what she chooses to do with it, is anyone’s guess.
We stood silently for a few minutes, never having seen such a peaceful countenance, and wondered what the man’s last thoughts must have been to produce such a peaceful smile. Then we gathered together our equipment and prepared to depart. Right before leaving, my assistant, a mother of five, as though putting her own to bed, whispered softly “peaceful dreams!”
