Life, what is it but a dream?

–Lewis Carroll

I’ve been dreaming of another world.  I’m the only one who can go there, because I’ve found the secret key.  It must have been about a year ago when I found it in the July 1946 edition of Weird Stories magazine, page 45, line 12.  At first this line didn’t really strike me as anything important.

They shot the tower down.

It wasn’t until the man spoke it to me in my dream that it meant anything.  I remember I was dreaming of a murky, fog-covered plain, and the sky got dark–almost black.  He withdrew from the shadows and faced me, but I couldn’t read his features; his whole body was like a silhouette cut from black paper.  There was only the outline of the fedora on his head and the light on his lips.

“They shot the tower down,” he said.

“What do you mean?” I asked him.

“These words open the door into the other world,” he said, “the one you’ve always hoped for.”

I told him I didn’t know what he was talking about, and he tilted his head.  I saw the glimmer of a smile on his shadow face.

“You’ll know when you see the gate.”

That’s how it all started.  I woke up with that sentence repeating in my head.  I got out of bed and walked into the kitchen like it was any other morning.  But those words–they shot the tower down–I couldn’t make them stop.  My mother sat at the table, spooning cornflakes into her mouth, oblivious.  I grabbed the box and poured the cereal, then the milk, trying to ignore the continuing loop of words.

The tower.

They shot it down.

As I was sitting there, I thought about what the man had said–about the other world.  I had always imagined some escape from my real life, some other place where I belonged.  I guess that’s why I read so much when I was kid.  All those adventure books, all that science fiction.  I was always wishing I were Jim Hawkins or Peter Pan, setting sail for some far away place that existed only in my dreams.

I told my mother, “I had the strangest dream last night.  There was a man in a fedora who gave me a key to this other world . . . ”  

My mother looked at me like I was crazy or on drugs.  “Really, Harold, where on earth do you get these crazy ideas?  I think you’ve been reading too many of your father’s old magazines.  Trashy pulp like that should be tossed in the garbage.”  And then she stood up and dumped her leftover milk in the sink, tossing it out as if to demonstrate her point.  

I dropped my spoon in the bowl and got up to fix a cup of coffee.  I told her very coldly, “Just a dream, Mom.  No harm in that.”

“No,” she said, smiling at me as she filled the sink with water.  “No harm at all.”

I swallowed down my coffee in a rush, then showered, and got to work late.  I tried to act like it was nothing, but within seconds my boss was staring me down with his big, fat bald head and polyester tie.  He grinned really big and smarmy, like it was no big deal.  It’s never a big deal with him.

“How long you been working in Collections, Harold?”

“Ten years,” I growled back.

“Ten years.  Wow.  And you’re still in Collections.  Time sure flies.”  Then, if you can imagine, he sits on my desk, sets his coffee on the invoices, and starts talking like we’re on some kind of fishing trip.  “You know what you lack, Harold?”

“No,” I said, “what’s that?”

“Motivation.  Ambition.  Look at Lou Frick.  He started in collections only a couple years after you.  Already been promoted twice.  You could be there too.  Wife, kids, nice pension when you retire . . . ”

While he kept talking, I moved his mug and started tallying invoices.  I’d heard it all before, how I should care about getting ahead and all that other bull.  Besides, I was already impatient for the day to end, content in the knowledge that some other world was waiting for me in that realm beyond sleep.  

The rest of the day floated past, suddenly unreal in light of my new knowledge.  When I got home, the house was full of radio noises and my mother half asleep on the couch.  We ate dinner together like always, but I rushed through it, didn’t talk much.  She didn’t notice, just kept right on talking about her programs while I washed dishes and swept the tile clean.  I kissed her and hurried into my room, locking the door behind me.

At first I couldn’t sleep.  My brain scurried all around my head, imagining what the world would be like, whether it would come at all.  I repeated the words over and over again until I finally drifted off and began to dream.

I was on that plain again, this time standing at a gate.  It was made of iron, like the big one that used to surround the Fosters’ property before they tore it down a few years ago.  I jiggled the latch, but it was held fast by an oversized padlock.  Beyond the gate there was nothing but shadows.  I thought, maybe this is the gate the man was talking about.  Maybe this is the door leading into that other world.

So I said the words I had been told to say, and each one of those words was like the tooth of some invisible key twisting and releasing the lock.  The gate swung open, and I stepped inside.

*   *   *

I couldn’t remember much the next day, only the memories of a heavy, foreign sort of bliss–nothing I could describe because I’d never felt anything like it before.  All I know is that after I felt it, every object that surrounded me was transformed, as if I could see through it, the truth behind the truth.  I was, myself, transformed.  The dull mediocrity that surrounded my previous life was merely a veil hiding another reality beneath.

After that night, getting back to the world was simple.  All I had to do was repeat the phrase until I fell asleep and started dreaming.  The gate would open, and I’d be there in that other world.  I’d wake up and again feel that sense of transformation, of metamorphosis.

I started keeping a notebook and recording my memories of the world.  In the early months, it was a struggle to assemble the fragments into anything that made sense, but eventually I was able to paint a vivid enough picture.  Above all things, there is the thick, yellow sky, full of amber clouds, but lacking any sun.  The wind flowing through it is constant, deep, and whirling, and the air flows into your lungs like honey.  Below, the earth is black and soft.  There are no people or animals to trample over it, and no plants save one.  When you walk along the land, you meet a looming hill, and on top of that hill is The Tree.  This Tree is so ancient you can hardly guess at its age.  The roots run thick and tangled through the hill, and you grab at them to climb to the summit.  And there you see that the branches knot and twist into masses of webbing over the amber sky.  And though you’re solitary, you’re not alone; a spirit runs through everything, a knowledge.  This world is the real world, not this one you imagine upon waking.  This is it:  ultimate reality.

I had uncovered the veil, sure, but my supposed “real” life continued in the same flat tone it always had.  I’d wake up, eat my breakfast, go to work, come home, eat dinner, and hurry off to sleep.

Then came the gas shortage.

It was bad enough I’d gotten to work late that morning, and my boss kept hammering me with invoices.  I didn’t get off until six o’clock.  So, I started my car and noticed the gauge was right at empty.  I drove to the gas station, but when I got there, I saw a line of maybe fifteen cars circling the block.  I figured I could make it home.  It’s only eleven blocks, that’s nothing.  I made it six, and the car started sputtering, and I started screaming.  Five blocks later, I was home.  Then my mom starts in on me:

“Where have you been, Harold?  I’ve been worried sick about you.  Do you realize it’s after seven?  Couldn’t you have called?“

Maybe I’m harsh on my mother, but she has no sense of reality, this one or any other for that matter.  My dad took care of everything for her except the cooking and the cleaning.  When he died, she had no means of supporting herself or anything.  And his pension wasn’t much.  That’s why I quit school and got the job in the first place–it’s not like I don’t love her.

But her nagging was the final nail in that stupid coffin.  I just stared at my aging mother, with her graying roots and faded housecoat, and I shut down.  I didn’t want this reality anymore.  Not at all.

I needed to prolong my sleep sessions, to give as much time over to dreaming as possible.  I don’t know why the idea hadn’t occurred to me before.  The only way to retain that reality–short of death or coma–was to stay asleep.  Of course I’d have to go through the usual ten hours of living, but the remaining fourteen were enough to sustain me through it.  I bought some sleeping pills and convinced my mother to leave the house.

“Why don’t you visit Mrs. Wilcox, Mom?  You haven’t seen her in months.”

She eyed me suspiciously, but in the end she was easy to convince.  In a way I was doing a favor for her; now she’d have a life apart from me and the television.  And I’d receive my fourteen hours of communion without her breath down my neck.

Do you know what it’s like to sleep that much every night?  At first it seems impossible; you need the pills to get you through it.  A week goes by, you develop a rhythm, and then it’s easy.  Asleep and awake meld together, and everything feels like one big dream sliding from one moment to the next.  Is it you holding that glass of water, or some entity known as “you” holding that glass?  Are you and this entity one and the same?  

My own mother became an extension of drywall and light bulbs and skin cells.  My footsteps were merely echoes throughout halls of linoleum.  My boss’s voice became a muffled set of verbs wafting through space.

By no means would I call this an easy–or even sane–state.  I could satiate my mother with the salve of society, but at work my quality control began to slip.  Often, my boss would sit and lecture me about tardiness and absenteeism while I watched the stripes on his tie dissolve into snakes.  His eyes would float down to my level, and he would ask with an unfamiliar frown, “Are you even listening to me?”  I’d nod and let my mind wander off again.  He no longer seemed threatening, or even particularly annoying, now that I was always half on the verge of absolution.  He had become an abstract Form with a talking head, as all things were beginning to appear.

While walking home after one of these sessions, I met the man again.  I hadn’t seen him in ages, certainly not in this limbo realm.  He leaned against an elm tree, one toe on the sidewalk, another in the grass.  Even in the waning daylight, he seemed shielded in shadow, still wearing that black coat and black fedora that hid his face from view.

“You’re looking for an answer,” he said.

“To what question?” I smirked.  His cryptic words no longer seemed strange.

“The one that’s been plaguing you since you unlocked that gate.”

“Death’s never been an option,” I explained.

“Because you fear it.  But there’s another solution.”

I asked him what that solution was.  Lit by the setting sun, his eyes seemed to glow.  

“You’ve never much liked television, have you?” he asked me.

“Hate the things,” I said.

He chuckled and nodded, then turned and walked down the sidewalk, vaporizing into the horizon.

*   *   *

When I got home, I forgot to take my after-dinner pill.  Instead, I sat with my mother as she waited for her primetime program to begin.  I kept staring at the TV screen, pondering the clues the man had left for me.  

I remembered how I had scoffed at my mother when she had bought the set back in 1965.

“People should be reading books,” I told her.

She just laughed at me while she fiddled with the antennae, trying to tune in Donna Reed.  “We’re entering the modern era,” she said.  The screen materialized from a wash of snow into a neat picture of a neat housewife and her neat little children.

Now my mother sat in her chair with a blank expression, one that suggested an empty kind of bliss.  I realized that a TV is like a window into a dream world, a gateway into another reality.  A dial is like a key: turn the channel, and all worlds, all possibilities, are open to you.  

I understood the riddle I had been given.  I had been presented with a new revelation.

That knowledge became a bolt of light centered in my skull.  I burst off the couch and kneeled in front of the screen.  I turned the knob to a river of static and shook the antennae until the grains spattered and sparked.  A faint outline emerged in the picture–it was the gate, the very same one from my dream, the one to that nameless other world.  I paused and pressed my face and fingers to the glass.

“Dammit, Harold,” my mother yelled.  “Stop blocking the TV!  My programs coming on in five minutes!”

I pushed her from my thoughts and remained motionless, my whole being focused on the distant gate, key on the very edge of my lips.  Yet there was a trace of doubt.  What if I do this, what if I don’t come back?  What will my mother do?  My boss?

Like an echo cracking through static, I heard her again, “Harold, you nut, what are you doing?  Stop that this instant!”

Distantly, robotically, I snapped at her.  “Shut up, Mom.”  My voice was an unreal thing, already drifting into the ether of the illusion I was slowly chipping away.   And this awareness cast out all my fears–

And so I said it.

They shot the tower down.

My body seemed to melt off my bones, and I could see the other world spread out before me, crisper, clearer than I remembered.  The sticky scent of honey clung to my nostrils as I looked into the golden sky, and there stood the immense tree against it.  Aching to understand its mystery, I climbed the gnarled roots of the hill and grasped at its thorny trunk.  A pulse of energy seemed to fill its body, like the breath that blew through its hoary branches.

Below, the gate creaked open, and there he stood.  The man.

He climbed up the hill effortlessly and met me at the summit.  Still his face was dark and hidden.  “Look behind you,” he said.

A deep red sun broke through the sky, illuminating the world with its ruby light.  I turned and saw the man in whole, the details of his face revealed.  I thought at first I saw my father, but it wasn’t him.  This man’s skin was nearly translucent, smooth, yet ragged at the edges–sexless, ageless.  He smiled at me with a dry wit reflected in his eyes.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to go now,” he told me.

“I don’t want to leave,” I pleaded.

“It’s not up to you.  Never has been.”

I gazed into his eyes.  “Are you the revealed god?”

He shrugged.  “If I were and I told you, what would be the point of any of this?  Not that it matters anymore.  You’ll be coming to soon.”

I stuttered at him, and he began to laugh.  Air that had once been heavy evaporated.  The man became a blur of crimson, and everything faded to black.  The program had ended.

As I was coming to, I felt a blunt rhythm beating against my sternum.  I coughed up strings of phlegm, and the world shifted from fuzzy blurs to smooth, clean lines.  I watched the paramedic reassure my mother, “He’s gonna make it, lady.” Tears were clinging to her cheeks.  And already I could feel the angst of disappointment throbbing in my skull.  I hadn’t crossed over.  I had failed.

Anyway, that was over a week ago.  I’ve been stuck in this finality, gazing at televisions, waiting for that gate to open again.  The key is always on the edge of my lips, and my sleep is a dreamless promise.  

I know you think I’m insane; that’s why I’m here, after all.  What you don’t realize is that I’ve given you the key, and any time you want to, you can go there.  You keep telling me it was all in my imagination, that I have to face reality and become part of the world.  But see, I’ve already been to the real world, and this place, it’s just a dream.