The Man of My Dreams

Lately, a faceless man has been appearing in my dreams. Sometimes it seems like he’s trying to convince me that I’m not capable of making any changes, but it's hard to tell what he's really saying most of the time. He tries to speak in riddles a lot and usually just sounds like an idiot. He’s always wearing this silly little black cape, as if he’s some sort of magician, and I think the rest of his clothing is something like rich purple velvet. I’ll try to pay attention the next time I see him. I can never recall his face in the morning, probably because I’m always too busy paying attention to his hair, which is hard to look away from. It’s huge and blonde and it’s got streaks of blue in it.

The first time we met, I was frolicking along a hillside with a bunch of small fluffy rabbits and my cat, Dante, who was of course chasing the rabbits, when I saw the man sitting at a stone table. I almost skipped by at first, chuckling, because the scene reminded me of the face-off between Vicinni and Wesley in The Princess Bride. But I stopped short when I realized that not only was there no Princess Buttercup, this man was not Vicinni. Vicinni did not wear a silly little black cape. I’m pretty sure he did wear velvet, though.

I smiled at the man and said hello. He stared at me.

“Uh… are you gonna say anything?” I asked.

When he didn’t answer, I shrugged and started climbing down the hillside toward a thick forest.

“You’ll find your way by going where you have to go!” he called after me.

I whipped around and looked at him. He was staring at the clouds in the distance, smiling, and stroking his hairless chin as if there were any hair to stroke. Alright, freak, I thought, and continued on toward the forest.

The next day was ordinary. I forgot entirely about the man in my previous night’s dream, and made Spanish pork chops for dinner. I hate when Mike uses ketchup on my pork chops. I did my homework, had a glass of vino tinto, and made plans with Mike to go to bed two hours earlier than we will ever get to bed (as is customary). Bedtime, like the rest of the day, was normal. I changed into nightclothes, I took my pills, I found my cat, and I turned on my nightlight. And then, of course, I got up because I forgot to set my alarm clock. Or something. An hour or two later, I was asleep.

Dreams came easy that night. I don’t usually have nightmares. Once, I had a nightmare about Timmy the Tooth. That son of a bitch terrified me until I was thirteen or so, and in my nightmare he was hovering outside of my window, banging on it, and demanding entrance. I, of course, refused. I haven’t been able to sleep near a window since. Ordinarily, though, my dreams are pretty bland. I dream about things like being Mario or going on dates with my boyfriend or playing with my cat. Exciting!

Being Mario is pretty exciting, actually.

After some dreaming, I was flushed down one of Mario’s pipes onto my back (which didn’t hurt, of course). I was lying on grass. I stood up and found myself back on the hillside where I had been playing with rabbits during the previous night. I noticed that something was different, but I couldn’t put my finger on it right away. Then I realized that there were no rabbits. There were no clouds. No Dante. Ugh. I looked around. Sure enough, sitting at a stone table not far away, was the man in the dumbass cape. I approached him.

“You’ve returned,” he said.

“Where are all the rabbits?” I asked.

“You never step in the same river twice,” he replied. “Heraclitus says so.”

“What?”

“Or perhaps,” he added, “you step in one river, you’ve stepped in ‘em all.”

“Who the hell are you?” I demanded.

The man refused to tell me his name. He did, however, tell me who he isn’t. He told me he doesn’t care what I think. He said he is not a Serious Person. I asked if he would tell me a joke, then, and he told me not to interject. He said that he does not believe in a commonsense view of the world. He told me that he isn’t magical. He also told me that he isn’t me or my boyfriend or my father or God.

At this point, I was wondering how this psycho had gained entry into my dreamland and why I was talking to him instead of playing with rabbits and Dante or being Mario.

“Listen,” I said, “if you’re just gonna sit there rambling about nothing, you should probably just go poof and stop bothering-“

“Stop bothering Sarah Muinos?” he tilted his head to the side, and I saw that he was wearing glasses. Was he trying to look more intelligent? “I don’t need to bother you,” he said, “You’ve bothered yourself in coming here.”

“I fell out of one of my pipes!” I remembered right after I said this that the pipes were not, of course, mine. I felt my face flush and wondered if he knew this, too.

“Yes,” he said, smiling, “but I told you that you would find your way by going where you have to go.”

“Clever,” I grumbled, sarcasm dripping from my voice. But even as the words escaped my mouth, I found myself moving toward the stone table to sit.

Now, you might be wondering why I hadn’t simply suffocated the man with his own cape (which he’d strategically sprawled over his left shoulder, making himself resemble a peacock). But I can’t pretend that I didn’t find the man’s words a little captivating, especially considering the fairly dull history of my dreaming. Additionally, I knew that the man was something of my own creation, unless of course he was a sign from God or Allah or a witch’s hex or something of the sort.

So I listened.

The man told me that he’d been waiting in my dreamland for weeks. He’d watched rabbits and clouds go by as he waited for me to come bouncing along. His voice shifted into a pompous tone, and he interrupted himself:

“There is a name for what I was doing during those weeks, you know.”

I stared. He told me the word was Motion, with a capital ‘m’. While he was performing this Motion, he was simply being; he was awaiting my arrival so that he may Act.

“So you’re an actor,” I said. “No wonder you’re so dramatic.”

“No!” the man yelled. I couldn’t help but laugh as he stood, his cape thrust out in the wind behind him and his chin held high, eyes gazing somewhere past me. He looked confused for a moment, then embarrassed, and sat down.

“Act,” he said when he began speaking again, “is what I’m doing now. It is the reason I have sat here for so long and given you such pearls of wisdom in your passing in last night’s dream. I am speaking now in hopes of enlightening you. Motion does not achieve any new results; Motion is when you’re doing dishes or scratching an itchy nose. Act, on the other hand, gives you something fresh. It is the choices you make in life, like the choice you made when you sat down with me. The leaving-off and beginning of the two is what makes life, life…”

“Okay, okay, I get it,” I said. Jesus, I thought. Is this guy serious? “Why would it be necessary to put so many labels on life? Why not just be? Life is living: yes, we make choices and yes, we go through the motions of their consequences. We choose a car and then we drive it. But while we’re driving, in your so-called Motion form, our hands thoughtlessly following the curves of the road and one foot moving rhythmically from pedal to pedal, our minds are still active. They are still capable of making choices and creating new things. Just the other day, as I was driving home, I made the choice to drive to the Kernsville Damn and write.

“People don’t spend their lives switching back and forth between Act and Motion; they spend their lives existing in both at once-“

“Aha!” the man exclaimed.

“We all do,” I continued.

“All of us?” he inquired, looking over my shoulder. I turned around. Dante was sunbathing in the grass behind me, her stomach turned toward the sun. “Perhaps not all of us.”

“What do you mean?”


“I mean,” he said, “that animals are not capable of Acting. Your cat simply behaves in the manner in which you’ve taught her to, but she has no concept of right or wrong. If she misbehaves, she doesn’t know that she’s done something bad. And because of this, she is incapable of remorse. Therefore, she has no identity. She is simply a cat.”

“That’s ridiculous.” I replied.

“No.”

“Yes.”

“No!” The man didn’t stand this time, and his didn’t place his hands on his hips. He did, however, begin stroking his hairless chin again.

“Then what would be the point of training? Training is to an animal what teaching is to a child. You teach a child right from wrong, and you teach a cat the same. My cat knows she isn’t supposed to be on the kitchen table, and when I catch her there, she runs like hell before I say a word because she knows she did something wrong. Ten minutes or so later, she’ll come up to me all cute-like and try and sit on my lap. And why? Because she knows I’m unhappy with her and wants to fix it. I would have to say that’s some sort of remorse.”

“But,” he interjected, “before one can say no, one must possess language. And to have an identity, one must be able to say no.”

“But maybe language is a relative term. Every time she chooses (by means of your definition of Act) to not climb atop the kitchen table, she is saying no. Therefore, wouldn’t she possess an identity?”

The man smiled. He started to giggle, and then chuckle, and soon he was laughing hysterically. I should get out of here, I thought. He got up and stretched. I noticed that he was wearing black shoes with gold buckles. I stood.

“Welcome to the world of proving opposites,” the man said. “When you’re ready, I’ll be waiting.”

I lied down next to Dante and watched clouds for the rest of the evening.