The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

The Dream

As a rule, I do not recall my dreams. At the approach of day their plots inevitably fade. So why did last December's dreams etch themselves into my memory with the precision of a laser beam? Perhaps that is how it is with coma. Since you never return to reality, your dreams don't have the luxury of evaporating. Instead they pile up, one upon another, to form a long ongoing pageant whose episodes recur with the insistence of a soap opera. This evening, one such episode has come back to me.

In my dream, thick snow is falling. It lies a foot deep over the automobile graveyard my best friend and I are walking through, numb with cold. For three days, Bernard and I have been trying to get back to a France paralyzed by a general strike. We ended up in an Italian winter-sports resort, where we found a small local train heading for Nice. But at the French border a strikers' picket line interrupted our journey and bundled us out of the train and into this desolate landscape, without overcoats and wearing thin city shoes. A lofty overpass straddles the junkyard, as if vehicles falling from the bridge one hundred fifty feet above our heads have piled up here, one on top of another. Bernard and I have an appointment with an influential Italian businessman who has installed his headquarters in one massive pillar of the viaduct, far from prying eyes. We knock at a yellow steel door with the sign “Danger: High Voltage” and an instruction chart for treating electric shock. The door opens. The entrance is reminiscent of a garment-district outlet: jackets on a mobile rack, piles of trousers, boxes of shirts rising to the ceiling. I recognize the surly watchman who admits us by his shock of hair: Radovan Karadzic, leader of the Bosnian Serbs. “My friend is having trouble breathing,” Bernard tells him. Laying down his machine gun, Karadzic performs a tracheotomy upon me on a hastily cleared table. Then we walk down ornate glass stairs to a study in the cellar. Its walls are lined with tan leather; deep armchairs and muted lighting give it the feel of a nightclub. Bernard confers with the owner, a clone of Fiat's elegant former chairman Gianni Agnelli, while a hostess with a Lebanese accent sits me down at a small bar. Instead of glasses and bottles, rows of plastic tubes dangle floorward like oxygen masks in an aircraft in distress. A barman motions me to put one in my mouth. I comply, and an amber ginger-flavored fluid begins to flow, flooding me with warmth from my toes to the roots of my hair. After a while I want to stop drinking and get down off my stool. Yet I continue to swallow, unable to make the slightest move. I look frantically at the barman to attract his attention. He responds with an enigmatic smile. Around me, voices and faces become distorted. Bernard says something to me, but the sound emerging in slow motion from his mouth is incomprehensible. Instead I hear Ravel's Bolero. I have been completely drugged.

Eons later, I become aware of an alarm sounding. The hostess with the Lebanese accent hoists me on her back and climbs the staircase with me. “We have to get out: the police are on their way.” Outside, night has fallen and the snow has stopped. An icy wind takes my breath away. The dazzling beam of a searchlight mounted on the overpass probes the forlorn automobile carcasses.

“Give up, you're surrounded!” blares a loudspeaker. We manage to get away, and I wander about, utterly lost. I long to escape, but every time the chance arises, a leaden torpor prevents me from taking even a single step. I am petrified, mummified, vitrified. If just one door stands between me and freedom, I am incapable of opening it. Yet that is not my only terror. For I am also the hostage of a mysterious cult, and I fear that my friends will fall into the same trap. I try desperately to warn them, but my dream conforms perfectly with reality. I am unable to utter a word.