I was in the math department, and I saw one of the professors carrying a big pizza box. I decided to follow him, to see whether the pizza might be for some colloquium or math club meeting where I could get away with grabbing a slice. Instead, he led me to a hidden door which I’d somehow never noticed before. It lead downstairs into a dark and gloomy secret basement, quite large and explorable. The doctor I’d been following had vanished, and I decided to poke around a little.
Bumping about in the darkness, I eventually found a second door, cloaked in shadows. I opened it and slipped through, finding myself in a tiny dusty room, dominated by a table covered with a thick blanket. I could tell there were things on the table, under the blanket, but just then I heard footsteps. I tried to hide against the wall, but the man I’d been following found me right away.
“Aha!” he accused, “You came to spy on my model cars, didn’t you! For snooping around like this, now I’ll never let you see them!” In my twisted dream mind, his words held the authority of a father figure, I was stung and shamed like a boy caught prying into something above his head, punished with the eternal exclusion from those forbidden things.
As can only happen in the surreal world of the sleeping mind, years whirled past in a wink. They were tormented years, agonized by the lack of that professor’s mysterious model cars, the toys I’d glimpsed beneath the blanket on the table. In my mind, the things grew into legend and myth, and that’s the status they had in my mind when the dreamy time-warp deposited me suddenly at a department picnic many years later.
The sun was shining, it was Autumn, sweet picnic fragrances drifted through the air, it was a drastic change from that musty secret passageway so many years ago. I was hanging out with my friends, and we just happened to come upon that good doctor of mathematics. The subject of the model cars came up, and one of us asked him what the story was behind them.
As mathematician became storyteller, my dreamworld drifted once more, so that rather than listen to the story from his mouth, I was there, invisible, a ghost whisked back to bear witness to what occurred.
The Door You Must Open Yourself
There is a certain strange tradition in that dreamworld of mine. In that dream’t reality, a prisoner can be tied and shackled right up to the jailhouse door, but no guard can open the jailhouse door for him. The prisoner must open it himself, and walk in on his own volition. This tradition is as sacred as an oath sworn in blood, and no prosecutor would ever dare defy it.
The esteemed professor was much younger, a grad student like myself perhaps, and I had the feeling I was witnessing something that happened long before my own birth. Two well-dressed gentlemen came to call on him, their dark suits seemed out of place in the grungy student dormitory. “Can I help you?” asked our protagonist. “You must come with us,” the agents replied. “What’s this all about?” the young doctor didn’t relish being separated from his studies. “We’ve come to take you to the greatest place to make model cars,” explained the suits.
That sure seemed to appeal to our storyteller. Without so much as throwing on a coat, he shut the door behind him, chatting animatedly as the agents led him toward some promised land of model cars.
Arriving at last at a small, single-story concrete bunker in the middle of nowhere, the agents took a seat at a small table next to the door. “This is the door you must open yourself,” they gestured toward a giant button next to the gray steel door. The innocent young man pushed the button and the door opened with a groan. He entered enthusiastically into the small, lifeless prison. The agents grimly followed and, no longer bound by tradition, locked him in his tiny, barren cell.
The Writing On The Floor
… “So, they lied to you, told you they were taking you to the greatest place to build model cars, just to trick you into walking into jail.” I was back at the picnic, trying to understand the murky details of the story.
“No, no,” explained the doctor, patiently correcting me as if I’d made a routine mistake in a mathematical proof. “That’s what I thought at first, too… but they were quite truthful, it really was the greatest place to build model cars.”
“You mean in a figurative sense, like it freed you from more worldly concerns and let you focus on your hobby?” I pried.
“No, you’re still not understanding,” as he proceeded to explain, I found myself back in ghost-form, watching the poor prisoner struggle with his horrible fate. His cell was small, real small, and just as barren as you can imagine, but there was one feature. High in the wall there was a deep crack. Straining his neck, the young professor peered into the crack. I don’t know what he saw in there– I guess he didn’t explicitly name it in his story, because I couldn’t see it in the vision. But whatever it was, it made the prisoner muse out loud: “Yes, this really is the greatest place to build mod…” his voice cracked and I could feel a tangible aura of sorrow seep into the room, as though the man had just realized he was the brunt of some tragic despairful prank of Satan’s own devising.
Suddenly I noticed the other feature in the room, indeed throughout the whole jail. The floor, a smooth and dark marble which seemed quite out of place, was covered in writing, painstakingly typeset writing like a page from some massive book!
“THEY TOOK THE ONE PLACE HE LOVED THE MOST AND THEY BUILT HIS PRISON THERE” I got down on hands and knees (as best as a ghost can) and began reading the words in astonishment. That one passage is all I can remember exactly, but as I crawled around the jail, reading about how they’d cruelly built this dungeon at the place most sacred to their prisoner, a flood of emotions hit me.
At first, I found myself gripped by the profoundest despair. A deep black anguish of an intensity which can only occur in dreams because the waking mind could never bear it. The sort of terrible sadness that you can feel piercing your heart like an icicle. But all at once, the feeling changed. Suddenly I was laughing and laughing, like it was some tasteless yet hilarious joke penned by the devil incarnate. I laughed so hard tears came to my eyes, I laughed so hard that I had to spit, I laughed til I almost passed out from breathlessness. I wasn’t laughing at the man’s misfortune, I was laughing because I’d glimpsed into the true nature of reality, like I’d seen into the mind of God and to Him all the suffering of the world was just a funny YouTube video.
Suddenly I recognized where I’d seen this prison before. It was the secret basement from the math department, only when I’d been there before it had been so dark I couldn’t see it very clearly. But now I finally understood. The professor never had been exonerated, he was just as much a prisoner as ever, but after he built his model cars he built the mathematics department around them, and the university around that, and the city around that, and all the world that I knew, it was all his way of killing time, endless time alone in that cell.
I woke up.
FURTHER READING
Lucid Dream Report, 08 May 2009
Lucid Dreaming
Short Story: The Balancing Beetles
10 Metaphors For Life
How To Be Solipsistic