He was a champion sleeper and could knock off consciousness at a moments notice to descend into dreams thick with his waking joys and sorrows. It was a skill he always had, ever since he was a child and learned to manipulate the clock through dropping out of his waking state. He awoke for the sake of his hunger and thirst, or if he had a bladder about to explode. As he grew, he awoke for the sake of self-responsibility, for the stray lovers his slender frame managed to attract by virtue of measured silence and sound.
The sleeper worked in a glassy office on Madison since he was fresh out of Columbia. He managed to climb in the ranks by virtue of his uncanny reading ability. He didn't call it speed reading, but that's what it was. He read at a torrid clip, perhaps channeling his ability to slip into dreams into an ability to slip into a story. The other editorial assistants simply couldn't keep up. By virtue of his success, the city opened its social gates. The city requisitioned him to all kinds of parties attended by luminaries. At once such party, he met his wife to be. His wife-to-be took one thing and made it into something else. She took a so-so happiness and made it into a waking joy. Married life brought new and unprecedented waking delights so that the sleeper forgot about what he did best.
For one thing, his wife was a beautiful woman in the way he preferred a woman to be beautiful. Perhaps not the model of every man's beauty, but someone who had all the pieces in place to slip into the shoes of his dreamed of composite. The edges overlapped but little. The first tragedy of the sleeper's life was when, at 31, they discovered they could not have children. There was something wrong with the sleeper. They visited several recommended doctors on the matter. When the sleeper told the doctors about his only known health defect, his ability to fall asleep for however long he wanted, they tried to connect the dots and piece together a puzzle. The puzzle could not be solved.
With little warning, on the heals of a complex verdict regarding the state of his reproductive physiology, his wife left him for another. Apparently, there were other unhappinesses associated with life with the sleeper. His wife was unsatisfied. It all came out in a conversation. He was not the image of her ideal mate. He was not the man who, laid upon the image of her dream composite, created no overlapping edges. She had always suspected this, but had managed to put the discrepancy out of her head. While she was still young, she wanted to go on a quest to find her ideal. When the sleeper asked her where she would do this, she said that she would travel first to Spain and then to Italy, where the men were tall and graceful. If that didn't work, she would journey to Iceland.
Several weeks passed until the fateful moment came when the sleeper put his head down on his desk at work. He slipped into a dream of India, of fruit stalls in an outdoor bazaar beneath an evening oil canvas sky. He sampled the most delicious plum, chewy and endless like the plums from his childhood. He dreamed of his beloved x-wife and her composite mate. Her ideal was tall and dark. He was wearing a tuxedo. She hoisted him up piggy back onto her back at which point he turned into a feathery white bird, flying her out over the dim and dangerous landscape. As he dreamed, he became aware of the time slipping past, the day ending, people struggling to waken him, lifting him onto a gurney, carrying him to the hospital. Fuck it, he thought as he explored a strange India, losing himself in a dream within a dream, the contented life inside a mansion inside blue eggshell. Midnight in the hospital. He awoke, laughed, got dressed, paid the whopping bill and went home.
He lay down and slept some more, ticking off the minutes in his sleep as he propositioned aloof dream women in a fictional Union Square, the rickety skeletons of dead and dying sky scrapers crumbling in accord with a decaying civilization. The following day, he needed to meet with a famous writer, a celebrated dissident, a legend of southern Europe. Throwing his gangling arms out wide, the legend told the sleeper that life was a big joke. The question was the punchline. If you could find that, then you could do anything. If you could find that, said the legend, you could even sleep with the most beautiful woman in the world. When the sleeper tried to turn the conversation to the legend's forthcoming book, Veronika Decomposes, the legend changed the subject to Aspen Colorado, the only inhabitable American place outside of New York and San Francisco. OK, so the legend was a bore. That did not fully explain the bilious hateful feeling that arose from the sleepers gut from the space his ex-wife's detour had left. Sitting on a park bench in Central Park, he fell into a dream about losing his teeth. His gums were in an unhealthy state. Then he was living in an igloo in a wife swapping Eskimo community, only none of the wives wanted to sleep with him. Instead, he presided over the transaction of other men's exchange. He was the middle man of an arctic orgy. He recognized his wife's composite in the form of a tall Eskimo in a tuxedo who stood apart as if eternally posing for a photograph. As before, he set aside the urgency of the waking world, felt himself lifted onto the gurney, felt the waking world tilt its odd course toward the hospital. He awoke. He prepared to leave. This first involved removing the i.v. from his arm. "I wouldn't do that if I were you," said the man sitting next to his bed shrouded in darkness. "Why not?" "Relax. Talk to me for a little bit." "Who are you?" "Me? I'm you." "What the hell's that supposed to mean." "It means I understand." "Understand what?" "I understand your ability." "My ability?" "I understand what it is to sleep your life away. Only, I now use my powers for good and not for evil." "Your powers?" "Not everyone can put himself like that into an unbreakable state of hibernation." "Can you?" "No, not exactly." "So that you don't exactly have my powers." "Yes, but I understand them." "How do you know?" "I read your chart. My name is Doctor Nod." "You've got to be kidding me." "Donald, it's actually Donald Nostrand. The Nod part I made up." "Oh." Doctor Nod invited the sleeper to a facility on the outskirts of Washington DC. He flew him there in a helicopter. The sleeper mainly went for the helicopter ride, although he found the view drab. From a helicopter, the East Coast of the United States looks like jungle interspersed with highways and factory outlet shopping centers. When they landed on the roof of a tan building, Doctor Nod told the sleeper that this was where all the biggest sleepers worked out. Tests were done, the goal being a state of suspended animation which would someday make deep space travel feasible. That was the goal. This is where the sleeper met the larger than life personalities, the champion sleepers of the world. They reminded the sleeper of the writers he would meet now and then, only in an objective sense they lacked charisma. Before the sleeper returned to New York, Doctor Nod reminded him that he always had a place at the facility. "Only we understand you," said Doctor Nod. "Remember the mission. REMEMBER THE MISSION!" Doctor Nod shouted from the landing pad as the helicopter launched itself into the blue sky. The sleeper smirked and drifted off. There was no sense in staying awake for the flight. Word spread in the office building that the sleeper was a narcoleptic and was nodding off in the middle of dinner parties and being carried off to the hospital. An attractive woman named Josephine came to his office to comfort him. Josephine had the things the sleeper liked to see in women. She gave him some of her Adderall which she took for a disease called Addison Reeve syndrome which involved any number of minor seizures taking place in her brain making focus impossible. He thanked her, took the Adderall and suddenly began hacking and slashing the legend's new novel, Veronika Decomposes. He eliminated the first several paragraphs and the entire first chapter, which laboriously and pointlessly explained how life was some huge joke. He edited deep into the night and sent his draft to the legend who did not respond. That same evening, his propositioning of Josephine didn't go over very well. The sleeper was put on leave from his work. Several days later, laying in his bed, he decided to see how long he could remain unconscious. He went to the bathroom. He went back to bed and slept all day and all night. At the end of the following day, he began to receive urgent messages in regards to his physical well being. He felt himself pushing the envelope. He passed through dream after dream in which he was discarded for another man or else behooved to step aside in favor of a kindly ideal. He sadly acquiesced, charitably acknowledging the way of the world. When he couldn't stand it any longer, the pain in his back, his massive dehydrated headache. He awoke. His strength came back as he swallowed the water at his bedside. He was awake, alive. After eating a large meal, walking through the city, he never felt clearer. The colors, sights and sounds were crisp. He went to a liquor store and bought a flask of Bim Black. He walked around the city taking sips from his flask. Later that evening, piss drunk on a train, he decided to wake the sleeping homeless, to usher them into a new and uncharted state of clarity, only whenever he tried they brushed him aside in favor of their hard won dreams. He returned home. He dreamed of being invited to a grand ball somewhere in Europe only to realize that he was actually the valet and that he had dinged up someone's car. The sleeper figured his ability was good for acts of minor crime. The first of such acts was, obviously, stowing away. He could potentially express mail himself anywhere in the world provided there was someone on the other end ready to pick him up. He could stow away on a ship and sleep until they had reached international waters. He could attempt to become famous by sealing himself off in a glass box in a public space, a ticker counting off the minutes of his record sleep. Only how would they know he wasn't faking it? He could get rid of all his worldly possessions and travel the world, a mendicant sleeper requiring little in the way of lodgings. The sleeper would see the world. He flew to Paris where he spent his first night on the street before being transported at early dawn to a French hospital. He awoke in time to be served brie on a baguette with a glass of wine. He traveled to the south, spending a night dreaming in the misty Pyrenees before passing on foot into Spain. Walking the streets of Barcelona, in the back of his mind he kept a look out for his ex-wife. She would like this city of architecture and excess. It was her kind of place. Obvious and contrived, like a dashing middle aged maitre d who was also a musician. As he drifted eastward, he let his beard grow. He became familiar which each country's health care systems. France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Poland. Occasionally, less than pleasant things happened. He was robbed of his socks and so he stopped changing his socks for a time. A man who can sleep anywhere, for however long, required little in the way of attire. When it got cold out, he bought a pare of felt boots. He bought an old tank drivers hat on a street fair in Ankara. In Armenia, he was accosted by a man wearing outdoorsey clothing unheard of in the region. The man in the green fleece vest handed him a card displaying his first name and last initial. He said he wanted to recruit the sleeper to come and work for the Central Intelligence Agency. "How did you find me?" the sleeper asked. "We have our ways," said the individual in the incongruous vest. Stanislaw B. purchased a room for the sleeper in the most expensive hotel in Yerevan. They went clothing shopping together, although Stass could not be persuaded to part with his green vest and brown corduroy pants. They ate a great deal. Stass was interested in the ancient history of the Slavic peoples migrating out of a legendary realm, ever westward, ever further into waking misery. "We know about your unhappiness," he said. "You mean as a Slav? Or as a CIA agent?" "You could say that your unhappiness is famous with us. We think we know what you need." "What do I need, Stass?" "A true enemy. It worked for me. I was a man unhappy like yourself rejected by most women until I found my true enemy." "So who is your true enemy?" "Islamofascism." Late that night in his brand new clothes, his face still smarting from the Armenian shave, the sleeper sneaked out into the streets of the still sleeping city. He boarded a train for Georgia. After several days wandering around Tbilisi drunk, sleeping in church yards, he passed into Azerbaijan. From Azerbaijan, he stowed away on a ship to Turkmenistan. Traveling through Central Asia, he found it useful to be asleep most of the time. In politically unfriendly places, the sleeper noticed that, rather than take him to a hospital, they bundle him off sleeping toward the border. And so he was literally dumped in the dead of night onto a dirt road somewhere in Uzbekistan. He woke from a dream in which he charitably acquiesced to sleep at the foot of his wife's bed. Her lover's body was long, requiring a refined mattress to support his full deceptive heft. In markets and bazaars on his way into India, through Pakistan and Afghanistan where he disguised himself as a Persian Dervish, he often thought he spotted Stass B out of the corner of his eye. He was detained in Kabul and sent to a facility known only as Summer Camp, a place for questionable bearded individuals of American descent. He slept most of the time he was there, confounding his interrogators by dropping off beneath the oppressive heat lamps or in the middle of blaring music. He thought about teaching his technique to the other inmates of Summer Camp, but he didn't have a technique. He could only drop off at a moments notice. Sitting in his cell one evening, he resolved that his issue was his endless charity. He accepted the needs and desires of his dream characters, never once asserting his own will, never once bending people's caprices to his own needs. He resolved to be more aggressive. Finally one day Doctor Nod came to visit him. It was just like before. The sleeper awoke on his straw mattress to sense a shadowy presence. "Happy to see me?" "I can't really see you." "Is this better?" Doctor Nod moved closer into a stray sunbeam cutting through one of the wall slits. He lifted up his heavy sunglasses revealing his hazel eyes. "What are you doing here." "I've come to offer you a deal." "A deal? As far as I know I'm being detained here because of my beard." "That's not all." "Then maybe you could explain to me what is going on here?" "We want you back on the mission." Ah yes, the mission, the dream of deep space travel. But what was the point? To escape into a nothingness deeper than dreams? "I think I'll pass." "Then my hands are tied." "But I haven't done anything." "Done anything? Do you think doing something has anything to do with this? Hehe." The sleeper felt filled with a sense of anger and pity for himself. She had left him in search of her ideal man. Her ideal man had been discussed at length between herself and her mother. The ideal had been mapped out by another and by another before her. It was a mere form, a kind of tradition, and held no intrinsic virtue. Meanwhile, he was a man of talents. He lay his head back on the straw and fell into a dream of cloud piercing mountains where joyful children awaited, welcoming him into their secret mountain city. He stayed in the city, offering his services as a teacher. He felt the outside world using every means at its disposal to waken him. But no force in the world other than himself could awaken him. He worked in the mountain city of his dreams, setting up intricate games of nonsensical, free form basketball, lecturing on humanities drift out of legend and into a waking state slowly but surly mirroring the truth, beauty and justice contained within a dream dreamed long ago by a caveman. He felt his body demanding to awaken, his heart palpitating in his chest. But he refused to acknowledge its demanding rhythm. He held imperious sway over his sleeping state. Within his dream, he suddenly realized he was in love with a caretaker, a faceless composite beloved, the lost love of his early childhood. She wore crimson and black homespun and cradled his head in her lap. Her dark, glossy hair fell into her face as she laughed. He felt his heart giving up, pumping the blood through his body ever more slowly. He took a walk through the darkness of the mountain garden, holding his beloveds hand. He felt his sleeping body lifted and carried. He lay himself in the garden, let go of his beloveds hand, closed his eyes and opened them. He lay on a dirt road. Next to him rested a canister of Gatorade and a power bar. His arm shakily outstretched reaching toward the Gatorade. He restored himself to a sitting position. He was in the forest somewhere on a dirt road in India. The second life of the sleeper was different from the first. Perhaps it was only a change in location and occupation that did the trick. Then again, maybe his imprisonment at Summer Camp taught him the value of open spaces. He now gave himself to different occupations that seemed useful to him. He taught children how to write. He worked in Indian hospitals reading Rudyard Kipling short stories to people who cried out in the night, their dreams of love and rejection cut by the pain of living. At last he entered a Hindu ashram where one of its masters, M.S Ramchan Ph.D, taught him how to channel his sleeping ability to enter meditative states in which his conscious mind could scan his dream dialogues, as he used to scan manuscripts, and chart the point where his consciousness intersected with humanity's slowly awakening vision.
The sleeper worked in a glassy office on Madison since he was fresh out of Columbia. He managed to climb in the ranks by virtue of his uncanny reading ability. He didn't call it speed reading, but that's what it was. He read at a torrid clip, perhaps channeling his ability to slip into dreams into an ability to slip into a story. The other editorial assistants simply couldn't keep up. By virtue of his success, the city opened its social gates. The city requisitioned him to all kinds of parties attended by luminaries. At once such party, he met his wife to be. His wife-to-be took one thing and made it into something else. She took a so-so happiness and made it into a waking joy. Married life brought new and unprecedented waking delights so that the sleeper forgot about what he did best.
For one thing, his wife was a beautiful woman in the way he preferred a woman to be beautiful. Perhaps not the model of every man's beauty, but someone who had all the pieces in place to slip into the shoes of his dreamed of composite. The edges overlapped but little. The first tragedy of the sleeper's life was when, at 31, they discovered they could not have children. There was something wrong with the sleeper. They visited several recommended doctors on the matter. When the sleeper told the doctors about his only known health defect, his ability to fall asleep for however long he wanted, they tried to connect the dots and piece together a puzzle. The puzzle could not be solved.
With little warning, on the heals of a complex verdict regarding the state of his reproductive physiology, his wife left him for another. Apparently, there were other unhappinesses associated with life with the sleeper. His wife was unsatisfied. It all came out in a conversation. He was not the image of her ideal mate. He was not the man who, laid upon the image of her dream composite, created no overlapping edges. She had always suspected this, but had managed to put the discrepancy out of her head. While she was still young, she wanted to go on a quest to find her ideal. When the sleeper asked her where she would do this, she said that she would travel first to Spain and then to Italy, where the men were tall and graceful. If that didn't work, she would journey to Iceland.
Several weeks passed until the fateful moment came when the sleeper put his head down on his desk at work. He slipped into a dream of India, of fruit stalls in an outdoor bazaar beneath an evening oil canvas sky. He sampled the most delicious plum, chewy and endless like the plums from his childhood. He dreamed of his beloved x-wife and her composite mate. Her ideal was tall and dark. He was wearing a tuxedo. She hoisted him up piggy back onto her back at which point he turned into a feathery white bird, flying her out over the dim and dangerous landscape. As he dreamed, he became aware of the time slipping past, the day ending, people struggling to waken him, lifting him onto a gurney, carrying him to the hospital. Fuck it, he thought as he explored a strange India, losing himself in a dream within a dream, the contented life inside a mansion inside blue eggshell. Midnight in the hospital. He awoke, laughed, got dressed, paid the whopping bill and went home.
He lay down and slept some more, ticking off the minutes in his sleep as he propositioned aloof dream women in a fictional Union Square, the rickety skeletons of dead and dying sky scrapers crumbling in accord with a decaying civilization. The following day, he needed to meet with a famous writer, a celebrated dissident, a legend of southern Europe. Throwing his gangling arms out wide, the legend told the sleeper that life was a big joke. The question was the punchline. If you could find that, then you could do anything. If you could find that, said the legend, you could even sleep with the most beautiful woman in the world. When the sleeper tried to turn the conversation to the legend's forthcoming book, Veronika Decomposes, the legend changed the subject to Aspen Colorado, the only inhabitable American place outside of New York and San Francisco. OK, so the legend was a bore. That did not fully explain the bilious hateful feeling that arose from the sleepers gut from the space his ex-wife's detour had left. Sitting on a park bench in Central Park, he fell into a dream about losing his teeth. His gums were in an unhealthy state. Then he was living in an igloo in a wife swapping Eskimo community, only none of the wives wanted to sleep with him. Instead, he presided over the transaction of other men's exchange. He was the middle man of an arctic orgy. He recognized his wife's composite in the form of a tall Eskimo in a tuxedo who stood apart as if eternally posing for a photograph. As before, he set aside the urgency of the waking world, felt himself lifted onto the gurney, felt the waking world tilt its odd course toward the hospital. He awoke. He prepared to leave. This first involved removing the i.v. from his arm. "I wouldn't do that if I were you," said the man sitting next to his bed shrouded in darkness. "Why not?" "Relax. Talk to me for a little bit." "Who are you?" "Me? I'm you." "What the hell's that supposed to mean." "It means I understand." "Understand what?" "I understand your ability." "My ability?" "I understand what it is to sleep your life away. Only, I now use my powers for good and not for evil." "Your powers?" "Not everyone can put himself like that into an unbreakable state of hibernation." "Can you?" "No, not exactly." "So that you don't exactly have my powers." "Yes, but I understand them." "How do you know?" "I read your chart. My name is Doctor Nod." "You've got to be kidding me." "Donald, it's actually Donald Nostrand. The Nod part I made up." "Oh." Doctor Nod invited the sleeper to a facility on the outskirts of Washington DC. He flew him there in a helicopter. The sleeper mainly went for the helicopter ride, although he found the view drab. From a helicopter, the East Coast of the United States looks like jungle interspersed with highways and factory outlet shopping centers. When they landed on the roof of a tan building, Doctor Nod told the sleeper that this was where all the biggest sleepers worked out. Tests were done, the goal being a state of suspended animation which would someday make deep space travel feasible. That was the goal. This is where the sleeper met the larger than life personalities, the champion sleepers of the world. They reminded the sleeper of the writers he would meet now and then, only in an objective sense they lacked charisma. Before the sleeper returned to New York, Doctor Nod reminded him that he always had a place at the facility. "Only we understand you," said Doctor Nod. "Remember the mission. REMEMBER THE MISSION!" Doctor Nod shouted from the landing pad as the helicopter launched itself into the blue sky. The sleeper smirked and drifted off. There was no sense in staying awake for the flight. Word spread in the office building that the sleeper was a narcoleptic and was nodding off in the middle of dinner parties and being carried off to the hospital. An attractive woman named Josephine came to his office to comfort him. Josephine had the things the sleeper liked to see in women. She gave him some of her Adderall which she took for a disease called Addison Reeve syndrome which involved any number of minor seizures taking place in her brain making focus impossible. He thanked her, took the Adderall and suddenly began hacking and slashing the legend's new novel, Veronika Decomposes. He eliminated the first several paragraphs and the entire first chapter, which laboriously and pointlessly explained how life was some huge joke. He edited deep into the night and sent his draft to the legend who did not respond. That same evening, his propositioning of Josephine didn't go over very well. The sleeper was put on leave from his work. Several days later, laying in his bed, he decided to see how long he could remain unconscious. He went to the bathroom. He went back to bed and slept all day and all night. At the end of the following day, he began to receive urgent messages in regards to his physical well being. He felt himself pushing the envelope. He passed through dream after dream in which he was discarded for another man or else behooved to step aside in favor of a kindly ideal. He sadly acquiesced, charitably acknowledging the way of the world. When he couldn't stand it any longer, the pain in his back, his massive dehydrated headache. He awoke. His strength came back as he swallowed the water at his bedside. He was awake, alive. After eating a large meal, walking through the city, he never felt clearer. The colors, sights and sounds were crisp. He went to a liquor store and bought a flask of Bim Black. He walked around the city taking sips from his flask. Later that evening, piss drunk on a train, he decided to wake the sleeping homeless, to usher them into a new and uncharted state of clarity, only whenever he tried they brushed him aside in favor of their hard won dreams. He returned home. He dreamed of being invited to a grand ball somewhere in Europe only to realize that he was actually the valet and that he had dinged up someone's car. The sleeper figured his ability was good for acts of minor crime. The first of such acts was, obviously, stowing away. He could potentially express mail himself anywhere in the world provided there was someone on the other end ready to pick him up. He could stow away on a ship and sleep until they had reached international waters. He could attempt to become famous by sealing himself off in a glass box in a public space, a ticker counting off the minutes of his record sleep. Only how would they know he wasn't faking it? He could get rid of all his worldly possessions and travel the world, a mendicant sleeper requiring little in the way of lodgings. The sleeper would see the world. He flew to Paris where he spent his first night on the street before being transported at early dawn to a French hospital. He awoke in time to be served brie on a baguette with a glass of wine. He traveled to the south, spending a night dreaming in the misty Pyrenees before passing on foot into Spain. Walking the streets of Barcelona, in the back of his mind he kept a look out for his ex-wife. She would like this city of architecture and excess. It was her kind of place. Obvious and contrived, like a dashing middle aged maitre d who was also a musician. As he drifted eastward, he let his beard grow. He became familiar which each country's health care systems. France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Poland. Occasionally, less than pleasant things happened. He was robbed of his socks and so he stopped changing his socks for a time. A man who can sleep anywhere, for however long, required little in the way of attire. When it got cold out, he bought a pare of felt boots. He bought an old tank drivers hat on a street fair in Ankara. In Armenia, he was accosted by a man wearing outdoorsey clothing unheard of in the region. The man in the green fleece vest handed him a card displaying his first name and last initial. He said he wanted to recruit the sleeper to come and work for the Central Intelligence Agency. "How did you find me?" the sleeper asked. "We have our ways," said the individual in the incongruous vest. Stanislaw B. purchased a room for the sleeper in the most expensive hotel in Yerevan. They went clothing shopping together, although Stass could not be persuaded to part with his green vest and brown corduroy pants. They ate a great deal. Stass was interested in the ancient history of the Slavic peoples migrating out of a legendary realm, ever westward, ever further into waking misery. "We know about your unhappiness," he said. "You mean as a Slav? Or as a CIA agent?" "You could say that your unhappiness is famous with us. We think we know what you need." "What do I need, Stass?" "A true enemy. It worked for me. I was a man unhappy like yourself rejected by most women until I found my true enemy." "So who is your true enemy?" "Islamofascism." Late that night in his brand new clothes, his face still smarting from the Armenian shave, the sleeper sneaked out into the streets of the still sleeping city. He boarded a train for Georgia. After several days wandering around Tbilisi drunk, sleeping in church yards, he passed into Azerbaijan. From Azerbaijan, he stowed away on a ship to Turkmenistan. Traveling through Central Asia, he found it useful to be asleep most of the time. In politically unfriendly places, the sleeper noticed that, rather than take him to a hospital, they bundle him off sleeping toward the border. And so he was literally dumped in the dead of night onto a dirt road somewhere in Uzbekistan. He woke from a dream in which he charitably acquiesced to sleep at the foot of his wife's bed. Her lover's body was long, requiring a refined mattress to support his full deceptive heft. In markets and bazaars on his way into India, through Pakistan and Afghanistan where he disguised himself as a Persian Dervish, he often thought he spotted Stass B out of the corner of his eye. He was detained in Kabul and sent to a facility known only as Summer Camp, a place for questionable bearded individuals of American descent. He slept most of the time he was there, confounding his interrogators by dropping off beneath the oppressive heat lamps or in the middle of blaring music. He thought about teaching his technique to the other inmates of Summer Camp, but he didn't have a technique. He could only drop off at a moments notice. Sitting in his cell one evening, he resolved that his issue was his endless charity. He accepted the needs and desires of his dream characters, never once asserting his own will, never once bending people's caprices to his own needs. He resolved to be more aggressive. Finally one day Doctor Nod came to visit him. It was just like before. The sleeper awoke on his straw mattress to sense a shadowy presence. "Happy to see me?" "I can't really see you." "Is this better?" Doctor Nod moved closer into a stray sunbeam cutting through one of the wall slits. He lifted up his heavy sunglasses revealing his hazel eyes. "What are you doing here." "I've come to offer you a deal." "A deal? As far as I know I'm being detained here because of my beard." "That's not all." "Then maybe you could explain to me what is going on here?" "We want you back on the mission." Ah yes, the mission, the dream of deep space travel. But what was the point? To escape into a nothingness deeper than dreams? "I think I'll pass." "Then my hands are tied." "But I haven't done anything." "Done anything? Do you think doing something has anything to do with this? Hehe." The sleeper felt filled with a sense of anger and pity for himself. She had left him in search of her ideal man. Her ideal man had been discussed at length between herself and her mother. The ideal had been mapped out by another and by another before her. It was a mere form, a kind of tradition, and held no intrinsic virtue. Meanwhile, he was a man of talents. He lay his head back on the straw and fell into a dream of cloud piercing mountains where joyful children awaited, welcoming him into their secret mountain city. He stayed in the city, offering his services as a teacher. He felt the outside world using every means at its disposal to waken him. But no force in the world other than himself could awaken him. He worked in the mountain city of his dreams, setting up intricate games of nonsensical, free form basketball, lecturing on humanities drift out of legend and into a waking state slowly but surly mirroring the truth, beauty and justice contained within a dream dreamed long ago by a caveman. He felt his body demanding to awaken, his heart palpitating in his chest. But he refused to acknowledge its demanding rhythm. He held imperious sway over his sleeping state. Within his dream, he suddenly realized he was in love with a caretaker, a faceless composite beloved, the lost love of his early childhood. She wore crimson and black homespun and cradled his head in her lap. Her dark, glossy hair fell into her face as she laughed. He felt his heart giving up, pumping the blood through his body ever more slowly. He took a walk through the darkness of the mountain garden, holding his beloveds hand. He felt his sleeping body lifted and carried. He lay himself in the garden, let go of his beloveds hand, closed his eyes and opened them. He lay on a dirt road. Next to him rested a canister of Gatorade and a power bar. His arm shakily outstretched reaching toward the Gatorade. He restored himself to a sitting position. He was in the forest somewhere on a dirt road in India. The second life of the sleeper was different from the first. Perhaps it was only a change in location and occupation that did the trick. Then again, maybe his imprisonment at Summer Camp taught him the value of open spaces. He now gave himself to different occupations that seemed useful to him. He taught children how to write. He worked in Indian hospitals reading Rudyard Kipling short stories to people who cried out in the night, their dreams of love and rejection cut by the pain of living. At last he entered a Hindu ashram where one of its masters, M.S Ramchan Ph.D, taught him how to channel his sleeping ability to enter meditative states in which his conscious mind could scan his dream dialogues, as he used to scan manuscripts, and chart the point where his consciousness intersected with humanity's slowly awakening vision.
