nightmare

In which I watch a silly Kurosawa film with E…

I live in a big house with an entertainment room set up with large, cushy couches and expensive electronic equipment. A giant flat screen TV is on my wall with speakers hanging all around. I’ve rented Rashoman, a movie that I’ve never seen but always wanted to.

(In real life, my house is nothing at all like this and I have seen Rashoman, but anyway this is a dream so let’s roll with it.)

Just as I’ve dimmed the lights and settled down on the couch with a bowl of buttery popcorn, there’s a knock on my door. I get up and open the door: it’s E, H and C. They ask what I’m doing for the evening, and I tell them that I’ve just sat down to watch a movie. H and C say they don’t want to watch it, and they ask if they can just hang out in my backyard. E, on the other hand, seems interested. He asks what movie it is and I tell him it is a Kurosawa flick. He says he’s never heard of Kurosawa, and I ask him if he’s seen Seven Samurai. He says he hasn’t, but he’s heard of it. I tell him that Rashoman is also a samurai film, and he seems excited to see it.

We go back to the fancy, entertainment room, and I tell E that Rashoman is a samurai adaptation of children’s TV shows from the 60s and 70s. He thinks this is really strange but I point out that Kurosawa made a few adaptations like that. I mention that Yojimbo was a samurai adaptation of Fistful of Dollars because I know that he really likes Clint Eastwood. He said he once saw a samurai adaptation of Macbeth and I said, “Yeah that was Kurosawa too!” We can’t remember what that movie was called though, and we think about it for a long time before remembering that it was Ronin. We talk about how much we love the scene in the end in which the archers all shoot arrows at Robert DeNiro.

So we sit down to watch Rashoman, but the first problem is that the subtitles are not in English. We can’t read what the people are saying, but that turns out to not be such a big problem as the plot is abstract anyway. First we see cartoon samurais singing the Ladybug Picnic song from Sesame Street. Then we see samurais in squares like at the beginning of The Brady Bunch. Then a bunch of samurais in miniskirts start dancing like on Laugh-In. Finally, a group of samurai sitting are around on beanbags drinking mate. Toshiro Mifune is one of them and he is wearing a fedora.

E tells me that this is ridiculous and that he doesn’t want to watch anymore. I’m embarrassed because I was only recently singing praises about Kurosawa. I tried to construct some argument about how he was making an ironic statement, but eventually I had to admit that the film was stupid. E went outside with H and C, and they all three called for me to join them. But I told them that I was going to finish the film since I’d already sat through half of it. E responded that I was just hot for Toshiro Mifune. Maybe so, I thought. He was a good looking man in his youth, I said, but I sure wish he’d hurry up and start killing people.

The phone rings and I get up to answer it. I'm not sure what happened then, but the next dream started with a phone call (though in a different setting) so I think they were back-to-back.

In which R is in the hospital…

A continuation of the dream above, I think.

I'm in line at the bank and I get a phone call from my mother and rush to the hospital because R has been in a car wreck. My grandmother and brother are there too. My mom explains that he has broken his neck and one of his vertebrae is lodged into a part of his brain. She says that he is in surgery to have it removed. This is expected to be successful and he should have a total recovery.

After his surgery is finished, we are admitted into his hospital room. His face and head is swollen and there is a large contraption, like an Xray machine, attached to his head. His limbs are being held down with belts and there are tubes coming out of his arms and chest. His eyes are open and he is looking around the room. I walk over to him and touch his face and tell him that he’s been in a car wreck but that he is OK now. He just looks around the room and doesn’t respond. I ask him if he is comfortable or if he has any pain. He still just looks around and doesn’t respond.

My mom is with me. She’s a nurse, and I can tell that his silence makes her nervous. I say, “maybe he can’t talk with all these tubes coming out of his chest.” She nods, cautiously. Then I lean over, close to his face and say, “R, can you hear me? If you can hear me, blink your eyes.”

He still just looks around the room randomly and I start to think that he doesn’t even see me or know that I’m there. This is terrifying, and I grab his head between my hands and shout at him, “Blink your eyes! Blink your eyes!” but he does nothing at all.

I start to cry and my mom pulls me away from him. R moves his arms around and gurgles. I look at him and realize that he is an empty shell. He is not conscious of being a person or that there are other people around him. He is simply an organism responding to external stimuli- whatever made him a person is gone.

I go out into the hall with my mother. My grandmother is waiting there with me. The doctor comes by and explains that the surgery was successful in that R can breathe on his own. But he has lost most of his brain functioning and now has the cognitive abilities of an earthworm. He says that it is a miracle that R survived, and that I should look at this as a gift from above to learn about compassion.

This makes me hysterical. I start screaming at the doctor that his practice is a modern day torture chamber. There is nothing miraculous about this- it’s a horror. R is dead and only his body is left over, kept alive by their interference. If there is no hope that he will ever recover then there is no miracle at all. It’s a miserable situation and I don’t want to hear any b.s. about miracles and gifts of compassion. My grandmother tries to comfort me.

I’m alone now thinking about everything I took for granted- all the days that R and I had together in which I didn’t tell him how wonderful he was and how happy I was to be with him. It was really a horrible feeling. I was also overwhelmed thinking about what to do next. He could live out another 40 years in this condition. He had not made a living will, so the hospital would probably keep his body alive even though he was dead. It seemed like a prison sentence to me that I would have to spend the rest of my life taking care of this hollow shell. Then I thought of the expense and how I’d never be able to work again, and I started to wonder if I could make him a ward of the state. When I asked a nurse about this, she told me that I was being selfish. But I told her that she was being foolish. If there was any hope that he could recover or that he could be aware of anything going on around him, then I would do anything I could to help him. This situation is hopeless though. He will never have any more consciousness than a slug. It’s cruel that he is being kept alive and also cruel that I should have to spend the rest of my life in poverty to take care of him.

Then I realized I needed to tell his family what had happened. R’s cell phone was destroyed in the wreck, so I didn’t have anyone’s phone numbers at the hospital. I didn’t want to go home because I didn’t want to leave him for that long before I figured out what to do and before I talked to his brother. So I decided to go to the hospital Internet café and send a FB message to his brother telling him to call me at the hospital. My brother was there, and he came with me to show me how to use the new computers. These computers looked like leaves with very long vines at the end that had to be connected to a large living stalk. I told him that I wished that technology would stop changing so fast. He connected me to the Internet and then left me alone.

I thought that R’s brother doesn’t check his Facebook page that often, so I decided to send a message to many people- V, A, S, R, and G. Once I’d compiled the list, I struggled with the words. If I just wrote “Tell V to call me- urgent” then I might put a lot of people into the horrible situation of not knowing what had happened. They would imagine all sorts of things and think that R might be dead. Normally when people need to talk about something like this, they say “Everything’s OK” or “R is doing fine” but in this case, it wasn’t true. He was not dead, but he was not doing fine. The news I had to share was so horrible that I couldn’t figure out what to do. I didn’t want to put any of them through the horror of wondering what was wrong while they made their way to a phone to call me. Sometimes the unknown can be worse than reality. But at the same time, I didn’t want to come out and tell them what had happened because it was so horrible that I wanted to do it over the phone- not on Facebook. Then I thought of R’s poor mother and how devastated she was going to be about all this. Really, this was all so upsetting that I couldn’t do anything so I closed the leaf computer and just put my head on the table and cried, wondering what to do. I couldn’t fly all the way to Delhi to tell them because I couldn’t leave R for that long. So finally I decided to go home and get my address book with all my phone numbers.

I asked my brother to take me home. We went down to the parking garage of the hospital and walked to his truck. It was smashed in the front, but the engine was still running just fine. My brother explained that this was the truck R was in when he got in the wreck. I looked at the truck in amazement. It hardly had any damage. How could he have injured himself so badly in a vehicle like that? My brother explained that the truck had rolled over several times so R had hit his head on the ceiling. But I looked at the roof of the truck and could see no indication that it had rolled.

“This doesn’t make sense,” I told my brother. He lit a cigarette and stood outside the truck. We were parked on the side of the road in front of the hospital. There was traffic all around us.

“I thought we went down to the parking garage?” I asked my brother. He turned around and looked at the hospital and the garage behind us. I realized that he didn’t really look like my brother.

“This is a dream,” I told him. But I felt buried down deep in it. I wanted out of the dream, but it seemed so heavy. I can’t really explain this feeling- it doesn’t make sense- but I felt like I was covered by the dream.

I started swimming in the sky up out of the dream. I could see the hospital and the road behind me. I swam up and up until I could feel myself inside my body in my bed. I was stuck in sleep paralysis. I tried really hard to wake up because I knew that I had to hurry up and find R’s brother’s phone number. I tried to swim up some more and finally woke up. It was 6 AM on Martin Luther King Day. I can’t tell you how relieved I was to discover that this was a dream. It took a good hour to shake off the horrible feeling.