The Conventionalist:
On the Placement of Dreams in Fiction
By Patrick McGinty
“Dreams are boring.”
o says Robert Stone’s therapist to a client in the short story "Helping." So says everybody, really. Your friends. Your significant other. Creative writing instructors don’t so much object as twitch. Why must we enter a second fictional reality to better understand the first? Why reveal "story" through a dream? Why not reveal "story" through the story?
What fictional dreams often violate is Newton’s first law. They violate the part that says objects in motion stay in motion unless knocked off course by an external force. The key word here is external. Once a story has been set in motion, any number of external events can shape it. A relationship, a betrayal, the passage of time itself: pick your fortune cookie. Dreams, though. Dreams are relentlessly, obsessively, uncontrollably internal, more so than even ambitions or desires. Dreams alter a story’s motion in a way that can feel quite literally forced. This doesn’t jive in fiction, we say. This doesn’t jive in physics, says Newton. A rolling red ball doesn’t dream up a left turn.
But what if the order is different? What if the dream comes first? What if that rolling red ball starts downhill in a dream?
If there is any writer who has tinkered with all the possible permutations of dreams in fiction, it is Haruki Murakami. I’ve always felt Hard Boiled Wonderland at the End of the World is his most interesting novel, and certainly his best constructed. It has the usual traits of his other work—whiz-kid teenagers, overwritten meal scenes, sudden phone calls—but where his other early works trend toward sentiment and nostalgia, Wonderland is more...complex. The chapters alternate between the Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. A different part of the protagonist’s consciousness is located (trapped?) in each. The more recent 1Q84 alternates similarly between two destined lovers, and the difference in alternating intra-consciously and between lovers cannot be overstated (these lovers are destined by around page 200, and for 700 pages you wait for them to meet. When they do, they wear bathrobes and look at the moon. There are a number of reasons to read the book. The pre-destined alternating love story is not one of these reasons). Because Wonderland alternates within the same consciousness, it is always clawing deeper and deeper at character, yet coming up curiously empty, breathing energy and possibility into the next chapter (as opposed to detailing yet another missed meeting for the lovers). It is predictable that these two halves of consciousness will intersect, but it is far from a leisurely, bathrobe-wearing intersection (I swear I’m done).
And fittingly, what with all this consciousness business, Hard-Boiled Wonderland at the End of the World begins in a dream-like state:
The elevator continued its impossibly slow ascent. Or at least I imagined it was ascent. There was no telling for sure: it was so slow that all sense of direction simply vanished. It could have been going down for all I knew, or maybe it wasn’t moving at all. But let’s just assume it was going up. Merely a guess. Maybe I’d gone up twelve stories, then down three. Maybe I’d circled the globe. How would I know?
Whether this opening counts as a dream is perhaps debatable, but the language carries on like this for six pages, chiseling away at all indications that this is reality as we know it. A summary of the opening paragraph alone could be "Or, vanished, could have been, maybe, assume, guess, maybe, maybe, question mark." An object has been set in motion. All we really know is that it is rolling in a world unlike our own.
he counterargument is simple. This is Murakami we’re talking about. Everything is a dream. Beginning, middle, end: it doesn’t matter where the dream is placed in the narrative structure. The whole damn thing always ends up being some form of a dream.
Fair points. Consider a radically different writer, then. An American realist. Charles D’Ambrosio’s story "The Point" begins with the slightest of references to dream:
I had been lying awake after my nightmare, a nightmare in which Father and I bought helium balloons at a circus. I tied mine around my finger and Father tied his around a stringbean and lost it. After that, I lay in the dark, tossing and turning, sleepless from all the sand in my sheets and all the uproar out in the living room. Then the door opened, and for a moment the blade of bright light blinded me. The party was still going full blast, and now with the door ajar and my eyes adjusting I glimpsed the silver smoke swirling in the light and all the people suspended in it, hovering around as if they were angels in Heaven—some kind of Heaven where the host serves highballs and the men smoke cigars and the women smell like rotting fruit. Everything was hysterical out there—the men laughing, the ice clinking, the women shrieking. A woman crossed over and sat on the edge of my bed, bending over me. It was Mother. She was backlit, a vague, looming silhouette, but I could smell lily of the valley and something else—lemon rind from the bitter twist she always chewed when she reached the watery bottom of her vodka-and-tonic. When Father was alive, she rarely drank, but after he shot himself you could say she really let herself go.
The mention of the nightmare is brief, but the dreamy tone is carried throughout the paragraph. We get two mentions of "nightmare" and two "Heavens," everything "backlit." There are "angels" and "looming silhouettes" and "silver smoke swirling." You could talk me into "crossed over" being a loaded phrase in any number of ways. Over the course of a single night, a dutiful, heartbroken kid has got to endure some very drunk adults who do some very weird things, none of which are half as weird or upsetting as what dutiful heartbroken kid and his family have already endured in the fallout from the Vietnam War.
“That is the sort WhamBowPow! opening we see often in contemporary American short fiction. Write straight from the wound, as they say. Dad is dead—might as well say so in Line One.”
A thought experiment: imagine if the paragraph was reversed. Imagine if that last line was the first. It’s easy to envision. "When Father was alive, [my mother] rarely drank, but after he shot himself you could say she really let herself go." That is the sort WhamBowPow! opening we see often in contemporary American short fiction. Write straight from the wound, as they say. Dad is dead—might as well say so in Line One.
Now imagine ending the paragraph with the nightmare. "I had been lying awake after my nightmare, a nightmare in which Father and I bought helium balloons at a circus. I tied mine around my finger and Father tied his around a stringbean and lost it." The dream no longer comes to us innocently. We as readers immediately fill it with all its ghastly meaning. In this thought experiment, the nightmare becomes almost entirely metaphor. It is no longer an event.
The opening paragraph in "The Point" has the exact right sequencing. The nightmare at the beginning sets the tone before we can fill it with out armchair analyses, before we can apply backstory and interpretation and logic. The ball starts rolling from a woken nightmare and it will roll the same way throughout the story, just as it does in Hard-Boiled Wonderland at the End of the World. The dreams work because of placement. You’d think a rolling red ball with a mind of its own would fetch quite the crowd, but it ends up being more of a parlor trick. It isn’t trustworthy. There’s obviously some gimmick at play, some deception. Newton would call it impossible. We’d call it boring.
Patrick McGinty's fiction has appeared, most recently, in ZYZZYVA and The Portland Review. In the summer issue, he reviewed Jon McGregor's story collection This Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You.
