The Price of Dreams

“We never remember the beginning,” she said quietly. “We pretend not to know why—but then that is one of our favorite tricks, isn’t it?” she glanced up at me, smiling at my confused silence. With her arms crossed she began to drift about the room, examining objects while continuing this strange introduction.

“We pretend not to know many things. We can even pretend not to know the truth. The horrible truth. But the beginning?” she paused and met my eye in the mirror. “Well there is an explanation for that one. We never remember the beginning because there never was a beginning. That’s one of those horrible parts of the truth we choose to miss.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. Her choice of words—the horrible truth—bothered me inexplicably. I wanted to argue with her; I wanted to point out the fact that there are many beginnings and how easy it is to remember most of them. The urge to argue was so strong that I felt suspicious of it. She turned to face me, and the look she gave me made me feel like I had asked the wrong question. She was waiting for my argument. But, before I could think of the right question to ask, she spoke.

“You know what I mean.”

For a moment I didn’t know if she was answering the question I had asked or the question I was thinking: What horrible truth? Or were they the same thing?

“We never remember the beginning,” she went on, not even sparing me a second look, “until the very end; because there is no end either. None of which makes sense, of course, until you risk looking at the truth. I wish I could tell you that truth. Honestly.”

“You can,” I assured her, hoping for something to define this conversation.

She smiled to herself. A rather frightening smile. “You can’t tell people things they already know. Or think they know. How am I supposed to tell you something you think you don’t know?” She laughed. It was a mesmerizing sound. “Knowing the truth is deceptively easy. It is like listening to what people say. Not just hearing their voice, but realizing what they are saying to you.”

She wasn’t looking at me. I doubt she was looking at anything in particular. It struck me suddenly that she was posed in the perfect expression of listening. So when she spoke again, it startled me.

“You can’t make people listen to you without tricking them. The truth is the same way. The only difference is that the truth is a constant. It doesn’t have to repeat itself.”

“What?” I asked, almost solely out of reflex; as if by being startled I might have missed something important.

“We never remember the beginning,” she said quietly, precisely as she had before. I looked at her with a frown, but she carried on without regarding it. “We pretend not to know why—but then that is one of our favorite tricks, isn’t it? We pretend not to know many things. We can even pretend not to know the truth. The horrible truth.

“But the truth?” she held that in the air a moment, and looked at me pointedly. She held up her hands for emphasis. Realizing that the question was not rhetorical, I nodded. “The truth is,” she measured out her words, “I can remember the beginning.” Before I could ask the beginning of what she cut me off with a gesture, and resumed the pose of listening.

This caused an agitation in me. I have never considered myself an insensitive man. Indeed I have prided myself on my sensativity to the subtlest of cues. As a child I was so sensitive that there were times I could not distinguish my own thoughts from those of people around me. I don’t know where such thoughts could have come from, but my best guess has been that I read their state of mind so well from their body language that I thought sympathetic thoughts for them.

What am I driving at? Well, at that moment, her gesture struck me so suddenly she might have just as well screamed listen! at the top of her lungs.

That shock made it clear to me that she was communicating deliberately on many levels, verbal and non-verbal. I brought my mind into focus and met her eye. Her body was governed by a poise unlike anything I had known. Without a word, she managed to express her awareness of my realization. My eyes widened and she nodded with the faintest smile.

The clearest thought chimed in my head, ears hear, but the mind listens… the mind listens with every sense and it becomes a sense. Can you read my mind? I was nodding my head before I even thought to question the origin of the thought.

I fell into a quiet of mind; a state of heightened awareness. I didn’t have to question what beginning she was talking about, because suddenly it was obvious what beginning we are each oblivious to. The beginning of awareness; of our selves. She smiled broadly at me and nodded assertively. Without further distractions she continued her story.

“Oh, I can call it the beginning because I can remember before that moment… I remember that I could have prevented what happened. I could have done anything else in creation, but once begun there was nothing I could do to stop it. Because at that moment I changed. Oh, I want to say that it was indescribable, but what happened to me was so vivid, so utterly real that it replaced creation in my own mind.” She writhed against the limits of the words; a movement at once seductive, sensual and painful.

Her attention seemed to withdraw from the world into some all consuming inner vision. “It was the moment I saw creation in the minds of the others.

“And there at the center of everyone’s attention was me,” she whispered. I felt a horrible echo of her meaning as I felt her at the very center of my own attention. Even she was caught up unselfconsciously in the lure of that powerful suggestion.

“It sounds simple, but it could not have been,” her voice sounded contemplative. Remote. “On the other side of the beginning there had been a flicker, the slightest glimmer in the corner of my eye. I had barely noticed this thing, a suggestion of measurable complexity,” she began to look entranced, her words coming out as if across a great distance of time. “I knew instinctively that I understood this thing, even before I had identified it. It came to me like a sensation. Unfolding and embracing me. Growing in detail and possibilities before my awakening curiosity. With growing delight I chased this wondrous image, a dream promising to fulfill all I could desire. It tested everything I could understand. I even understood who the others were. I knew them as well as I knew myself. And then I knew something was wrong. And I knew it was too late.

“There it was. My understanding laid bare before me and at once I could tell that it exceeded my consciousness. The others had held up a mirror to my mind’s eye and shown me nothing more than myself. Conscious now of the memory of that pure unconscious understanding I was changed.

“That I should embrace death so! That death is a sudden rude awakening!” she clenched her fist and eyes tightly; caught up in the pain of this memory. It was all I could do not to interrupt. I had to resist the disturbing notion that I was listening to some kind of poetic drama rather than an experience from her life. In her stance I read her frustration; the kind of agitation of a person who simply cannot find words to express an idea or a feeling.

“To become so sharply aware of myself and understand in that moment that I knew nothing,” she confessed, abandoning her tension. She rested her figertips against her temples as she went on, “Here in my naked mind there were no concepts or thoughts by which I might harness this understanding. And yet, my first memory is a moment of self conception. There in the light of this limitless understanding I thought, this is me.”

She paused and turned to look at me directly. I had the palpable feeling that she had stepped back into reality a moment to comment, “You remember your first thought, because you are your first thought. That is the secret. At first you are incapable of thought. You look at the world passively for eternity, then suddenly you realize you are there. You have defined yourself apart from the world, so naturally you begin to try to define the world.

“You try to fill the void; you begin to think. Analyze.” She shuddered, “Unless you are conceived in doubt. God help those who begin with the thought: this is not me. How powerless that must make you feel. To recognize the world but fail to recognize yourself…” She trailed off and became distant again.

“Then,” she resumed, as if she had not interrupted herself, “I turned and really looked at the others. I can remember their experiences of that time as well as my own because at that moment I was aware of them only in the sense that they resembled myself. I was only aware of their minds; I was only aware of them as what they understood. I understood this, and I understood them. Understanding them, I understood what they knew and in that second breath I knew.

I knew in a limited fashion that this assumption of their knowledge was barely within the limits of their conception. However, their knowledge brought me only confusion. Unlike the constant sensation that came with my self awareness, or the understanding from which I had been embodied, there was nothing definite, certain or clear about the connection between what they knew and what they understood.

By the time I could grasp the meaning of what I had glimpsed I no longer had any kind of advantage. I lacked so much experience. In fact I was forced to realize that my existence was in danger.

“Sensing this, knowing it as surely as I can know anything, I wonder if I am truly any different from anyone else. Do I really remember this moment I call the beginning or have I, like the rest of them, dared that unforgivable error and looked too closely at the truth. Do I suddenly see the beginning so clearly because I have reached the end of my existence?” she stopped abruptly, startled by her own words.

Suddenly her story seemed forgotten, and she visibly began to reconsider what she had begun. Smoothly, swiftly she swept over beside me and sat on the couch facing me. “Is that why I have hidden here among those who are aware of the existence of god the way we are all aware of the truth? Fearfully unexamined?” she asked me, the first honest question she had asked me since our initial meeting. Showing an honest need for an answer from me.

So specifically from me that part of my soul ached. “Do I ask you to help me write this only because I fear that in my future I will not be there to represent my own story?”

I could have come up with an answer, and yet I felt it imperative to silently drive her to her own counsel. I recalled the brief conversation that had brought us together. She had been looking for an author. Someone who could tell her story for her, because—mysteriously—she was forbidden to write it herself.

I was flattered by her confession that she had sought me out particularly, deliberately ignoring opportunities to approach established writers in favor of me. I was not bothered by her stipulation that while she dared not write a word herself she had to have absolute say over whatever form it took.

Far from chaffing at this limitation, I realized how closely we would have to work to fulfill this request, and she was—literally—the woman of my dreams. When she added that not only could she have nothing to do with the actual writing, she could not take any credit or particularly any profits for the completed work.

It was such a strange request that I had to at least find out if there was a story to tell. With the little I had heard so far, unintelligible as it was, there was indeed a story. It didn’t matter suddenly if it was a real story about a real life.

A thought like that, just at that moment, was more than enough to make me check the state of my sanity and empathize deeply with the suggestion of mortal peril on the part of this young woman. I had no doubts that this was a far out story so far. Yet it seemed obviously very real to her. So questioning the reality of the story was tantamount to questioning her reality.

And yet I did not care about such a question. The story was important in its own regard, and I had to be totally impartial about the source of it.

But these thoughts did not pass in an instant as they so conveniently do in books.

She had come to some conclusion on her own in the silent moment. Her eyes scanned a private horizon, seemingly measuring the height and breadth of the untold story. Rhetorically, her question snapped the silence oddly close to the mark of my own mused image. “Or is what I’ve been through enough?”

“Am I to have this written simply so that I can forget and forgive those who tore me out of the majesty of heaven to share an existence where I can be aware of the pain of death and resurrection? Where I can be conscious of the terrible thing I have done to their world mind—so that I can learn how to not look so closely at the horrible truth?” she shared her question in a way I found difficult to take part in. “And yet I am afraid that what I want is as unforgivable as my other sin.”

I shook my head slowly, rising to pour myself a drink. I went ahead and poured her one too, not bothering to ask. It was a small interruption, but enough for me to gather my thoughts. As I sat her drink on the coffee table before her I began to speak quietly.

“I am going to apologize first, and ask you to let me finish before you continue this. Or leave, if I offend you.” She shrugged, then nodded slightly. “Good. First thing. What is the point of all of this?” I asked, since both of our conversations had barely touched on what it was she wanted of me in specific terms.

She stared at me a moment, either unsure of what I meant or how to answer. I don’t know which and she didn’t ask me to clarify. She just reached for her glass and took a sip.

“The story is the only point,” she said after a long silence.

“Then what is all of this you are trying to tell me? Is this the story? Do I write just what you say?” I asked. But there was more to it than this question. There was a more logical problem, as I tried to explain, “There is a tremendous difference between just telling a story and writing a book. There has to be a point of departure. There has to be some kind of common ground. If the point is for people to read this, then they have to be able to understand what it is you are telling them.”

“I am telling you the beginning,” she began, but I cut her off.

“What kind of beginning is saying there really isn’t a beginning. Or, the beginning is somehow not there until the end?”

“But that is the whole point,” she declared, setting down her glass. “I never realized how important that moment was until it was all over. If that moment had not happened, then I would have to describe the whole of creation to explain how what happened could have happened.”

I sighed. “Actually, that has nothing to do with it. A writer can start a story any damn way he pleases. All he needs to accomplish is catch the reader’s attention. It is sort of funny, but in a sense the problem with your beginning is like what you said. People choose not to know a lot of things, like the truth, but in the ways that it counts they can acknowledge it easily. People know that beginnings are illusions.

“The writer realizes that the reader knows this and contrives to make the beginning slip past the reader. A good beginning suckers the reader into the story before he or she notices it. So the problem with your beginning is that it makes the reader, or the listener, ask too many questions.”

“Is there every anything but at the beginning?” she mused softly, fingers resting lightly on the rim of her drink. Looking up, she flicked her other hand up dismissively. “If it bothers you so much, start at the end. You already know that part.”

I gazed back into her stormy eyes. “You mean this.”

Her response was delivered with a wry grin, “If you like to jump in at the deep end.”

It was hard not to laugh and shake my head. “Didn’t this conversation start with me asking you to ‘Start from the beginning’?” I asked a bit peevishly. She just shrugged and gave a slight nod. “Do you think maybe you took the question a bit too literally?” I suggested.

She frowned, “I’m not that obtuse. I’ll get to my story. There is a lot I am still sorting out and your question got me thinking out loud. I hadn’t considered how I would go about telling my story; it’s hard to see a beginning when I’ve always seemed caught up in the middle of things.

“I suppose you could say that this all began because I dared to look myself in the eye and know myself,” she confided, rising to her feet with her drink in hand. She took a sip as she resumed pacing. “That is how I know the only way to tell my story is to ask you to write it.”

I frowned and crossed my arms. “Something seems to be missing there,” I pointed out.

She nodded, “It is a kind of paradox. I can only assume that you knew what you were doing all along. Either that, or this is all just a dream and the story of my life just the horrible truth of it.” She bowed her head, her hair flowing forward to veil her face.

A cold shock raced down my spine.

“When I set out in search of you, I assumed that the books must have already been written,” she murmured, her words stepping firmly on my mind. “How else could I have read them? I thought they would lead me to you, I thought maybe this is the wrong world entirely. Then I found you, and I finally understood. You are the end of me. You are my only hope of a beginning.”

I blinked and the world shifted on its axis. I did not need to think about what had drawn me to her, and repulsed me. I realized I was dreaming, amazed at myself for believing even for a moment that I had finally met the girl of my dreams and yet truly be awake. I knew in that instant what she had been trying to tell me, what she had already discovered for herself. I knew her story. I had tried a thousand times to write it and found it too painful every time. “It is true. I know how you got here. I didn’t write it. I couldn’t write it. I did not want to do this to you. To me,” I whispered.

“Oh, but you must. If you don’t, I may as well have never existed, and how then can I know my own story?” she demanded, reaching out and taking my arm in her hands. “Do not doubt for an instant how well you know me – how well I know myself. Even as I am undone, I realize that not only will I not turn a blind eye to the truth, you will see the truth in me.”

She was going to force me to see what I always knew was true. She had come to wake me up, and it was going to cost her everything she was. My dream was on its dying breath, and I knew that the girl of my dreams was the girl I had dreamed of being. A girl who chose to face the truth and die instead of living out a lie, and this is where her story begins.