Sauron Defeated (32 page)

'Being part of the foundations of a continent, and upholding immeasurable tons of rock for countless ages, waiting for an explosion or a world-shattering shock, is quite a common situation in parts of this universe. In many regions there is little or no "free will" as we conceive it. Also, though they are large and terrific, events may be relatively simple in plan, so that catastrophes (as we might call them), sudden changes as the end of long repeated series of small motions, are "inevitable": the present holds the future more completely. A perceiving but passive mind could see a collapse coming from an immense distance of time.

'I found it all very disturbing. Not what I wanted, or at least not what I had hoped for. I saw, anyway, that it would take far too much of a mortal human life to get so accustomed to this kind of vehicle that one could use it properly, or selectively, at will. I gave it up. No doubt, when any degree of control was achieved, my mind would no longer have been limited to that particular vehicle or chunk of matter. The waking mind is not confined to the memories, heredity, or senses, of its own normal vehicle, its body: it can use that as a platform to survey the surroundings from. So, probably, it could, if it ever mastered another vehicle: it could survey, in some fashion, other things where the meteorite (say) came from, or things it had passed in its historical journey. But that second transference of observation would certainly be much more difficult than the first, and much more uncertain and inefficient.

'So I turned more than ever to dream-inspection, trying to get

"deeper down". I attended to dreams in general, but more and more to those least connected with the immediate irritations of the body's senses. Of course, I had at times experienced, as most people have, parts of more or less rationally connected dreams, and even one or two serial or repeating dreams. And I have had also the not uncommon experience of remembering fragments of dreams that seemed to possess a "significance" or emotion that the waking mind could not discern in the remembered scene.(35) I was not at all convinced that this significance> was due to obscured symbols, or mythical values, in the dream-scenes; or at least I didn't and don't think that that is true of most of such dream-passages. Many of these "significant patches" seemed to me much more like random pages torn out of a book.'

'But you didn't wriggle out of Rufus's clutches that way, did you?' said Guildford. 'He'll analyse a whole book as cheerfully as a page.'

'It depends on the contents,' said Ramer. 'But I'll come back to that. For at about that time something decisive happened. It seemed to sweep away all other trials and experiments; but I don't think they were really wasted. I think they had a good deal to do with precipitating the, well, catastrophe.'

'Come on, come on! What was it?' said Dolbear. He stopped snoring and sat up.

'It was most like a violent awakening,' said Ramer. He was silent for almost a minute, staring at the ceiling as he lay back in his chair.

At last he went on. 'Imagine an enormously long, vivid, and absorbing dream being shattered - say, simultaneously by an explosion in the house, a blow on your body, and the sudden flinging back of dark curtains, letting in a dazzling light: with the result that you come back with a rush to your waking life, and have to recapture it and its connexions, feeling for some time a shock and the colour of dream-emotions: like falling out of one world into another where you had once been but had forgotten it. Well, that was what it was like in reverse; only recapturing the connexions was slower.

'I was awake in bed, and I fell wide asleep: as suddenly and violently as the waker in my illustration. I dived slap through several levels and a whirl of shapes and scenes into a connected and remembered sequence. I could remember all the dreams I had ever had, of that sequence. At least, I remember that I could remember them while I was still "there", better than I can

"here" remember a long sequence of events in waking life. And the memory did not vanish when I woke up, and it hasn't vanished. It has dimmed down to normal, to about the same degree as memory of waking life: it's edited: blanks indicating lack of interest, some transitions cut, and so on. But my dream-memories are no longer fragments, no longer like pictures, about the size of my circle of vision with fixed eyes, surrounded with dark, as they used to be, nearly always. They are wide and long and deep. I have visited many other sequences since then, and I can now remember a very great number of serious, free, dreams, my deep dreams, since I first had any.'

'What a lumber-room! ' said Lowdham.

'I said my serious dreams,' said Ramer. 'Of course, I can't, don't want to, and haven't tried to remember all the jumble of marginal stuff - the rubbish the analysts mostly muck about with, because it's practically all they've got - no more than you try to recollect all the scribbling on blotting-paper, the small talk, or the idle fancies of your days.'

'How far have you gone back?' Lowdham asked.

'To the beginning,' Ramer answered.

'When was that?'

'Ah! That depends on what you mean by when,' said Ramer.

'There are seldom any data for cross-timing as between waking and dreaming. Many dreams are in, or are concerned with, times remote from the standpoint of the body. One of those dreams might be said to occur before it started; or after. I've no idea how far I've gone back in that sense, backward in the history of the universe, you might say. But sticking to the waking time, then I suppose I cannot have begun dreaming until I had begun to be: that is, until the creation of my mind, or soul.

But I doubt if any ordinary time-reference has any real meaning with regard to that event considered in itself; and the word dreaming ought to be limited to the ... er ... spare-time, off-duty, activities of an incarnate mind. So I should say my dreaming began with the entry of my mind into body and time: somewhere in the year 1929. But that fifty-odd years of our time could contain various indefinite lengths of experience, or operation, or journeying. My earlier experiments were not necessary, except perhaps to help in the precipitation of memory, as I said.

My mind "asleep" had long done that sort of thing very much better.'

He paused, and we looked at him, some of us a bit queerly.

He laughed. 'Don't imagine me walking about "in a dream", as people say. The two modes are no more confused than before. If you had two homes in quite different places, say in Africa and Norway, you'ld not usually be in doubt which one you were staying in at any given time, even if you could not remember the transition. No, at the worst my situation is only like that of a man who has been reading a deeply interesting book, and has it

"on his mind", as he goes about his affairs. But the impression can pass off, or be put aside, as in the case of a book. I need not think about my dreams, if I don't wish to, no more than I need think about any book or re-read it.'

'You say re-read. Can you will, now when awake, to go back to any particular dream, to repeat it or go on with it?' asked Frankley. 'And can you remember your waking life while in a dream?'

'As to the last question,' Ramer replied, 'the answer is: in a sense yes. As clearly as you can remember it while writing a story, or deeply engrossed in a book. Only you can't give direct attention to it. If you do, you wake up, of course.

'The other question's more difficult. Dreams are no more all of one sort than the experiences of waking life; less so in fact.

They contain sensations as different as tasting butter and understanding a logical argument; stories as different in length and quality as one of Arry's lower anecdotes and the Iliad; and pictures as unlike as a study of a flower-petal and those photographs of the explosion in the Atomic Reservation in the seventies,(36) which blew the Black Hole in the States. Dreams happen, or are made, in all sorts of ways. Those that people mostly remember, and remember most of, are marginal ones, of course, or on the upper levels...'

'Margins? Upper levels? What d'you mean?' snapped Jones,(37) breaking in, to our surprise. 'Just now you spoke of diving.

When do we get to the bottom?'

'Never,' Ramer laughed. 'Don't take my words too literally, at any rate no more literally than I suppose you take the sub in subconscious. I'm afraid I haven't thought out my terminology very carefully, James; but then I didn't mean to talk about these things to you, not yet. I've been put on the mat. I think I meant deep as in deeply interested; and down, lower, upper, and all the rest have crept in afterwards, and are misleading. Of course there isn't any distance between dreams and waking, or one kind of dream and another; only an increase or decrease of abstraction and concentration. In some dreams there's no distraction at all, some are confused by distractions, some just are distractions. You can lie "deep" and sodden in body-made dreams, and receive clear visions in "light" sleep (which might seem on the very margin of waking). But if I use "deep" again you'll know that I mean dreams as remote as may be from disturbance, dreams in which the mind is seriously engaged.

'By the marginal ones I meant those that are produced when the mind is playing, idling, or fooling, as it often is, mooning aimlessly about among the memories of the senses - because it's tired, or bored, or out of mental sorts, or worried by sense-messages when its desires or attention are elsewhere; the devil's tattoo of dreaming as compared with the piano-playing. Some minds, perhaps, are hardly capable of anything else, sleeping or waking.

'And the machinery may go on ticking over, even when the mind is not attending. You know how you've only got to do something steadily for hours - like picking blackberries, say -

and even before you're asleep the manufacture of intricate trellises of briars and berries goes on in the dark, even if you're thinking of something else. When you begin to dream you may start by using some of those patterns. I should call that

"marginal". And anything else that is largely due to what is actually going on, in and around the body: distraction complexes in which such things as "noises off", indigestion, or a leaking hot-water-bottle play a part.

'Asking if you can re-visit that stuff is like asking me if I can will to see (not make) rain tomorrow, or will to be waked up again by two black cats fighting on the lawn. But if you're talking about serious dreams, or visions, then it's like asking if I shall walk back up the road again last Tuesday. The dreams are for your mind events. You can, or might - waking desire has some effect, but not much - go back to the same "places" and

"times", as a spectator; but the spectator will be the you of now, a later you, still anchored as you are, however remotely, to your body time-clock here. But there are various complications: you can re-inspect your memories of previous inspections, for one thing; and that is as near to dreaming the same dream over again as you can get (the closest parallel is reading a book for a second time). For another thing, thought and "invention" goes on in dreams, a lot of it; and of course you can go back to your own work and take it up again - go on with the story-making, if that is what you were doing.'

'What a busy time we all seem to have been having without knowing it,' said Lowdham. 'Even old Rufus may not be quite such a sloth as he looks. Anyway you've given him a jolly good excuse to fall back on. "Goodbye all! I'm off to my dream-lab to see if the retorts are bubbling," says he, and he's snoring in two ticks.'

'I leave the bubbling retorts to you,' said Dolbear, opening his eyes. 'I am afraid I've not yet got down to such high levels as Michael, and I muck about still with the marginal stuff, as he calls it. Tonight at any rate I've been having a bit of a dream: in the rootling stage, I suppose, owing to the distraction of this discussion going on round my body. I got a picture of Ramer, equipped with Frankley's long nose, trying to extract whiskey out of a bottle; he couldn't pour it out, as he had no arms, only a pair of black wings, like a devil in a stuffed M.A. gown.'

'The whiskey-bottle was not derived from the sense-data in this room,' said Lowdham.

'Now I can sympathize with the psychoanalysts,' said Frankley, rising and getting a bottle out of the cupboard. 'The difficulty they must have in sorting out dreams from the malicious inventions of the patient's waking mind!'

'No difficulty with Rufus,' said Lowdham. 'The drink-urge explains most of him. And I don't think he's got a Censor, sleeping or waking.'

'Hm! I'm glad I'm so transparent,' said Dolbear. 'Not everyone is so simple, Arry. You walk in disguises, even when awake. But they'll slip, my lad, one day. I shouldn't wonder if it was fairly soon.'(38)

'Lor!' said Lowdham. 'Have I come out in a false beard and forgotten it, or something?' But at that moment he caught a glint in Dolbear's eye, and stopped suddenly.

'Go on, Michael, and don't take any notice of them!' said Jeremy.