I Am the Author of My Dreams

It doesn’t hurt to be surnamed Junge when one is a psychiatrist although Frank’s family was several generations away from Switzerland and he was unaware of any relationship with the great Carl Gustav. Junge was a common enough name. Frank believed that he had achieved his former position of responsibility at a Mid-Western teaching hospital strictly on his own merits and his many published papers would support that opinion. He had left that relative security as the captive of an idea. During the early years of his medical training he had suffered severely from nightmares. Mainly due to the awareness that his parents marriage was in danger of foundering from the constant strain of the financial obligations that they had undertaken to put him through medical school. He had felt very much to blame, selfish, and had offered to pull out, take up something else, but they would not hear of it. He had also discovered himself, now that he was for the first time in his life away from the safety of home and the friends that he had grown up, to be unskilled socially. Young women paralyzed his brain and his tongue. If they betrayed the least interest in him, he would look around in panic for some way of escape. Years later, he had still never had a special woman friend. He could talk to women quite freely in his professional capacity but a social closeness with any woman was something that he could not handle or at least imagined he could not. In his nightmares, he was forever being chased by someone of extreme malevolence and power. He knew now, as a psychiatrist, that being chased was the most common form of nightmare: that children were usually chased by wild animals while adults tended to be chased by some unspeakably evil man. In one recurring dream, he would be at the top of a never-ending gradual slope when his

nemesis found him and in this dream he had the ability to fly or at least to glide one or two feet above the ground with arms outstretched as wings which is why he always chose this method of escape. And always, there was a series of stone walls topped with razor-wire stretched across the slope. They would loom up suddenly before him and each time with a supreme effort of will he would gain sufficient altitude to clear them. But, with each fence, his clearance became somewhat less until, inevitably, he was ripped open from end to end. He would wake in a sweat, screaming, and only slowly come to the realization that his intestines were not hanging free. Even before his glide started he knew that the disembowelment must happen and yet he seemed to have no choice in the matter. He could only put off the inevitable for as long as possible. In other dreams he had a variety of powers. He could fly at any altitude, he could make himself invisible, transport himself instantly to some distant place, hide within solid objects such as rocks or in the depths of the earth, even make himself into a disembodied spirit, but it was all to no avail. No matter what he did his bane had superior abilities and could always find him out. His only haven was wakefulness. It was in a slightly different dream that he gained his insight. He was watching television in an unfamiliar house not knowing how he had come to be there or why he was there. He had the profound feeling of a dread that he could not name. He wanted to get out but could not. He was anchored to the armchair with his attention locked to the set by some outside force. And then a smiling demon looked out at him from the screen and he knew that others of its kind were everywhere around him and for the moment they were just playing with him and reveling in his now anticipatory fear. Soon would come their abominations and some very real pain. It was then that a strange thing happened. Though still in sleep, he had told himself, “This is

not really happening. This is just a dream. I am making all this up.” And knew that if he was writing the dream, he could surely rewrite it. He had thereupon granted himself greater powers than the demons and had violently turned on them and tortured them as they would have tortured him. He had gained a sadistic enjoyment in doing so which possibly made him no better than they were. After that he had always taken control and turned at bay to successfully attack any pursuer granting himself such powers as were necessary. In time, his nightmares had ceased. Over a period of years, in the course of his work, he had been investigating, as a side-line interest, the possibility of similarly empowering others who came to him with nightmare problems. He appeared to have found some success. The trick seemed to be to imbed in the unconscious mind that it was always in control and particularly so in the dream world. It was reaching the unconscious mind with this message that had been the problem. Hypnosis did not appear to work, why was not clear, and many of the desperate who came to him had already exhausted that possibility anyway along with all the other suggested remedies. What did seem to work was self-suggestion, a simple secular mantra. The sufferer looked into a mirror at bedtime, or at any other time when they were using or even passing a mirror, and chanted softly to themselves, “I am the author of my dreams. I have the right to bend them to my will.” If those who tried this simple but unlikely treatment were to be believed, most of them began to enjoy a deep untroubled sleep. The rest reported at least a better sleep than before. Oddly though, when asked to give some account of recent dreams none could remember even one of them. They were all absolutely convinced that they were having dreams it was just that the couldn’t remember them. That might be explained by the fact that we do not normally remember the bulk of our dreams anyway. It is usually the dreams of troubled sleep that we carry out to the

conscious world. Frank had taken to chanting the chant himself and apparently slept better so that the proof had seemed overwhelming and had prompted a paper detailing his findings along with the appropriate case studies. This had been submitted to a prominent journal in the field of psychiatry and then, failing to gain acceptance and publication, to another. While the amazing power of belief is generally recognized, the use of mantras is hardly an in-thing in psychiatry. Both journals, playing safe, had sent copies of the paper out for peer review rather that making an immediate rejection. Frank was well known and had a strong reputation in the field but the reviewers, though clouding their opinions with trade jargon, also expressed their reserve. To publish was to invite possible ridicule. But someone did publish and not with the wish to enhance Frank’s reputation. Rather the reverse. He had an enemy somewhere who, having obtained a copy of his paper, broadcast it on the internet to the networks and the popular press. This immediately brought other enemies to light who were pleased to have the opportunity to point fault since it was assumed that Frank had taken this step when other means of publication were closed to him. His denials were disbelieved. It is not the done thing to take one’s purported findings directly to the media and thence to the general public. New ideas are expected to be exposed first to the scrutiny of others working in the field. That is the scientific way. The scandal of B.Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann going straight to the press with their later disproved claims of having achieved cold fusion even now looms large as part of recent history. The implication engendered by Frank’s going straight to the media was that his work would also not stand up to close examination. The media, though, paid immediate attention as they do for any novelty. Frank became the

subject of articles and the guest of talk shows though he hated them. The medical fraternity was quick to counter Frank’s claims and at first without any actual research on their part. Some claimed that Frank did not really have any right to the Junge surname and shot themselves in the foot in doing so. Their main argument, however, was that this was simply another manifestation of the auto-suggestion-cure advocated by Professor Emile Coue’ in the nineteen twenties. At that time, the incantation one hundred times a day of the phrase ‘Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better’ had been supposed to cure the majority of illnesses. Many thousands had sworn by it but the medical giants now arrayed against Frank were, as back in those days, adamant that the idea was bunkum. If there were any confirmed Coue’ists still around, their voice was not heard and definitely not wanted. Yet the medical fraternity soon received a knockback. People began ringing daytime talk-back programs to say that they had tried the ‘I am the author of my dreams’ routine, “just in case there was something in it”, they said, “And it couldn’t hurt. It cost nothing. And it worked!” They were having “the best in years.” There was a tendency to put them down as part of ’the idiot fringe’, people who thrive on self-deception, but it was surprising how many of them there were and there was growing evidence that what they were saying was true. There was a noticeable drop in the number of callers to late-night talk-back radio. Many of its long-term stalwarts, the supposed insomniacs who had filled the small-hours with inconsequential chatter seemed to be no longer around. Where there had once been callers waiting in a holding pattern there was now, at times, dead lines. There had had to be an increasing recourse to recordings to paste over the gaps. Frank was not being hurt by the scorn of his peers. It is true that the hospital, unable to discover a way to breach his contract, had made it clear that he was an embarrassment to them

and had suggested that it might be best if he found another position but he had fallen on his feet. His critics were being drowned out by the much louder acclaim of the general public. Right or wrong, Frank was a hot property and an organization that arranged national speaking tours made him an offer that would never be matched if he stayed in research Frank’s attempts to demur were swept aside. ‘So what if he’d never spoken to more than a handful of people before.’ They would train him, they would groom him, give him a real presence. They had writers,some of them medical men who would put a polish on his notes. They would be with him every step of the way. Though not stated, they would also boost his image to an almost God-like status. He was bulldozed into it. To his surprise, he found that he performed well in front of an audience and actually enjoyed it. He could be charismatic as long as people were at a distance. Less pleasantly, he was expected to be a close-up social charmer which was completely out of character but his stardom and contract required it. He was fortunate in having Wendy assigned to him as his tour manager. She was everything that he was not. One of those super-efficient women who are afraid of nobody. Svelte good looks, extremely charming when there was something to gain, but cold steel and all business. Some would insist that she was really a machine. She made all the on-the-spot arrangements of the tour, presented him on time for interviews, and generally shielded him from any unpleasantness while he provided her with proof, if she really needed any, of just how useless and helpless males can be. The medical fraternity did not remained inactive. At a number of different facilities, believers along with non-believers who were used to give the tests some resemblance to strict science, were persuaded for a fee to sleep in research laboratories with electrodes taped to their heads.

Normally tight research budgets somehow discovered the additional money to prove that Frank was wrong. The results were surprising and disappointing. Many researchers had already openly predicted that they would find no Rapid-Eye-Movement sleep in believers, since that is where our dreams and nightmares occur, and had warned that ultimately this would prove to be harmful. As they explained it, in R.E.M. sleep the mind is processing, sorting and filing away the information and impressions received during the previous day, and is readying itself to receive new impressions the following day. Somewhat akin to the midnight operation of a financial institution’s data-bank. They had warned that a mind deprived of this reorganizing process for any period of time must become cluttered, fuzzy, and disorganized. “Any day now,” they said. Their tests, unfortunately, showed no difference between believers and non-believers. Both groups cycled through the recognized stages of light sleep four or five times during the night. All had periods of R.E.M. sleep totalling between 20% and 23% of the time which was entirely within the normal range. None of the unsatisfactory test results were ever offered for publication which allowed the medical non-believers to remain as convinced in their disbelief as the non- medical ‘idiots’ were in their belief. Frank’s public image continued undiminished and easily shed all attempts to tarnish it. The media had begun to use him as as one of their favourite medical gurus seeking his input even on topics that were clearly outside his field and Wendy had persuaded him to set up his own organization or rather to have her set it up for him. But there had come to be problems in their relationship. She had always treated him rather like an ignorant child but now she was becoming even more frustrated and short with him. If men in general were hopeless, Frank was the most hopeless of

them all. He let everyone take advantage of him. He should never have left his mother. He needed a keeper: a wife if there was anyone stupid enough to have him. She was not ready to admit that she could be in love with a man. Not even to herself.