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TLDR: Guy who wrote A Series of Unfortunate Events has issues
There’s nothing more boring than someone else’s dreams. “I had a dream last night,” someone will say, and no matter how much you like them, you want them to shut up.
That’s why I didn’t tell anybody when it first happened. It was my first year in college, and terrifying figures began to appear in my sleep. Naked, hairless and powdery white, they beckoned me to witness scenes of violence and torture. I’d wake up, drink water, take some calming breaths and go back to sleep, then have the dream again. Before long I was having it every night.
By morning I would be exhausted and lost. I wasn’t too worried—it was just a dream, after all, and everyone at my liberal-arts college seemed a bit exhausted and lost—but at dusk, my fingers tingled with the sense that something dreadful was about to happen.
Finally I began to tell people. When a friend asked what the dreams felt like, I explained that it was like my whole life was on cheap paper, which these figures ripped away to show what’s underneath. My friend gently suggested that I walk with her to the mental health center.
I didn’t mind therapy, but no matter how much I dug into my life, I did not improve. I was getting so little sleep that the daylight hours had an unsettling hue, a haze that made reality seem fragile. I was clumsy, missing classes, an unreliable friend, a disastrous boyfriend.
Something else began happening, too. No one knew what to call it: fainting, seizuring, dropping. My exhausted brain would lose its bearings and I’d fall twitching to the floor. Once this happened at the house of my girlfriend’s family, sending me tumbling down a flight of stairs. When I awoke, her father told me, as concerned for his daughter as he was for me, that whatever was happening, I needed to fix it.
I was referred to a widening array of experts, but “seizure” turns out to be a vague term for a brain event that can be hard to explain. Some have known causes, but my case was among the many medical mysteries. I had several MRIs. I spent a night with electrodes all over my head and shoulders like a low-budget sci-fi movie. I stayed up all night, the better to fall asleep in an examining room while they flashed strobe lights at me.
When these experts gave up on finding a physical cause, I was sent to a mini-mall storefront to analyze ink blots and fit an assortment of wooden blocks into a framework, then blindfolded and told to do it again, an activity so senseless I ended up crying. I was hypnotized repeatedly, spelunking for repressed trauma. When a doctor used the word “schizophrenia,” my mother left the room.
There is, of course, nothing that makes you feel crazier than being tested to see how crazy you are. I kept thinking the same thing everyone thinks: that there must be some mistake. These were only dreams.
A year or so into this, while walking across campus, I saw one of these naked, ghostly white figures staring right at me. No one else seemed to see what I was seeing, and I fell unconscious on the grass. I was very, very frightened, not just because of what I saw, but because I realized, there on the lawn, that these weren’t just dreams after all. This was something worse.
Various experts with various plans, various drugs and various referrals, kept on failing, and the visions got worse. Sometimes the figures were so close that I had to walk through them. Shortly before graduation, while writing a final paper on H.G. Wells, I had a seizure, the biggest yet. When I woke, I couldn’t read, write or speak. I remember the worried faces of my friends as I was sirened away in an ambulance.
Nobody wants to be a medical mystery. Doctors get excited, but when a pet theory doesn’t pan out, they get tired of making guesses. My brain was rescanned, awake and asleep. I was hypnotized again. In the hospital, I was afraid to sleep, and they were afraid to make me. Finally, a doctor sat on my bed and said, “I don’t know, what do you think it is?” Heaving with sobs, I told him that maybe the reason they couldn’t find the causes of my hallucinations was because they weren’t hallucinations at all. Maybe the figures were real, an actual thing, actually happening.
If you say such things, there are only two places you go. My family had health insurance and money, so instead of ending up on the streets, I arrived at a place not entirely unlike my dorm, except that they took my belt and my shoes. Mostly we sat. Women with eating disorders walked around with apples and paper cups, tasting the fruit then spitting it out. Manicured young men from religious families, described as “confused,” were there for attempting suicide. In my fragile state and Keith Haring T-shirt, I recall telling them that if there is a God, He doesn’t care who you love.
Occasionally we took supervised walks, blinking in the sunshine within a two-block radius. On one of these walks, I heard someone call my name. It was my Nabokov professor, a middle-aged woman in a beat-up car, who seemed both surprised and not surprised to see me there. We had only a brief conversation, but it jogged something in my troubled mind.
In one of my favorite Nabokov novels, the relatively obscure “Invitation to a Beheading,” the hero experiences something akin to what I was feeling there with my professor. Condemned to death, the hero is hit with a clarity, “at first almost painful, so suddenly did it come…why am I here? Why am I lying like this? And, having asked himself these simple questions, he answered them by getting up and looking around.”
I never quite like when someone says, “This book saved my life,” as it needlessly imbues a work of literature with the power of an antibiotic or paramedic. But there, in the psychiatric ward, I began to save myself, in part by living by the principles of a book I loved. To some extent, I was in a prison of my own making, and I did not want to be imprisoned any longer.
I began giving different answers to the questions put to me. I told the doctors that they were not helping. I stopped taking the antidepressants, antipsychotics and seizure drugs—drugs which, I should add, work wonders for many people. I did not stop seeing things, but I changed how I talked about them. They were certainly not real. They were hallucinations, of course, and I was going to live with them, not in a hospital, where they would be a constant occupation, but in the world, in “reality”—a word Nabokov said meant “nothing without quotes”—where talking about these visions would send me away again.
I would hate for anyone to infer that I was “cured” by a passage in a novel, or to believe that mental health is largely a question of attitude. I still, to this day, see these figures, frequently but no longer frighteningly. Nobody else has ever said they see them too, and there is still no medical explanation as to why. My seizures are now rare. I’ve more or less pinpointed their cause, never suggested to me by any medical professional: I get them when I don’t get enough sleep. I’ve learned to anticipate them. I’ve also learned to look away, to keep walking, to move through the figures I see, as if they are merely inappropriate, staring strangers. To the bafflement of people who’ve known me for years, I hardly mention them.
I’m not a crazy person. If I were a crazy person, babbling about visitations from ghostly figures, I would not be allowed to run around loose, writing books for your children. Everyone has bad dreams, and talking about dreams is boring, so I stay quiet and I stay in the world.
Sometimes I think of something that happened in the hospital. What I remember is sitting in a chair while two women, nurses or technicians, took a small tool, almost a can opener, and poked two small slits in my arm, between my elbow and my wrist. Then they sat, chatted with each other and let me bleed. When it seemed like my blood was clotting—if clotting is the word—they scraped off the hardening blood with an index card.
Could this have happened? Am I misremembering some essential part of this procedure? The time I spent in the hospital was so confusing and scary that I’m tempted to think this didn’t happen at all, but I have two tiny scars on my arm. They are hardly visible but sometimes, when I tell the story, people lean in close to see the little lines—real scars, but so faint they might as well be a dream.
TLDR: Guy who wrote A Series of Unfortunate Events has issues
There’s nothing more boring than someone else’s dreams. “I had a dream last night,” someone will say, and no matter how much you like them, you want them to shut up.
That’s why I didn’t tell anybody when it first happened. It was my first year in college, and terrifying figures began to appear in my sleep. Naked, hairless and powdery white, they beckoned me to witness scenes of violence and torture. I’d wake up, drink water, take some calming breaths and go back to sleep, then have the dream again. Before long I was having it every night.
By morning I would be exhausted and lost. I wasn’t too worried—it was just a dream, after all, and everyone at my liberal-arts college seemed a bit exhausted and lost—but at dusk, my fingers tingled with the sense that something dreadful was about to happen.
Finally I began to tell people. When a friend asked what the dreams felt like, I explained that it was like my whole life was on cheap paper, which these figures ripped away to show what’s underneath. My friend gently suggested that I walk with her to the mental health center.
I didn’t mind therapy, but no matter how much I dug into my life, I did not improve. I was getting so little sleep that the daylight hours had an unsettling hue, a haze that made reality seem fragile. I was clumsy, missing classes, an unreliable friend, a disastrous boyfriend.
Something else began happening, too. No one knew what to call it: fainting, seizuring, dropping. My exhausted brain would lose its bearings and I’d fall twitching to the floor. Once this happened at the house of my girlfriend’s family, sending me tumbling down a flight of stairs. When I awoke, her father told me, as concerned for his daughter as he was for me, that whatever was happening, I needed to fix it.
I was referred to a widening array of experts, but “seizure” turns out to be a vague term for a brain event that can be hard to explain. Some have known causes, but my case was among the many medical mysteries. I had several MRIs. I spent a night with electrodes all over my head and shoulders like a low-budget sci-fi movie. I stayed up all night, the better to fall asleep in an examining room while they flashed strobe lights at me.
When these experts gave up on finding a physical cause, I was sent to a mini-mall storefront to analyze ink blots and fit an assortment of wooden blocks into a framework, then blindfolded and told to do it again, an activity so senseless I ended up crying. I was hypnotized repeatedly, spelunking for repressed trauma. When a doctor used the word “schizophrenia,” my mother left the room.
There is, of course, nothing that makes you feel crazier than being tested to see how crazy you are. I kept thinking the same thing everyone thinks: that there must be some mistake. These were only dreams.
A year or so into this, while walking across campus, I saw one of these naked, ghostly white figures staring right at me. No one else seemed to see what I was seeing, and I fell unconscious on the grass. I was very, very frightened, not just because of what I saw, but because I realized, there on the lawn, that these weren’t just dreams after all. This was something worse.
Various experts with various plans, various drugs and various referrals, kept on failing, and the visions got worse. Sometimes the figures were so close that I had to walk through them. Shortly before graduation, while writing a final paper on H.G. Wells, I had a seizure, the biggest yet. When I woke, I couldn’t read, write or speak. I remember the worried faces of my friends as I was sirened away in an ambulance.
Nobody wants to be a medical mystery. Doctors get excited, but when a pet theory doesn’t pan out, they get tired of making guesses. My brain was rescanned, awake and asleep. I was hypnotized again. In the hospital, I was afraid to sleep, and they were afraid to make me. Finally, a doctor sat on my bed and said, “I don’t know, what do you think it is?” Heaving with sobs, I told him that maybe the reason they couldn’t find the causes of my hallucinations was because they weren’t hallucinations at all. Maybe the figures were real, an actual thing, actually happening.
If you say such things, there are only two places you go. My family had health insurance and money, so instead of ending up on the streets, I arrived at a place not entirely unlike my dorm, except that they took my belt and my shoes. Mostly we sat. Women with eating disorders walked around with apples and paper cups, tasting the fruit then spitting it out. Manicured young men from religious families, described as “confused,” were there for attempting suicide. In my fragile state and Keith Haring T-shirt, I recall telling them that if there is a God, He doesn’t care who you love.
Occasionally we took supervised walks, blinking in the sunshine within a two-block radius. On one of these walks, I heard someone call my name. It was my Nabokov professor, a middle-aged woman in a beat-up car, who seemed both surprised and not surprised to see me there. We had only a brief conversation, but it jogged something in my troubled mind.
In one of my favorite Nabokov novels, the relatively obscure “Invitation to a Beheading,” the hero experiences something akin to what I was feeling there with my professor. Condemned to death, the hero is hit with a clarity, “at first almost painful, so suddenly did it come…why am I here? Why am I lying like this? And, having asked himself these simple questions, he answered them by getting up and looking around.”
I never quite like when someone says, “This book saved my life,” as it needlessly imbues a work of literature with the power of an antibiotic or paramedic. But there, in the psychiatric ward, I began to save myself, in part by living by the principles of a book I loved. To some extent, I was in a prison of my own making, and I did not want to be imprisoned any longer.
I began giving different answers to the questions put to me. I told the doctors that they were not helping. I stopped taking the antidepressants, antipsychotics and seizure drugs—drugs which, I should add, work wonders for many people. I did not stop seeing things, but I changed how I talked about them. They were certainly not real. They were hallucinations, of course, and I was going to live with them, not in a hospital, where they would be a constant occupation, but in the world, in “reality”—a word Nabokov said meant “nothing without quotes”—where talking about these visions would send me away again.
I would hate for anyone to infer that I was “cured” by a passage in a novel, or to believe that mental health is largely a question of attitude. I still, to this day, see these figures, frequently but no longer frighteningly. Nobody else has ever said they see them too, and there is still no medical explanation as to why. My seizures are now rare. I’ve more or less pinpointed their cause, never suggested to me by any medical professional: I get them when I don’t get enough sleep. I’ve learned to anticipate them. I’ve also learned to look away, to keep walking, to move through the figures I see, as if they are merely inappropriate, staring strangers. To the bafflement of people who’ve known me for years, I hardly mention them.
I’m not a crazy person. If I were a crazy person, babbling about visitations from ghostly figures, I would not be allowed to run around loose, writing books for your children. Everyone has bad dreams, and talking about dreams is boring, so I stay quiet and I stay in the world.
Sometimes I think of something that happened in the hospital. What I remember is sitting in a chair while two women, nurses or technicians, took a small tool, almost a can opener, and poked two small slits in my arm, between my elbow and my wrist. Then they sat, chatted with each other and let me bleed. When it seemed like my blood was clotting—if clotting is the word—they scraped off the hardening blood with an index card.
Could this have happened? Am I misremembering some essential part of this procedure? The time I spent in the hospital was so confusing and scary that I’m tempted to think this didn’t happen at all, but I have two tiny scars on my arm. They are hardly visible but sometimes, when I tell the story, people lean in close to see the little lines—real scars, but so faint they might as well be a dream.
your
reason you present this Great Depression-era solution as surprising (and it is!), there's a reason it didn't take off.
