Dream Memory 2 – by Sandra

I am a person without a past.

I am a person without a name, though they call me Patient 12.

I am a person without memories, except one, which they tell me is only a dream.

The Voice knows when I have this dream and when I do, it sends me to the Plain.

Last night I had the dream again.

The Fallen man. He lands at my feet, in a twist of limbs and pooling blood. There is a pink globule on my shoe. People scream but it seems a long way off; then there are police; an ambulance; Mrs Alder say, ‘She’s in shock.’ I’m hurried away, wrapped in a blanket. Later, sweet tea is pressed into my hands. Mrs Alder looks after me, checking in on me, in my flat. The police come. They want to know if I knew him, this man, with his black hair. I don’t. I didn’t. One of them is pushy, insistent, while the other looks around my flat. They want to know if he had a key, if he slept here. They want to know all this because it was my tenth-floor window he jumped from.

I don’t like the Plain, but I have no choice, the buzzing starts and –

-I am there on the salt flat pan of the Plain, under the white sun. Everything is blinding white, but for the moment it seems empty, I can’t see anything or anyone, and I’ve been gifted a rare space to think of the man in my memory. As always, I think of his face, although in the memory it’s too disfigured to tell what he looks like, but somehow, I know his face, as it was pre-fall, a serious man, with an earnest gaze, the gaze of someone who is trying to tell me something.

-I sense something behind me and turn reluctantly, I know the kind of things that appear on this Plain. The man is the size of a full-grown oak tree, towering above me, but simultaneously the same height as me and I feel the familiar nausea as my brain tries to match the two conflicting images. He smiles and laughs, gesturing to some cubes that have appeared nearby, like a ring master showing his performers. The cubes are, like him, both too big and too small, too near and too far and I start to sweat, unable to look away.  My brain is somersaulting, and stretching, trying and failing to place these things in their proper place, all perspective is lost. The resulting vertigo makes me throw up and all thought of the dream has gone.

‘Welcome back, Patient 12.’ the Voice says. ‘It is time for lunch,’ it continues. After visiting the Plain, I don’t like hearing the Voice, it always sounds a bit too smug after sending me there. It’s hard to tell if it’s a man or woman speaking, the pitch and tone change subtly so that I’m never sure. Nor are the other Patients.

We never meet the owner of the Voice.

When I first came here, I used to tell them the Fallen man wasn’t a dream, that it felt real. There is a difference between dreams and memories, and I could tell which is which.  But they are the experts and they tell me the two can be confused. It’s called Dream-Reality confusion, and can happen when someone has been as ill as I was. Everyone knows the feeling: that summer when you were eight, did you really stay in that house with the pool? or was the pool the other year another place and you’ve confused the two? Maybe the pool was a wish, that became a dream and over the years you changed your memory to suit. They give me lots of examples like this and it makes perfect sense. But pools and dead men are very different. I think there is a different feel to memory, but then how can I be sure? I am here because I was very ill.

—

Everything in the Reborn Institute is designed to stop you thinking, from the talking therapies to the physical exertions of a suite of exercises and games. They use the Reset technique, pioneered, the literature says, by Dr David Stone. After realising that there were some traumas that were impossible to recover from, or so hard, people spent their entire lives trying, he developed a patented treatment using a combination of novel drugs and a mild form of electro-therapy to reset the brains neural patterning. The downside is everything prior to your entry to the RI is gone. Seems a horrible bargain to me, but apparently, I didn’t used to think so. I have been shown my application video, a woman who has my face, but I have no memory of, agreeing to all the terms and conditions of entry. When I sign my name – Patient 12 – it is the same as her writing on the documents I signed.

I tell the Voice that I feel it was unlikely I would do something so permanent and drastic, but as the Voice says, I am not the person I once was.  I am being Reborn.

I made myself come here, and it must have been for a good reason.

Downstairs the other patients are in the canteen, twenty of us, familiar faces, all in the RI clothes tunic and trousers. We have a choice of colours, blue, pink or green, and some patients rotate them religiously, but I wear the same blue top and trousers as I did when I came here, except for wash days. It helps me keep track of time because it’s not easy; clocks and calendars are forbidden; they disrupt the process. I know I’ve been here a long time though, because I notice the inner thighs of my trousers are thin and worn, some threads missing.  I try to remember how long it might take to wear through a pair of trousers. They are not particularly thick, and I wear them every day. but still… a long time. Six months? A year?

Patients 1, 9, 15 and 19 are by the buffet table piling their plates with chicken and pasta salad. I need to eat something, but the residual sickness hasn’t left me, and so I take an apple and wander to the old window, looking out at the grounds. Wherever we are, this was once a grand old house, probably for some Lord or other, who probably made a fortune in the empire and had an army of servants. Patient 1 follows, standing beside me companionably. Of all the others here, he is the closest to a friend, mainly because he doesn’t talk too much. Still, he recognises the signs, ‘The Plain?’ he asks and I nod. ‘Humph,’ he grunts. He’s been to the Plain many times and what he sees there makes me glad mine are just maddening vertigo-inducing warped perspectives. The last time he came back he had to be sedated, and he still whimpers in his sleep. He slips me something, a muesli protein bar, ‘For later.’ He’s a good egg, old Patient 1.

Not knowing days of the week, we assign the regular rotation of menu options a day. Pizza days are, we decide, Fridays. External constructs hamper recovery. I don’t know about that, but I do wonder what’s happened outside the RI in the time that’s gone.

I am encouraged to talk about any emerging memories, which they cross check with my prior life and assess my progress. Apparently, there is no evidence of the falling man, so it is not a real-life memory, but just my brain processing the whatever real trauma I suffered. It is frustrating not to know, but the leaflets I have read of their methods are filled with glowing praise from many people, celebrities included.  To be Reborn whole, is the promise and who doesn’t want that?

Exercise is encouraged as part of recovery, and I play doubles with Patient 1, usually against Patient 9 and Patient 15, who are both in their thirties. Patient 9 is very fit, while Patient 15 makes up for her less mobile, large frame by smashing any ball back to us like a missile. Patient 1 must be sixty and I estimate I’m in my forties, (ages are another fact we aren’t allowed, but must allow to rise up within us, naturally) so we often lose. I like to think we generally put up a good fight although the following day we lose the match in straight sets. I blame the hot weather.  Patient 9 runs up to Patient 1 and me as we sit on the bench catching our breath, like a bouncy dog, the ponytail on top of her head bouncing in time.

‘Here,’ she whispers, ‘this will cheer you up.’ She reveals a bottle of water, carefully rolled in a towel, but of course it’s not water inside. The first sip has me coughing. ‘It’s moonshine!’ she laughs. Patient 9 is a picture of health, but I wonder if anyone here used to have a drink or drug problem. Maybe I did? Or maybe not, I revise, as I try and clear the taste from my mouth. Patient 1 however glugs at the bottle with gusto and then giggles like a schoolboy. Even staid, humourless Patient 15 cracks a reluctant smile. I check but there are no cameras here, under this tree, so we are safe, a fact I’m sure Patient 9 knew beforehand.

The games room has chess, draughts and various board games, which we are encouraged to play, as socialisation is also good for us. The other inmates, about twenty in all, are seated in the room at tables, mid game or discussing what to play. There’s a league of sorts, of which I’m about midway. I’m neither ambitious enough to make it my mission to get to the top, nor quite careless enough not to care completely. As well as those considerations, it is not good to have too much time to think. They call it ruminating. Which is interesting when you can’t remember the past, but they must know what they’re talking about because even without real facts, I often have a vague unsettling feeling. Sometimes I want to sit with it and think, but more than that I want to get better and get out of here. So – chess it is.

Patient 1’s face sitting across the board from me, is flushed from Patient 9’s moonshine, and I wonder if he had more when I was walking ahead back to the house. I raise my eyebrow, and he giggles again. He did, what was Patient 9 thinking? I haven’t seen this side of Patient 1 before and its charming for a minute, then irritating. He suddenly stops giggling, face pale.  ‘Are you ok?’ I ask.

He nods, then gives a watery belch and puts his hand over his mouth, eyes alarmed. There’s a fractional pause where everything hangs in the balance, but the moonshine wins, and he is suddenly sick on the floor. Within seconds, the nurses, Kayleigh and Mark, are there, lifting him up and ushering him away. I notice my trousers are splashed, and point this out to Kayleigh, who nods permission to go and clean up. Phil, one of the larger nurses, watches me go from his place by the door, his face impassive as always. In the nearest bathroom, I can hear Mark making soothing noises over Patient 1’s retching, so I go further back into the recesses of the house, and remember there is a bathroom in the basement, near the kitchens.

Down here it is deliciously cool after the heat of the day and I pause for a while, in the corridor. The kitchen is ahead, visible through a half glass partition, empty, the staff gone for the day. Pizzas for the evening meal are stacked ready for the oven. On Pizza days the nurses supervise us cooking the pizzas, although I’m not on the rota this week.

 In the bathroom, I lean my forehead against the cold tiles of the Victorian bathroom, and I am startled again that I can remember these things; I know Victorian style from medieval. So why nothing else? Nothing personal? They say it’s the brains way of protecting itself, compartmentalising. I wet paper towels and clean off Patient 1’s sick. I’ll have to wear the green set tomorrow, while these are in the wash.

I’m still debating about giving up on the trousers and going to change, when I hear a crash from the kitchen as though a tower of pans has crashed to the floor. It’s quite the racket and I assume nurses will come running but there’s nothing; maybe the soundproofing is better here. Maybe Lord so-and-so didn’t want the servants’ noise to disturb his port. 

Through the glass, I can indeed see pans rolling on the floor, and the doors to the cupboard they were in hanging open, swinging. Did the weight of them topple over and push themselves out? I open the door into the main room. The big table where the pizzas are stacked is between me and the cupboard, so I walk around, and that is when I see him, the man from my dream, sitting, shaken, on the floor.

—

The Plain stretches before me, the white salt crystals magnifying and reflecting the sun a million times, so I can hardly see, eyes scrunched against the burning haze. The oak tree man is there again, but far off and for a moment he hasn’t seen me. There is something I need to remember; or is it forget? The beat of the sun, the oak tree man, the vast space stretching horizon to horizon, makes it impossible to think. I know this is good for me, this forgetting. But still there is something that keeps wriggling at the farthest corner of my mind, that resists forgetting. They warned me about this; the trauma memories are tricky things and will try and insist on being remembered in their way. So, I try, I really try, but am I resisting the wrong thing? Am I supposed to forget or remember? A face, a man, looks up at me, saying something I can’t hear, his lips moving, but I can almost read them, ‘keep trying…?’ is that it? I focus more, but my head is pounding now, so hard, it is making me sick. Then the oak tree man is coming, closer, bigger, yet staying where he is, perspective zooming, his cubes tumble with him, house-sized, yet dice-sized, and I tumble to the ground, head spinning, thought beyond me.

The voice greets me, ‘Welcome back, Patient 12’. Nausea grips me and I can’t answer, I’m in a land between waking and sleeping, memories and dreams.

‘What can you recall, Patient 12?’ the voice asks. Recall? I search my mind, but there are only the physical sensations, the receding headache, the pain behind the eyes, a fading bleached landscape.

‘Nothing,’ I whisper, and the voice must read the truth in it, because it says, ‘Sleep, now.’

And I do.

—

I don’t dream for a while after that.

The weather cools and the trees turn the muddy browns and bright orange-reds of autumn, and as I watch the acer by the front porch display its flaming reds, a snippet of memory drops into my mind like a photo in the slot of a photo booth. In this photo perfect memory I am arriving, stepping out of a car, seeing the red acer by the door. It is time I think of then. I arrived in autumn and so it must be a year then? A year I have been here.

A year, without knowing anything more than I did last year. Back in my room, I ask the Voice, ‘Am I making progress? The Voice, as always answers directly in my mind, soothing, and reassuring, ‘You are making excellent progress Patient 12. Your mind is healing. Soon, you will be able to leave.’

But today, with the new memory still fresh, the usual answers it gives don’t soothe me; instead, I realise it was the same response weeks ago, and if my Plain- cleansed brain remembers anything, I believe it was the same weeks before that. So, although I ache to ask about the memory, to be reassured its real, I keep the knowledge to myself. The Voice knows when I dream, so it will know soon enough without me telling it.

I need to think, so at the next doubles game, I complain of a twisted ankle and sit under the tree. Patient 1 offers to sit out with me, but I encourage them to rotate partners, and follow this up by assuring Patient 1 I will pick up tips by watching their play.

Instead, I relax and bring the image of arrival back to my mind, and I examine it with a critical eye for detail. One obvious thing is that the car is old, very old. Did someone (me?) like Classic cars? Even the name comes back, it is an old Riley. So, was it my car? But then I see myself stepping out of the back seat and someone must have driven it away.

But there is something even stranger, and that is that my clothes are old, they too look like they are 1940’s, my thick coat is cinched at the waist, and I am wearing a hat and while it is true I don’t know what year I’m in now, I know instinctively that the 1940s was a long way back, eighty years or so. Did I like the era so much I dressed in the clothes of the time?

I look up to see Patient 1 is in front of me, his racquet hanging limply by his side, looking at me with a half quizzical, half concerned look. ‘You alright there?’ I’m tempted to tell him what I have remembered, but it is the first thing since the fallen man that I have remembered, (or dreamed) and I want it to myself at least for a while, before being sent to the Plain. Besides, it feels real.

‘Yes, thank you. My ankle is hurting, that’s all.’ Patient 1 seems to want to ask something, but in the end, says, ‘Well, lets get you to the nurse, for some ice and pain killers.’

Lying in bed that night, I half expect the Voice to ask me about it, to know my thoughts, and for some reason I don’t want it to. Progress or not, false memory or not, this feels tangible. I quickly change to thinking about dinner. Its shepherd’s pie night, with choices for vegetarians and a crunchy salad.