Dreamcatching
By James Lafond Sutter

ucker Juergenson woke up screaming, hands clutching spasmodically at clinging, salty sheets, just as he did every morning.

Flopping back onto the damp pillow, Tucker forced his eyes shut again and counted backwards from twenty, purposefully slowing his breathing in hopes that his heart would take the hint and follow suit. As his body gradually returned to some semblance of stasis, he rolled his head to the side and attempted to make sense of the throbbing liquid crystal numbers on his alarm clock. Ten thirty. He had plenty of time before the appointment.

Levering himself out of bed before he had a chance to change his mind, Tucker stood and stretched. In winter the bare hardwood was cold as ice, but on days like today it was actually fairly decent. The shaft of sunlight stabbing through the single blue drape on the window probably had a lot to do with that--Mom treated the furnace like it was some sort of benevolent deity, not to be prevailed upon except in utmost need.

Mom.

Tucker ran his fingers through his hair and padded over to the window, throwing the shade the rest of the way open. The morning light poured over him in a shower, sloshing around the room and breaking on the sparse furnishings. A bed. A bureau. An easel.

Scratching himself absentmindedly, Tucker snatched up the jeans and t-shirt he’d conveniently forgotten to throw down the laundry shaft. He knew without sniffing that they’d be fine--it wasn’t like he’d exercised yesterday or anything. Drawing the shirt over his head, he considered the easel and the mess of painting supplies in the corner. The majority of the canvas was still beige, but there were a few broad stokes of green and blue that he was pretty sure would turn into a landscape before the day was out.

Other people sometimes had trouble with that. For some reason, self-proclaimed “art enthusiasts” either expected every painting to be either an über-intellectual job, chock full of symbolism and social commentary, or else wanted something that was pure emotion, unadulterated and tragic; acrylic and brain matter mingling on canvas as the artist’s black beret floats slowly to the floor. Tucker’s art didn’t come with all that baggage. While he had influences, he’d never been caught up in the hype and posturing of the art world, nor had he confined himself to a single subject. Most mornings he just stared at the canvas until an image suggested itself, and then he painted it. If that meant ending up with a dark cottage in the woods, a family with decaying angel wings, or blurred and distorted pedestrians in a too-tall cityscape--so be it. The only true consistency was in the painting itself, the way he blended the heavy blacks and muted pastels to create a sense of depth. His one gallery showing had been described by a newspaper critic as “brooding and surreal… an homage to Dali in every stroke,” which seemed like something of a backhanded compliment to Tucker. If there was anything he despised, it was artists who made their names ripping off others.

That attitude hadn’t flown too well at the Art Institute. “Art is all about self-expression,” the professors proselytized over their turtlenecks. But only if you express yourself the way I do. For all their rhetoric, that much of the lesson plan had come through loud and clear. Fortunately for his GPA, self-expression had hardly been Tucker’s main concern back then.

No, what Tucker had really wanted at that point, when he was eighteen and living away from home for the first time, was a little acceptance. He didn’t want widespread popularity (though that would have been nice), just some basic understanding, and maybe a little love. Even monkeys need love--baby chimps die without physical affection, don’t they? He’d seen that on The Learning Channel.

It was the nightmares that messed it up, of course. Apparently listening to your roommate scream isn’t the best way to wake up every morning--both of his dorm mates had told him so before they left. The real humiliation was the second time: after he refused their offer of a private room--how was he ever going to meet people in a single? Administration had stashed him in a dorm specifically for kids with disabilities, in hopes that he’d get along better with other “differently-abled” folks. Yet that roommate had ditched him even faster than the first--apparently life in a chair hadn’t made James Michael Finnegan any more understanding. Even now, that one hurt.

Bite me, Jimmy, Tucker thought. At least I can pee standing up.

Girlfriends were a little bit better. Things invariably went well until they started spending the night, but as soon as they reached that point it was all over. Some lasted longer than others, the best holding and rocking him afterwards, telling him not to be ashamed, that it wasn’t his fault. But they always left.

So he’d dropped out and come home. Mom had objected at first, but once she discovered what he’d been putting up with at school, she acquiesced on the condition that he continue to take classes at the community college. So now he was home, taking a class here and there and painting as much as possible. He knew that the “artistes” at school would laugh at the idea of a mama’s boy styling himself a painter, but what did they know? Hadn’t some of the greatest artists in history relied on patrons for financial support? So what if his was his mother. While everyone else was busy writing him off as a head-case, Tucker’s mom had been the one willing to stand by him. Knowing that she’d be there to comfort him when he woke was the only thing that made going to sleep bearable as a kid. And she had never once made him feel ashamed about it. Even when the fright was so intense that he wet the bed, she didn’t care--she was his mother.

And now she was gone.

Tucker grabbed his keys from the bureau and walked out the door.

* * * * *

“So have the nightmares changed at all in content since your mother’s passing?” Dr. Stevens asked.

“Not really.” Tucker’s voice leached up from the depths of an overstuffed armchair. “I mean, I know what you’re getting at, and there are occasionally ones that deal with her, but no more than usual. It’s still pretty much just the random anxiety dreams--I’m being chased, but my legs don’t work. I’m trying to scream but my voice is a croak. Falling. Drowning. The usual.”

“Okay then. What about frequency?”

“Well, since I saw you last week, I think it’s been every day except Saturday and Tuesday…so 5 out of 7. What percentage is that?” He paused briefly to do the math, then sighed and gave up. “I dunno. You know what’s the weakest part? I bet that if I had them every night, it wouldn’t be so bad--it’d eventually become routine or something. But no, that’d be too easy. Instead, my brain has to be all ‘Hey, let’s give him a decent dream every couple of nights to mix it up.’ So there’s always that hope, that uncertainty. Every night for two decades. God, I am tired of this!”

“Understandably so.” Dr. Stevens took off his spectacles and brought his elbows forwards onto his knees, pointedly keeping his right hand from rising to play with his goatee. Tucker liked to give him a hard time about the beard--it fit the psychiatrist stereotype too well.

“Tucker, before we go on, I want to ask you how you’d feel about participating in a new sleep disorder study.”

Tucker made a noncommittal noise. In the six months that he had been seeing Dr. Stevens they’d done several different closed-environment studies and brain scans, and all they ever amounted to was Tucker getting even less sleep than usual.

“I know we’ve done some of these before,” Stevens continued, “but this one doesn’t relate directly to treatment, per se. It’s actually a research project that some of my colleagues at the University are working on. I’m not directly involved, so I can’t explain the details as well as they could, but they tell me that they’re attempting to monitor and manipulate the brain’s electromagnetic activity with the intention of recording and reproducing specific dream sequences. As I understand it, everything’s done via electrodes--no needles, totally non-invasive. You wouldn’t even have to leave your house.” He paused for air and Tucker, who was by now sitting up and paying close attention, took the ball and ran with it.

“Hold up a second,” he said. “I thought you said this was strictly a research thing? Playing around with my brain’s activity sounds more like electroshock therapy--I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m sick of having to deal with these every night, but a lobotomy is a little bit out of the question, thanks.”

“Your concerns are completely valid, and I’m certainly not going to pressure you,” Dr. Stevens said. “But consider this: the University wouldn’t let the study go forward with human testing if they hadn’t already determined that it was safe enough to avoid scandal or legal troubles. I know those people, and they cover their bases pretty well. And I certainly wouldn’t recommend it to you if I didn’t absolutely trust the researchers involved.”

Dr. Stevens leaned back in his chair, took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. “And at this point, Tucker,” he continued, “I’m going to be honest and admit that I’m flat out of ideas. Your episodes don’t behave like either regular nightmares or night terrors. We tried sleep deprivation, but all that did was make you tired. We tried sedatives, but in order for them to be effective we had to give you such extreme doses that you felt groggy all the time. We tried anti-anxiety drugs and antidepressants, but they just messed with your emotions, never the dreams. And despite what you may say about my beard, I’m not enough of a Freudian to cling to the idea that this problem has a psychoanalytic explanation when all evidence points to the contrary. So while I would never push you into something like this unless you were comfortable with it…” He stopped and spread his arms. “What other options do we have?”

* * * * *

“So what do you think--if this neuroscience thing doesn’t work out, could I make it as a barber?”

“Har har har.” Tucker still couldn’t believe he’d agreed to this. While he didn’t consider himself particularly vain, spear-bald was not his idea of haute couture. Even so, he found himself liking this researcher--still finishing up his doctorate, the guy was probably only a few years older than Tucker himself, and didn’t seem to have developed that professional distance yet. He’d introduced himself as Tim.

“Yeah, I know it sucks,” Tim said, “but the electrodes won’t work properly otherwise, and we’d probably end up cutting them out of your hair afterwards--they’ve got to be pretty sticky to handle any tossing and turning you do. Anyway, that’s the last of them, so you’re good to go. Check it out.” Tim held up a hand mirror, and the reflection Tucker saw resembled nothing so much as a sprouting potato, the nimbus of wiring trailing down his shoulders and across the bedroom to a card table buried in electronics. He was glad they’d suggested conducting the experiments in his own room--it made the whole business a little less alien, if more surreal.

“Feel like a cyborg yet?” Tim asked over his shoulder from one of the laptops, his free hand guiding a cursor in complex little loops.

“I suppose,” replied Tucker. “But shouldn’t there be some of these on my forehead, too?”

“Nope.” Tim turned back around and pulled up a chair, spinning it around backwards and folding his arms over the top. “When we sleep, our prefrontal cortex is basically turned off, so there’s no need for us to deal with it. What we’re concerned with is primarily the older parts of the brain--the stem, the thalamus, the amygdala...temporal lobe stuff. Those are the parts most active during REM sleep, and thus the ones we want to monitor. Make sense?”

“Yeah,” Tucker said, and it did. Sort of.

“Okay, now, this thing we’ve got you hooked up to here is a modified electroencephalograph, or EEG. It monitors the wave activity in your brain and gives us a real-time visual readout--that’s where all those pretty pictures in the packet we gave you came from. So what we’re going to be doing is recording your brain’s wave activity while you sleep, looking primarily for fractal patterns. Do you know what a fractal is?”

The word brought up a vague memory of a math class with a dark-haired professor, but that was it.

“Fractals are just patterns that retain the same form when you break them down into smaller components. You know how if you break a little piece of broccoli off of the stalk, it still looks like a miniature version of the whole thing? Fractals are like that. We’re particularly concerned with them because they suggest high levels of cohesion between different brain sections. But we’re recording everything, fractal or not. That’s what all of this gear is. Most of it’s processor and storage space, same as your home computer. We just need more of it, because your brain has incredible amounts of activity every second, and we’ll be recording you for eight hours or so each night. That’s a lot of little ones and zeroes.” He stopped and took a breath, then visibly remembered something and turned back to the computers.

Tucker waited until he was sure the researcher was finished, then said, “Gotcha. So tonight we’re going to start recording my dreams?”

“Basically, yes. Obviously we won’t be able to record the subjective emotions and experiences--whoever’s out here won’t even know what you’re dreaming about. But when we’re done we’ll have an exact record of your brain’s electrical activity, which we then hope to turn around and induce artificially, essentially giving you a re-run of that dream. But that’s phase two. For now, we just have to record until you find a dream worth replaying over and over. So are you ready to give it a shot?”

With stiff, tentative fingers, Tucker reached up and ran his hands lightly over the wires protruding from his scalp. It made him feel like Medusa.

“Yeah, I think I’m good to go. Let’s do it.”

“Alright,” said Tim. “I know it’s counterintuitive, but just relax and try to get some rest. If you need anything, I’ll be right here. In phase two we should be able to teach you enough about the equipment to take care of this part yourself, but for the time being I’m just going to hang out while you snooze.”

“Okay. Sounds good.” Great, actually--even given the situation, it was astonishing how comforting the scientist’s presence was.

Electrodes poking weird dimples in his pillow, Tucker lay back and stared at the ceiling.

* * * * *

Consciousness returned with a jolt seven hours later, the resulting gasps and shudders immediately attracting the attention of a bleary-eyed Tim.

“Man, what was that one?” he asked, reaching over the mess of electronics to hand Tucker a cup of stale coffee. “Your anterior cingulate cortex was going bonkers.”

Tucker blinked slowly as his retinas adjusted to the sudden light. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he said. “What’s a cingulate cortex do?”

“It provides the emotional responses to pain.”

Tucker cradled the cup in both hands and took a sip.

“Figures.”

* * * * *

All together, it took three more nights to find a dream worth keeping. Tucker felt pleasantly optimistic as he closed his eyes on the fourth, the sound of Tim tapping away at his keyboards already reassuringly familiar. He let his mind drift.

He was in the back yard. Not as it was now, all overgrown from lack of mowing, but as it used to be--a rich, verdant green, with the pond reflecting a cloudless sky. His lucky shirt--the one with the squirrels on it--was the same as always, the hole still there from when he’d caught it on a stick climbing Billy Rutherford’s tree. His shorts ended just above the knees, ballooning out around skinny seven-year-old legs. And there, soaking in the sun on the battered wooden picnic table, sat his mother.

“Hey there, Tuckster! Come over and sit with me.”

Tucker’s feet moved as if of their own volition. He knew, in a vague and theoretical sense, that she was dead and that this t-shirt had long ago decayed beyond repair, but the urge to ignore those facts was overwhelming. He bounced his way over to the table, sat down, and began regaling her with tales of frogs caught down by the pond.

When he woke that morning, it was slowly and languidly. He reached one foot out of the bed and prodded a sleeping Tim.

“That one” he said.

* * * * *

From that point on, the project entered phase two. Every night, Tim or one of the other researchers would show up, get all the electrodes in place, and download the previous night’s data from the computer’s memory banks while reading over the report that Tucker wrote out each morning upon waking. Once that was done, all that remained was for the scientist to leave and let Tucker drift slowly off to sleep, at which point the computers, programmed to wait for the telltale signs of approaching REM sleep, would kick in and begin playback of the dream.

It wasn’t always exactly the same, but they’d warned him about that. Though they weren’t entirely sure which aspects of the dream experience would be affected, the researchers had known going in that their recording methods were far from perfect, and that the brain was far too complex for them to hope for one hundred percent reproductive accuracy with the current technology. So things in the dream changed, little things: Tucker’s clothes, the birds swimming on the pond, the color of the grass. But the picnic table was always there, as was Mom, and that was all that mattered to Tucker.

Their conversations varied, but kept mainly to topics appropriate for his dream-age: school and friends, experiences both remembered and imagined. Tucker did most of the talking, but Mom was more than content to smile and let him chatter. She kept smiling right on through the moment he woke up and, when he did, he usually found that he was smiling as well.

In the first days of the experiment, Tucker would leap out of bed each morning, fresh and full of energy, and throw himself at his canvas until well into early afternoon. The finished paintings stacked up, and he began to consider arranging some gallery space. As the weeks rolled on, however, he found himself more and more inclined to be productive in other ways--to go mow the yard or hit up the supermarket for groceries. No longer were his room and his easel the extent of his comfort zone. The world was opening up before him, and without the fetters and exhaustion of constant nightmares. Tucker reveled in it.

Still, he decided, it wouldn’t do to let his art fall by the wayside simply because it wasn’t his only activity anymore. He began setting aside a few hours a day exclusively for painting.

Then he hit a block. Not all at once--ideas still came to him, but it was if somebody had pinched the garden hose of his imagination. What used to be a torrent of images for him was reduced to a trickle, and soon that too dried up and left him. A month passed, and his “art time” gradually degraded into two hours of sitting on his bed every morning and staring at the canvas without a single idea.

It had to have something to do with the treatment. Tucker wasn’t stupid--nothing like this had ever happened before, and the timing was a little too coincidental. Still, it was too early to panic. He decided to try and subtly pump the doctors for information.

“So, I was wondering,” he asked the woman assigned to prep him that evening, “have you guys noticed anything weird about my brain? Changes or anything?”

The researcher gave him a concerned look. “Weird’s a pretty broad term,” she noted. This one was forty-something-ish and round, with brown hair that just barely touched her sweater. “Why, is there something in particular that’s worrying you?” She reached for her clipboard.

“No,” Tucker said quickly. Creative block or not, he wasn’t going to let a certified, honest-to-God magic bullet cure like this slip out of his hands. “I’m just curious as to how my brain’s responding to this whole business.”

“Well, actually,” the doctor replied “now that you mention it, there is something we’ve been watching for a while.” She turned one of the monitors around to face where Tucker sat on the edge of the bed. A side-on view of Tuck’s own brain stared back at him in shades of gray. “See this area in here?” Her finger made little circles around a nondescript gray lump near the bottom. “This whole thing is your temporal lobe, and this part right here is your inferior temporal cortex. It’s concerned with vision and processing of images, among other things.” Her finger shifted slightly. “We’re honestly not quite certain what this area to the right here is responsible for, but yours was going like mad when we started the proceedings. Not just when you were asleep, either. In fact, let me turn this on…” She flipped a switch and one of the machines hummed to life. The picture changed--still his brain, but now a vivid mass of color. “See how it’s kind of greenish right now?” she asked. “Well, it used to be yellow and red all the time, and it’s been reducing in activity levels at a fairly steady rate since the experiment began. We’re not doing anything to it that we aren’t doing to all the areas around it, so frankly, we don’t know what’s going on. We don’t even necessarily know that it’s us causing it, though it could be that its original activity was just the result of chronic stress. But as long as you’re not experiencing any side effects, I don’t see any reason to worry. The brain can be a funny animal sometimes.” She stopped and looked hard at him. “You’re sure you haven’t noticed anything unusual that you’ve forgotten to mention?”

“Absolutely.” Face blank, eyes wide. Nod the head.

“Alright, then, let’s go ahead and get you to bed.” She stood and lifted her bag. “I’ll be by tomorrow to grab the results, and then Tim’ll be back the day after that. I know he gets a kick out of you. Sweet dreams.” She stepped out of the room and closed the door.

Disconcerted, Tucker buried his face in his pillow, wires fanning out from the back of his head and waving like anemones in a current.

Sleep was a long time in coming.

* * * * *

He was standing in the yard, just outside the patio door as usual. The sun shone bright on his blue and yellow Cub Scout uniform. Mom was sitting at the table, waving him over. Something was bothering him.

“Hey, Tuck, how are you?”

Something important.

“Tucker? You okay?”

Now he remembered. Tucker walked over and sat down next to her on the bench, letting her put an arm around his slumped shoulders.

“Mom, I’m scared.”

“Of what, honey? What’s wrong?” The muscles in her jaw tightened.

“This art camp thing. I mean, I want to go, but what if I’m not as good as the other kids? What if the counselors don’t like what I paint?”

Though she was careful to maintain a serious expression, he could feel her arm relax. She pulled him closer.

“Sweetie, I understand why you’d be scared, but you can’t let that stop you. You’re a wonderful artist! I love your paintings, and everybody who comes into my office always mentions the one I have above my desk. They can’t believe you’re only seven! And you know what?”

“What?” His finger traced his own sloppily carved initials in the table’s rough surface.

“You should be really proud. You know why I think that? Because I’m proud. I love knowing that I’ve got a son who can create things the way you do, and I think that if you can do that, and I created you, well…that makes me special too, now, doesn’t it?” She scratched the crown of his head. “And when I see the mothers of other children, you know what I say in my head?”

“What?”

“I say…” She crossed her eyes, puffed up her cheeks, and stuck out her tongue.

“Tbfpppbtbt!”

Tucker couldn’t help laughing, and for a few moments they rocked back and forth together, the rest of the world forgotten. Then he sobered and asked, “But the camp is overnight…what about my nightmares? The other kids will think I’m weird, and you won’t be there.”

Reaching over, she adjusted his neckerchief.

“I know, Tucker, but you’ve got to take the chance. You put up with so much, and I hope you know how much I admire that. You’re so brave.”

“Really? You think I’m brave?”

“I think you’re incredibly brave.” She rested her chin on the top his head. “I don’t know if I could go through what you do every night and still be as fun as you are. It’s normal to be scared. But believe me, you’ve got a gift, and you can’t let being scared stand in the way of your dreams.”

“Yeah,” Tucker said. “I guess you’re right. Thanks, Mom.” He gave her one last hug, throwing his whole body into it, then hopped off the bench and headed for the house.

* * * * *

Eyes puffy and sore, Tucker woke and stared at the ceiling for a long while. Then he rolled over and reached for the phone.

* * * * *

That night he dreamed of falling.

It was beautiful.

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