Chapter Twenty-Two Lucid Dreaming
Twenty-Two
Lucid Dreaming
One night Paul and I were watching TV when the main character yelled at her sister’s husband, after he’s lost his family and his dignity and is living in a run-down motel: “How could you cheat on my sister? How could you be so stupid?”
Right. That’s what the world would say about all this. So stupid! Of course. There was no plan for me to see David again. I mourned him more than I’d ever mourned any loss in my life.
Paul and I had teary, all-night conversations in which he said he couldn’t handle it if I loved David and slept with him again too.
“I might be able to handle one, but I certainly can’t handle both,” he said.
“We’re not going to sleep together again,” I said.
“Don’t act like that makes you a martyr,” he said. “I’m your husband, not him. This was always supposed to be something good for us, not only for you.”
He needed me to say I still loved him and would never leave him. I said all the right things, but I didn’t feel them.
What I felt was claustrophobic. Paul was always there . I took on extra work and spent many hours each day on my laptop, with him sitting three feet away. I overperformed my role at home. I cleaned out the fridge drawers with bleach. I organized Nate’s shelves. I baked a plum torte.
One day Veronica called as I was leaving the drugstore carrying two large bags and a new mop. I awkwardly carried the bags and the mop all over the neighborhood while on the phone. I hadn’t spoken with her in a while, and she asked if I’d been mad at her. I said no—I’d just been afraid to talk to her because I wasn’t sure how she’d react to my sleeping with David, or to the news of my mystical experience. I’d feared she might judge or doubt me in some way that I couldn’t handle yet.
She said, “Don’t you know by now that you could kill someone, and I’d only want to know how you felt about it?”
“How long will I be sad?” I asked.
“If you work very hard on feeling better, a month and a half. And if you do nothing, thirty-two years.”
“I have to get some time alone,” I said. “But Paul’s going to want to go with me.”
“I’m going to the library,” I said when I got home.
“I’ll come with you!” Paul said.
I didn’t feel like I could say no. As we walked, he asked yet again for reassurance.
“We’ll always be together, right?”
“Right,” I said. But the more he asked, the more my doubt grew. And the madder I got.
In the old days, wasn’t the cliché that when a man worked hard, he got to have a mistress, and his wife took care of the kids and the house? But I did that too! And I was so tired . I started to envy people who were single or who were placidly content in their marriages. They must sleep so well , I thought.
I slept terribly, waking up every two hours in a flood of anxiety. To help fix the problem, I checked out a book on lucid dreaming, a psychological exercise designed to let you control your nocturnal life. The first night I tried it, my dreams became like on-demand movies. I swam in the ocean. I walked through forests.
Then the next I settled in for another meaningful, restful dream. I was strolling through a meadow at sunrise, deer and rabbits loping around me, when I encountered a group of teenagers. I stopped to ask what wise words they had to offer me. One picked up a branch and hit me in the head. I fell into the dirt, and the rest of the gang stomped on me. I tried to explain the concept of lucid dreaming to them: I was in charge; they served me. They laughed and hit me harder. I woke up in a sweat, panting. I didn’t try to practice lucid dreaming anymore after that.