Carla Tells Me About Her Dreams

Most of the dreams Carla describes to me are about people from her life. Children and grandchildren. A cousin she’d honestly forgotten all about. Her eternally upset mother. Old friends, dead friends. Sometimes movie stars from way before I was born. She always employs a euphemism if she fucked Cary Grant or something, flashes an embarrassed look at me. But I never mind. Think it’s great that someone her age is still having wet dreams. Probably none of the other residents are.

A few weeks after her 87th birthday Carla has a dream about nothing. I ask her what she means. Carla says, Exactly what it sounds like. She’s all alone in a totally dark room, can’t see anything. Complete absence of light. That’s the whole dream. I tell her I think technically something has to happen in a dream for it to be a dream. Not true, she says.

She has the same dream the next night, the night after that, every night. It’s her only dream now. The nothing dream. I tell her, It sounds to me like you’re just waking up in the middle of the night with your eyes closed. She shakes her head at this. I’m not describing it right, she says.

One evening Carla isn’t in the dining hall for dinner. I give her ten minutes before I go to her room, knock once. Twice. When I enter it’s totally dark, way darker than it should be. In the narrow sliver of light cast from the hallway, I catch a blackout curtain hung in front of her window, sealed to the wall with duct tape. Carla says, from somewhere I can’t see, Come in and shut the door. So I do. I hear the scrape of fabric taped to the bottom of the door as it closes, so no light sneaks in underneath when we’re enclosed.

It’s like this, Carla says. The sensation of having your eyes open but no light that can be attached to anything, adjusting and readjusting against nothing, nothing. Only void.

I think about my bedroom. It’s never fully dark, not really. My blinking phone, the streetlamp outside my window, the city’s ambient light pollution. I can’t escape it. Even in my sleep I see.

I say Carla’s name again, but she’s not in this room, she is not here. Carla, how did you know you were in a room when you were dreaming? If it was completely pitch black like you said, if you really couldn’t see anything, how did you know it was a room? I open my eyes as wide as I possibly can. It’s like this.

I’m not describing him right, the young man who used to work here. The orderly or caregiver or whatever they’re called now. I’m trying to tell Eleanor about him but Eleanor is so old she makes my eighty seven years feel young, and she swears she doesn’t remember him. I do remember him, clearly, but an odd thing keeps happening – or maybe not so odd, given my years – where I can picture him vividly but when I try to describe what he looks like the words fail me. Like my inner dictionary has been bleached clean. I can’t even remember his name. But he was just here. Maybe he was a volunteer.

As always, it’s much too bright in the dining hall. I’ve complained about it so many times but no one here listens to me. There is no need for so much light, exposing everything: the grime on the dishes, grease on fingers, drool on chins, my own wrinkles all over my arms. Blue and purple veins just beneath my skin now, so clear I can’t stand it. Though I guess they were always there, just deeper down. Is that true? I don’t know how bodies work. This is the kind of thing I would ask that young man, wherever he’s off to now. This is the sort of thing we could talk about. He was easy to talk to.

Maybe you dreamed him, Eleanor says, and I nod and smile. But that isn’t true, can’t be true. I have never had the kind of brain that can invent people. There has to be something there. All of my dreams are about people I remember, real people, or they used to be anyway. When was the last time I dreamed? Eleanor’s brain is shot, or mine is, or both. We go round and round.

I cannot think with all this glare making my head throb, these new light bulbs they have now that are white, white, white, so clean and unnatural, when they used to be creamy yellow, romantic, gentle. Or is that just how it looks in my memory. Eleanor says I’m a victim of my own sterling vision, that my eyes should have failed at least a little by now, that they have to keep everything lit up like this in here because most residents can’t see too well anymore. A blessing and a curse, she says. Even in my sleep I see.

I eat an acceptable amount of broccoli and potatoes and chicken, just enough to call it a night, which I’m eager to do. Back in my room someone has taken down my blackout curtain again, removed the duct tape and fabric from the door. Somehow I find the energy to carefully put it all back up, sealing the light out inch by inch. It was him who took it down, I think suddenly, though I don’t know how this thought arrived, or why. Just neurons misfiring these days, increasingly directionless. Signals without a source or destination. I know what this means, the slow winding down, but I’m not afraid of what comes after. I’m not afraid of that.

Fully enclosed now, bone tired under the covers, perfect darkness finally, and the thing about darkness is this: it’s blinding. Real darkness is brighter than anything in the world, I think, with nothing to interrupt it, nothing to compare it to. If you look at nothing long enough, nothing becomes something just like that, it does. The darkness is light. That’s the secret. That’s what I was trying to say earlier. And then drifting off gently, gently, letting these thoughts become a dream, letting the dream take me somewhere, and then I see him in the doorway. His silhouette. Exactly how I remember him. Come in and shut the door.