I’ve just emerged from the near equatorial heat of the bathroom and am fresh with new realization. I was taking a bath, as I often do, not for sanitary purposes, but as escapism. Now, let’s get a few things straight. There are no Martha Stuart-like foaming clouds of white bubbles, chakra aligning droning sitar music or, God Forbid, scented candles involved in this ritual. (“Matha’s polishing the brass on the Titanic, man, it’s all going down” – Tyler) It’s purpose is merely to afford me some time alone with whatever I happen to be reading at the moment. My latest volume of lore was provided to me by a friend, and it’s good, which we’ll get to in a moment, but it’s also important to me because it helped me with my fresh new realization. My bathing ritual involves not only a good piece of literature, but a tub full of water so hot it reddens the skin. The hot water can barely be tolerated at first, in fact can only be entered by degrees. Immersion into this molten pool is a lengthy process involving sitting on the edge of the tub with my book in one hand, thumb along the spine between the pages, and my feet dangling in the water, patiently waiting for the stinging heat like a thousand needles to lessen into merely a tolerable scalding. Slowly but surely the rest of the body is engulfed in this warmth, full to the neck, except for the hand holding the book aloft above the water. In long years of practice I have mastered turning pages one handed. When one arm gets tired from holding the book thusly, switching hands is accomplished by raising my opposing pink skinned wet arm from the depths like the Kraken and drying the hand with the nearest available hand towel, or if there is none, my own still dry hair. This is usually unneccesary however, for I rarely read long enough for either appendage to grow weary. Most often, I drift into the second part of the ritual, the part that was truly intended from the beginning. Encased in my warm liquid womb, comfortable and relaxed, I nap. More importantly, I dream.

Unlike some, I dont remember all dreams. The dreams from a good nights sleep are many and involved, long mystical journeys, no doubt full of adventure, romance, death, suspense and magic. They are also almost exclusively lost to me. I have attempted the sage advice given to many, and written dreams upon awakening every morning, in an effort to learn to remember them, with little success. My rereading of those writings jogs no memories of the dreams themselves and feels only like a bad third hand retelling of a rather dull piece of gossip. So I have given up the effort of remembering the nightly wanderings of my mind, and assign little signifigance to the ones I do retain. However, I always remember the dreams I have when napping.

Short term, for me, seems to be the key. Don’t sleep too long, and don’t sleep too heavily. I often recognize that I am dreaming as I do it, and even manage to retain some sense of what is going on around me during naps. I have always felt that this was somehow involved in the way I dreamed, that it gave these brief forays into mental fantasy a closeness that I enjoyed, like seeing an old friend. It was just today that I realized the truth.

My short, cat-napping dreams are not mine, and it’s all because of this book I am reading.

Sarah loaned me The Virgin Suicides, by Jeffrey Eugenindes. Suprisingly, I haven’t seen the film. It’s captivating, with a narrative voice unlike any I have encountered in quite sometime. While I was dreaming, I had a sense of dread. I dreamt I was speaking to myself from the ceiling of the bathroom, spewing guilt upon myself in the third person. I was using all the hot water. I was tying up the bathroom, not allowing Kevin access to it for longer than was fair. I was wasting water. I was not getting clean, was in fact getting dirtier as my hair was sweating from the sauna-like temperature of the bathroom. As I awoke, I realized something that perhaps in the back of my mind I have known all along.

I was dreaming in the narrative voice of the book I had been reading, and this is not the first time that it has happened. It has, in fact, been happening to me for quite some time. I recently dreamt of sad hopelessnes that slowly bloomed into too lately realized adulthood, and I was doing it in Steve Martin’s voice, both literally and figuratively. I dreamt of esacping dangerous men in the elaboratly matter of fact tones of one of spy fiction’s greatest writers. I dreamt of roaming the plains with both frontiersman and Sioux alike, thanks to a hero of mine. I delighted in life as a young child thanks to another.

I honestly feel a little cheated. I want my dreams to be mine, but cannot to give up reading any more than I could give up breathing. I am very confused. On the other hand, to all the authors I love and read, thanks guys. I’ve been having a great time.