The Dreamdrive
The night it began, he’d had an unremarkable meal of chicken and rice. Sure, the chicken was dry, flavorless, and the rice, wet, also flavorless, but he had not found the meal particularly bad, and, after imbibing a large glass of cold filtered water, he’d experienced no gastrointestinal bloat. He’d done little of note after the meal. He’d sat on his sofa and watched TV: innocuous cooking shows, the news, “Jeopardy!” Yet those to whom he kept telling this story—his sister, his mother, his then girlfriend, and, later, his doctors—continued to press him for more detail. Along with the water, could he have, unbeknownst to him, swallowed a toxic amount of psychedelics? Could the chicken from which the thigh and breast meat came, have consumed, weeks earlier, a toxic amount of psychedelics? And what about the television? Did it give off TV waves? Or the sofa? Sofa waves? One doctor said that some psychedelics are fat-soluble and can live indefinitely in one’s fat cells, which, unless they succumb to liposuction, never go away, and often grow.
“Did you know this about fat cells?” he asked (texted) his mother, his sister, and his then girlfriend. They were all on the same group chat. Yes, these women knew.
Another doctor focussed on the sofa waves. Which, more specifically, were gravitational waves. All objects emit gravitational waves, the doctor explained, and should those waves interact unfavorably with those of the self, through the calibrated physics of destructive interference, destruction ensues.
Read an interview with the author for the story behind the story.
“Did you know this about gravitational waves?” he asked (texted) his mother, his sister, and his then girlfriend. His mother did, for she’d often warned her children not to stand near microwaves. His sister did, for she had a hobby of reading people’s tarot cards at dinner and, on weekends, collecting crystals. His then girlfriend did not, for she was a theoretical astrophysicist. In lay terms, she tried to convince the others that gravitational waves are distortions of spacetime caused by huge things, like black holes, and that these waves have nothing to do with “waves of the self,” which do not exist. “A sofa is a black hole,” he replied, a comment at which his sister and his mother, but not his then girlfriend, laughed.
He’d had bouts of insomnia before. A string of days, weeks. Drugs didn’t work. No dosage of melatonin, Ambien, or trazodone, and no quantity of alcohol. But sometimes this worked: rise and read in dim light the most boring book you can find, like the one he had on European horse breeding. And sometimes this worked: lie down in the bathtub with the shower set to very hot, feel the scalding water pound your chest. That was where his then girlfriend found him one dawn, drenched, naked. Thinking him either dead or, worse, suicidal, she’d screamed, which inopportunely woke him up.
But this stretch of insomnia was so radically different from the others that he refused to give it the basic name. Lots of people experience insomnia, almost one out of three. Yet his current state was unique, wholly individual, and thus deserving of a cool compound word as cogent as “spacetime.” Between “drivedream” and “dreamdrive,” he settled on the latter, and, henceforth, this was how he described his soon-to-be-routine malaise to his mother, his sister, his then girlfriend, and, later, his doctors. Each night, he went into the dreamdrive. He would think he’d fallen asleep but would wake up driving, and, while driving, he would panic, believing that, if he had just woken up, then he must have fallen asleep at the wheel, and he would drive, drive, drive, in this panic, in this fog, as the road was always foggy, until he once again fell asleep at the wheel, and then he would wake up in his own bed, panicked that he had not slept, had never slept, would never sleep, and when his eyes shut again, he would wake up driving, further panicked that he had once again fallen asleep. Each morning, he “awoke”—not the term he would have used—exhausted, having not slept (his then girlfriend would argue that he had) and having driven all night, before falling asleep at the wheel. The drive was the dream. But the dream was also the drive.
His mother asked if there was ever anyone in the car with him. His sister asked if he was certain that he was in a car. Was it gas or electric, stick or automatic? Could it be a truck or a train or a tractor, and had he remembered to turn on the headlights? When driving in the dreamdrive, he had limited range of motion. His hands were at ten and two, his face fixed, staring straight ahead. It was fear that hindered movement. Fear that, should he look away from the road, he would either hit a cement barricade or pass out yet again. But, one night, he forced his eyeballs down toward his dashboard and the middle console. It was, indeed, a car that ran on gas and was manual. The stick shift induced new fear. He did not know how to drive stick. Yet the car was still in fluid motion. He awoke in his bed, covered in sweat and shouting. Another night, he peered into his rearview mirror, at the back seat. It held a booster but no child. The empty foam block with adjustable armrests induced more fear. Where had he left this child that was not his? And did this child know how to drive stick?
Podcast: The Writer’s Voice
Listen to Weike Wang read “The Dreamdrive.”
He awoke, again, in his bed, covered in sweat and sobbing. His then girlfriend decided that it was time for her to sleep elsewhere. She said that she would text him, but, the next morning, she called him. She’d gone to her lab and slept on the sanitized floor of its common room. She’d slept so exceptionally well that, for the sake of her own intellect and future endeavors, with a heavy heart but, at long last, a clear head, she’d decided that she could no longer be with him. “It was the booster, wasn’t it?” he’d asked, hinting at what he thought was every woman’s perennial desire for children. “No,” she replied. Later that day, she removed herself from the group chat.
One doctor, a psychologist, went through dream theories with him, to see which great thinker’s mind he was in. Dreams (a) are physiological necessities; (b) help us consolidate a day’s events; (c) reactivate neural pathways; (d) are wish fulfillment. Out of these theories, the last seemed the most speculative, personal, and, therefore, pertinent. Freud it was, then. The man told the psychologist that in the real world, that mundane grind, he never drove anywhere. He worked from home. Ordered delivery. He held a driver’s license but did not practice. His mother was a better driver than he was. His sister, too. His once girlfriend, by leaps and bounds, miles, literally—more than two thousand she’d driven with him, he the passenger tasked with feeding her seedless green grapes as she steered. Highways made him nervous. The oncoming cars, like lines of golden-eyed insects rushing to swarm him. “When driving, you have to assume that other people want to live as much as you do,” he’d told his mother, his sister, and his then girlfriend, an assumption none found of interest, as it was universally applicable to any situation, like walking outside or using a public rest room, but the assumption reassured him, since, if, while operating heavy machinery, he also had to worry about the sanity of other people operating similar machinery, then how was driving different from warfare, and cars from fighter jets, in which you either attack or get attacked? The psychologist found these analogies interesting. The psychologist wrote furiously on a notepad.
“My father,” the man told the psychologist, since neither his mother nor his sister ever wished to speak about this person, “my father was a defensive driver.” Had his mother wished to speak about this person, she would have added, “His father was an aggressive driver,” and his sister would have added, “Dad was the worst driver in the world. Ask him how many accidents he got us into, ask him how many tickets, how many cars he totalled. One time, I flew through a windshield. A windshield!” The sister would then point to her large, dented forehead. Only in a certain light was the dent visible.
It was impossible to ask their father how many accidents, tickets, totalled cars, et cetera. He’d left the country long ago and cut ties. Also, his sister had not, as she said, “flown through a windshield,” but she had shot forward in the car (inertia, his once girlfriend had called this), hit her large forehead against the glass, cracked the glass, and then rebounded into the back seat, where, had she just buckled up moments earlier, as their father had mandated both children do, she would not have been thrown at the windshield when their father rear-ended the car in front of them while going five miles over the forty-five-miles-per-hour limit. Prior to the collision, their parents had been arguing. It was either about money or about why they had immigrated to an insane country that measures height in feet and distance in miles. Their mother had dared their father to crash the car. He had done as he was told. Their mother’s forehead had also hit the windshield and been dented, a detail his sister conveniently leaves out.
“Where were you in all this?” the psychologist asked. The man, then a boy, was in the back seat, with his seat belt fastened. He had felt no pain then or later, when paramedics treated a cross-chest abrasion, vermillion colored and the width of a mountain-bike tire. He had felt no pain because his parents had stopped fighting, and his sister had stopped complaining, and the car had stopped moving, so, for all intents and purposes, his father had done a good deed by ending the familial discord without killing a bystander. With their father, there had been twelve accidents, zero casualties.
“Did he wish to live?” the psychologist asked, and the man said, “For sure,” with the same conviction one might declare all families happy, and all immigrants grateful, and all sisters saints.
“There’s no child in the booster seat because the child is you,” the psychologist told him, and the man said, “Oh, my God.”
Then the psychologist showed him a silver lining. After his father had left, his mother and his sister became good drivers, and that allowed the man to be a defunct one, which allowed him to charm his once girlfriend, who pursued a hard science helmed by strong men and found, for a time, happy purpose in the act of caring for him, a less strong man, a gentle man. Wasn’t there consolation in that?
He left that session restored. The dreamdrive did not end, but he did not care. The ordeal was no longer a senseless drive to nowhere but a sensible one to nowhere. The drive itself was the destination—this is the logic with which families delude themselves into taking road trips in the first place—and the drive was an endless solo road trip that represented all the road trips that he and his family had never taken, since they never made it far before his father got into an accident and the car had to be towed. How American a road trip was. Car ownership, too. A package deal—the car, the open road, and being a sedentary but freedom-aspiring resident of this insane metric-system-phobic country.
Thus, one morning, after having fallen asleep at the wheel for the hundredth time and woken up in bed, the man realized that he understood his father a little better. He understood why his father, in his first month in the U.S., had gone out and bought, in all cash, a fourth-hand compact auto with sticky roll-down windows, and why, although he’d had to keep moving the family into progressively smaller rental properties, his father had always made sure that they had access to a car. The car was the American Dream. Yet the car was also a burden, with high monthly interest payments, which put savage masculinity at odds with paternal liability. As soon as the man understood that, he also understood why his father, being the imperfect, self-destructive human that he was, had had no other recourse but to wreck it. And, as soon as the man understood that, he also understood why his father, being the duty bound, self-loathing human that he was, had no other recourse but to fix the car immediately or buy a new one. Had there been fewer totalled cars, his father might have attained home ownership, but then another cycle would have begun—burn the house down, just to build it back up—and it was objectively more arduous to level (and to rebuild) a house than a car. The last car that his father owned had not been totalled. It was not in optimal or even suboptimal condition, but, on roads that were not highways, it was drivable. So, perhaps by leaving that broken but not entirely destroyed piece of equipment to their mother, their father was trying to tell her that he still had hope. Perhaps he was saying that he believed the dream would outlast him.
The man texted these early-morning epiphanies to his mother and his sister in one long paragraph that began with “My father.” His mother liked the paragraph so instantly that the man was certain she had not read it. His sister took four days to respond, privately, with two sentences. The first declared, as a fact, that their father was a “manipulative layabout” (in all caps) and that a son’s sorry habit of excusing his layabout father is an imprinted form of “patriarchal power and brotherhood” (in all caps) that leads to the insidious gaslighting of daughters and mothers. The second asked if he was O.K. “I am O.K.,” the man replied, and the sister left that sentence on read.
Since he did sleep a bit each night, he was biologically O.K. and not dead. But he could no longer recall what restful slumber was like: lapsing from light to dark, slipping under, into hypnosis, the sleep of the dead, no dreams, no terrors, just a pristine blank, a gone-ness that lasts the snap of a finger, only to surface, inhale, and see that, by some clock magic, a third of a day has passed. That he could now perceive every passing minute was a new and unpleasant phenomenon. Was this to be the remainder of his life?
Yes. Maybe. In the grand scheme of sleep disorders, it could be far worse.
He was delighted when the dreamdrive gave him a change of scenery. Sections of roadwork, albeit with no workers. A school crossing, albeit with no schoolchildren. The delight was followed by loneliness; he was in this dream world childless, fatherless, companionless, and indisputably alone. Sometimes it snowed, and, when it did, he would roll his eyeballs upward into that black cavern and address the snowflakes: “Ah, my friends.” To these friends, he told stories about his father, whose name was Greg. Not that names were so important, but, in the dreamdrive, the man thought they might be. Greg was not his father’s real name; it was his chosen one. Easy to say, to spell. Easy to remember and also to forget. Greg had crashed cars but had not had insomnia. Nor had he believed in insomnia. He’d believed that if people worked long and hard enough, if they were fatigued enough from physical or mental labor, they slept, as sleep is crucial to survival, and people who defied their own survival, insomniacs, would, under the laws of natural selection, be eliminated. In other words, Greg had thought insomnia a problem of the rich, the weak, the useless, the indulgent, the lazy. “Greg for gregarious,” the man joked, and the snowflakes laughed. Oh, how these jovial ice fractals resembled ash.
Awake, Son of Greg the Gregarious, was let down. The day was too bright, the weather too random, and events moved around him, despite him, as if he didn’t really need to exist. He had friends in his contact list, real, even gregarious, people he knew and could meet up with, but never did. At work, he had become desultory, though not enough to draw notice. He realized that much of what he used to do with his once girlfriend was listen to her vent about her work, how if she lost focus for a millisecond—“that’s one-thousandth of a second,” she’d explain—her colleagues would not only notice but say that they’d noticed, and report her to their supervisor. Now the man couldn’t help but wonder: What was worse—to be singled out for decimal changes or to be ignored for integral ones?
Each morning, by text, he reported to his mother, his sister, and his psychologist what he had seen the night before, and expressed keen anticipation for what he would see that night. His mother liked his texts but rarely responded. His sister rarely liked his texts and never responded. The psychologist was a willing accomplice, even curious. “There ever any chickens?” he’d asked during one session. The man checked that night and the night after, seven nights in a row he checked, only to report back that there were no psychedelic chickens crossing the road. “A shame,” the psychologist said, making a note.
This was the nature of things, until the man mentioned, offhandedly, more as a setting detail, that, in the dreamdrive, he talked to snow. The psychologist leaned forward and clarified that the man meant snow from the sky, and not a ground-level accumulation in the form of a buff snow guy or a voluptuous snow gal. The man clarified that he meant snowflakes. What would he and a bunch of shape-shifting snow people have to discuss, except the certainty of climate change and a fleeting existence dependent on temperature, for which modern civilization had three incongruous scales? Kelvin, Celsius, Fahrenheit, the man said. Kelvin, Celsius, Fahrenheit, the man repeated.
So the psychologist spoke to a psychiatrist, and the psychiatrist spoke to a neurologist, and the neurologist spoke to a better neurologist, and the group of them decided that it would benefit the man to undergo an MRI of the brain.
Brain waves, sleep waves, these were not what an MRI would measure, according to Google, and, wisely skeptical, the man met with the two white-coated neurologists to glean with absolute clarity what kind of procedure he was getting himself into. Their white coats hung like snow capes. He wished that his once girlfriend were still his girlfriend. He wished that he saw his mother and his sister more.
“MRI stands for magnetic resonance imaging,” the neurologist said.
“Which uses a magnet,” the better neurologist said.
“To align the body’s water molecules,” the neurologist said.
“Then uses radio waves to disrupt that alignment,” the better neurologist said.
“But please remember,” the neurologist said, “that radio waves travel at the speed of light and not sound.”
“And because radio waves travel at the speed of light and not sound, they’re actually light waves. Light,” the better neurologist said, panning his hands upward to the L.E.D. ceiling panel. “Light.”
The man looked down at his own hands, which felt heavy and coarse. He said that he would do his best with this information, do his best to remember, but the “it”—the dreamdrive, the scan, the waves, his presence today in this exam room, and his firm but erroneous belief that he had not slept in months—still felt, all together, surreal.
“Surreal is a homophone of so real,” the neurologist said.
“Other questions?” the better neurologist asked.
Since radios are often found in the same rooms as sofas, the man asked at what speed sofa waves travelled. Sound or light? The better neurologist said sound, for sure. Sofa waves travel at the speed of sound.
A few days later, the man was strapped onto a table that would be fed into a machine that reminded him of an incinerator. Heavily sedated, his head shoved into a yoke the neurologist called a “head coil,” he was told to count backward from ten. He didn’t make it to six. Yet, between the numbers of ten and six, he felt he had attained nirvana. How many times—countless—had he, awake and livid, dreamed, in the sense of yearned, to be stabbed in the neck with a horse tranquilizer, and how many times—countless—had he realized that he only thought “horse tranquilizer” and not “bear” or “lion” because he was still reading that book on European horse breeding. From numbers six downward to negative infinity, he was in the dreamdrive, the same car, the same fog, the same snow, the same road. Seconds passed. Minutes. He could not wake from the sedation, so he could not fall asleep at the wheel. He was tired from the sedation, but he could not alleviate his tiredness by falling asleep at the wheel; he was trapped. “I’m trapped,” he told the snowflakes. They were sympathetic. As the minutes stretched on, and the drive became the longest he’d experienced, it also became boring, monotonous, with none of the panic he’d previously known, and he wondered if he had overreacted. If he had never told his mother, his sister, his once girlfriend, if he had not enforced his own terminology, vouched for his own singularity, if they had not left him to cope with it alone, and if that had not pushed him into the rooms of disease-obsessed doctors, who then pushed him into rooms with wave-obsessed machines, would it all have worked out fine?
No. It would not have. He would have died.
In the moving vehicle of the dream world, and in the stationary machine of the real world, he was trapped, but trapped, at least, in two triumphs of humanity. A combustion engine. An incinerator-like magnet. Light energy harnessed in the real world was now playing through the radio of his car in the dream world in the form of melodious static that lulled him either to sleep soundly or to be sound asleep. This was progress, advancement. He was privileged, and, if he had privilege, he had power. He moved his right foot to the left, to a new pedal. He could only hope that this was the brake. He pressed the pedal, and, as a normal car would, the car slowed, and, once it had come to a stop, he pulled the hand brake. The fog was still present. The snow. But in the car’s total lack of motion, in the stillness of its water molecules, which mirrored the stillness of his own water molecules, he had achieved what his father had wanted his son, his boy, his progeny in the new country, to achieve all along. He had parked the car.
A memory unearthed. Remember when, on snowy, foggy mornings, on the drive to school, your father or your mother or your sister turned on the radio, and remember when you sat to the right of whoever was driving, in the passenger seat, and took your index finger and drew shapes in the window condensation, and remember when your father or your mother or your sister would stop at a red light, that rouge color aglow on their cheeks, and they would puff clouds into their hands, to stay warm, and remember when they looked at you and remarked on those window shapes, how funny or ugly or weird they were, and you thought, especially with your father, Greg the Gregarious Guardian of Families and Cars, If only we could stay like this, on red, with the car, the radio, the snow, all running as they were built to but not going anywhere, and remember when, through the glorious marriage of light and sound waves, the radio announced, as you had willed it to, that school was closed that day, Congrats, kids, grab your sleds, mitts, skates, friends, go out yonder to those bleached meadows, roll those snowballs, build those snowmen, dig those snow forts, fight, conquer, and remember how that message electrified you by declaring the imminent day unstructured, thus ungovernable, removed from time, and remember how your father or your mother or your sister knew this, too, such that, once the light turned green, your father or your sister, though not your mother, but especially your father, would curse at the radio, at the voice on the radio, for now they had to make a U-turn in the snow and take you back to the wild, haphazard home, from which you, then your entire family, one by one, would soon exit. Remember that?
When the man smiled in the dream world, he also smiled in the real world, under his head coil, unbeknownst to the medical techs until an hour later, when he was pulled out of the incinerator and his head was unyoked. By then, the car was covered in snow, the windshield blitzed in white, yet, inside this igloo, the man was at ease. The medical team confirmed that he was still sedated. The neurologist checked the right side of his face; the better neurologist checked the left. His smile was, indeed, asymmetrical, with the curl set slightly higher on the right side, reflecting the fact that the man was left-brain dominant and not, as he had stated during intake, ambidextrous. What the man had probably meant, the neurologists agreed, was that he was mixed-handed—that he wrote with one hand but threw with the other. Because few people are truly ambidextrous. Maybe one per cent of the population. There are far, far more insomniacs, and it would be a wonder of science to find an ambidextrous insomniac. The neurologists moved the man to a recovery ward. At some point soon, the sedation would wear off, but, until then, here was where he would stay and rest and be cured. ♦