12 Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus

More about 12 Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus

1. Dr. Sardonicus dreamed he had misplaced his face inside a woman. She wore yellow skin with blue spots and seemed pleased with the arrangement. He asked for it back. She closed her eyes.
2. Four young men stood around him. They looked like a band whose instruments had gone away to college. Nobody remembered the song, but everyone remembered being nineteen.
3. He climbed a staircase into the moon. At the top was another staircase and a little sign saying the moon had moved. He sat down. His knees had believed in astronomy.
4. A leopard walked through his consulting room carrying all its spots. This struck him as unnecessarily thorough. He himself had stopped bringing his qualifications.
5. He dreamed of a lake so blue that people visiting it forgot whom they had married. Along the shore stood little houses where the forgotten spouses made lunch.
6. The woman leaned against him. Inside her shoulder was a smaller woman leaning against a smaller doctor. He could see the afternoon going on in there. He wondered whether they had eaten.
7. His sunglasses contained two nights. He removed them and put them beside the bed. By morning something had laid an egg in Tuesday.
8. A heron offered to cure his sadness.

“How?”

“Stand in water.”

“For how long?”

The heron looked at him with the patience of someone who had never owned trousers.

9. He found himself inside himself, surrounded by the same four young men. One asked whether this counted as rehearsal.

“Only if we get paid,” said another.

They waited for somebody larger to reach into the room.

10. Every flower in the garden had a telephone. His mother called from a red one. She had been dead for years but still wanted to know whether he was wearing a sweater.

“It’s warm here,” he said.

“That isn’t what I asked.”

11. At the bottom of the smallest doctor was a light. He walked toward it through rooms getting progressively less expensive. At last there was only a kitchen chair and a cup of coffee.

The coffee was still warm.

Someone had expected him.

12. Dr. Sardonicus woke with the woman’s head against his shoulder. The young men were gone. Outside, a bird was making the same small adjustment to the morning over and over.

He wanted to tell her all twelve dreams, but she was sleeping.

So he stayed where he was.

For once, being inside somebody’s dream did not require him to understand it.