Falconer+-+John+Cheever

Falconer 88
of this dream was unusually deep and vivid. He asked himself,
from his psychiatric experience, if the dream was in color. It had
been, but not brilliantly. The sea had been dark and the woman
wore no lipstick, but the memory was not limited to black and
white. He missed the dream. He was genuinely irritated at the fact
that he had lost it. It was, of course, worthless, but it seemed like a
talisman. He checked his watch and saw that it was three-ten. The
toilet was still. He went back to sleep.
This happened again and again and perhaps again. The time was
not always precisely three-ten, but it was always between three and
four in the morning. He was always left irritable at the fact that his
memory could, quite independently of anything he knew about
himself, manipulate its resources in controlled and repeated
designs. His memory enjoyed free will, and his irritability was
increased by his realization that his memory was as unruly as his
genitals. Then one morning, jogging from the mess to shop along
the dark tunnel, he heard the music and saw the woman and the
sea. He stopped so abruptly that several men banged into him,
scattering the dream galley-west. That was that for the morning.
But the dream was to reappear again and again in different places
around the prison. Then one evening in his cell, as he was reading
Descartes, he heard the music and waited for the woman and the
sea. The cellblock was quiet. The circumstances for concentration
were perfect. He reasoned that if he could pin down a line or two
of the jingle, he would be able to reassemble the rest of the reverie.
The words and the music were receding, but he was able to keep
abreast of their retreat. He grabbed a pencil and a scrap of paper
and was about to write down the lines he had captured when he
realized that he did not know who or where he was, that the uses
of the toilet he faced were completely mysterious, and that he
could not understand a word of the book he held in his hands. He
did not know himself. He did not know his own language. He
abruptly stopped his pursuit of the woman and the music and was
relieved to have them disappear. They took with them the absolute