This is the “dream” I have tried to describe over many pages, and that I had for the first time at the age of sixteen, right or almost right after I got out of Colentina Hospital. Since then, it has replayed itself, in various variations, with details added and elements subtracted, possibly twenty times in these fourteen years. At the start, it came disturbingly often, maybe once a month (while I was feverishly searching through neurological treatises to diagnose myself), then the intervals extended and everything seemed to be on the way toward “healing,” with time. Last night’s dream, the result, perhaps, of yesterday’s pages (when I was detailing the vision of the plaster model screaming and spouting blood, I felt something much like insanity), followed the pattern of all the ones before and was no less devastating, even though it had been two years since the last time. As usual, accompanying the eruption of the revelatory dream — but what veil was moved away? on the contrary, the veils lay on top of each other, thicker and thicker, until their thickness, around the fragile egg of your dura mater, a celestial turban with the diamond of Shiva on the brow, becomes enormous, filling the entire cosmos (finite, but without limits, where imaginary time follows space in all its directions) with an impenetrable batting — my oneiric activity intensified considerably, along with waking states in which my self was suppressed. Monsters teemed under my eyelids as I curled up in bed and closed my eyes. Rotted skulls, indescribable faces, and terrible whispers in my ears tortured me until morning, when, so often, I woke up completely paralyzed and couldn’t make even the smallest gesture for minutes on end, even though my mind tried desperately to command, firmly, to believe, not to doubt. It was as though I had ordered a mountain to hurl itself into the sea.
And then the night came when, after I was finally able to fall asleep, it seemed that I rose, still wrapped in my sheets like a mummy. It awakened no suspicions when I saw myself from above, from the ceiling, as if twin entities from my consciousness had decoupled and moved several meters apart, one of them crossing (by what osmosis? by what tunnel-effect?) the metaphysical skin around my encephalon that separated the inside from the outside. The room was dimly lit in a gently rotating olive light. Although everything was in its proper place (see, the English notebook is open on the table, as I left it the night before, and my pants on the back of the chair were on the carpet in my dream, just as I would find them the next day in reality), there was a lunatic mist in the room’s air, as though I had slept poorly or I’d awoken in a world identical in every detail to our own, but reconstituted (too faithfully, in a way that was too nuanced) on a strange planet, for incomprehensible ends. And suddenly I began to hear the sound. It seemed like it had always existed, but it had evolved over millennia far below the threshold of my perception. It had amplified, starting from an almost absolute silence, seeking my ears (or maybe the zone of my temporal lobes, found at the interface of vibration and sensation) like an arrow finding its target, and in the end, amplifying billions of times from its original point, it slid through the great audile gate of my mind. The sound, that began as small and inoffensive as the buzz of a tiny fly, almost inaudible, oscillated like a siren, but on a frequency all its own and with a certain glissando that gave it an almost-tactile velvetiness, as though your fingers softly rubbed a petunia’s soft, fibrous petals.
In just a few seconds, the sound gained corporality and became yellow. It twisted into my brain like a corkscrew, ever more powerful, oscillating up-down, up-down faster and faster, rising asymptotically from audible to loud, surpassing the thresholds of acceptability, then tolerability, until it transformed into a howl of gold. I felt that the amplification would never end, and a destructive hysteria, a terror synchronized with the mad growth of the sound, encompassed me, mastered me, and substituted itself for me, against all of my efforts to maintain my identity. The sound had exceeded my ears’ capacity to hear, maybe dissolved them into flame, when the second part of my dream unleashed itself. I was knocked down violently by invisible hands, dragged out of my bed, sheets and all, and thrown against the furniture on the opposite wall. In other iterations, the abuse did not stop here. I was carried, with an ever increasing speed, through strange rooms, on tunnel-like roads covered by trees, reaching infinite speed, while the tongues of flames of the former sound burned my body. They exploded my head and spread me out triumphantly through all of space, through all of time, through all being, until being itself burned and the bubbling fire took its place, thickening, multiplying, concentrating, and endlessly amplifying. Howl of fire, falling and rising a billion times a second, my howl and God’s, my terror and triumph, horror beyond horror, happiness a billion times exceeding happiness …
I found myself again in my bed, and it seemed I was awake. The green room pulled into itself, and rotated the same lunatic light. It seemed tears had dried on my cheeks. I got up and went to look for my mother. Dawn was breaking. I walked down the halls and through the rooms of our home, still lost in the twilight. The doors opened before me by themselves, letting me enter, slowly and steadily, three rooms in turn. When the living-room door opened, I saw the dawn sun in the window, small and red, without shining, rising over the Dâmboviţa mill. On the ravished sofa my parents were sleeping, Mamma with her head completely beneath the sheet, curled up, so that she seemed oddly small, and my father on his back, with the buttons of his wrinkled pajamas undone and wearing a sleeping cap, made of a knotted woman’s stocking, to keep his hair back. I walked closer and looked at my mother with a strange intensity. Almost immediately, I actually woke up, and I remained for a bit in a state of complete confusion, like I had the night before. Then I did some little, absurd things. I went to the bathroom, and after I looked at myself in the mirror a while, without a single thought, I began to cut my fingernails. Or I screwed and unscrewed the cap of the rubbing alcohol. My scalp burned all over, as though it were covered with an incandescent metal web. I walked mechanically back to my bed, where I fell right asleep again and vegetated for a few hours without dreams, until dawn came.
During one of my dream-wanderings through twilit rooms, on reaching the living room, I was surprised that my mother was no longer sleeping in the sofa bed. Only my father was there, with his face turned toward the wall, wearing just an undershirt and breathing steadily. Frustration and disquiet woke me immediately. When morning came and my mother came back with the milk, she told me, black with anger, that “this father of yours” had gone out again with his newspaper buddies to celebrate someone-or-other. Mamma had made such fuss over the expense that she slept in the little room, leaving my father to sleep alone … The dream, therefore, involved a kind of bizarre clairvoyance, as though in a way I could touch reality — even if it was outside my body — through dark rooms.
It all began in the late fall of 1973, when I was caught in a bad, freezing rain while coming back from some workshop classes. My uniform was drenched immediately and water ran through my hair, under my collar, zigzagging over the naked flesh of my spine and spreading over my back. The view from number 5 was desolate in any case, but beneath the steady rain, all the houses and the sky looked like they were made from clay and pitch. The leaves stuck, dead, to the tram’s sides and windshield, rotted in puddles, and caught on the hunched shoulders of a crazy baba who leaned against a fence, spread her legs, and urinated along with the rain. When I got home, I took a hot bath and I soaked with the water over my ears, listening to the curiously clear sounds coming from the neighbors — voices, barking, a washing machine humming — until the heat almost made me sick. Afterwards, for the entire evening, one after the next, I emphatically recited works of poets I had discovered, one after the next. The latest poet always seeming like the greatest, the only one touched by genius, the only one. The emotions of my declamation — in a low voice, still, since I was afraid my parents would tease me, even though they usually were lounging like the dead in the blue aura of the living-room television — passed all measure. On the edge of my bed, book in hand, I whistled, hooted, and barked the verses, contorting the muscles of my face trance-like until they started to hurt, and, like the peribuccal sphincter of trumpet players, they even went numb for a bit. Each line had to be experienced with absolute intensity, since each line brought new meaning, an interior light to my pathetic life in my room with dim bulbs and old furniture. When I recited these poems, looking in my own eyes in the mirror and grimacing (I thought) desperately, prophetically, purely, or passionately, it seemed my interior chemistry changed: my hair rose up, not just on my head and arms but even on my thighs, my eyes widened, the acne that covered my forehead lit up across my pale skin … I sweated profusely, soaking my pajamas, which always had broken buttons. I could not stay still. I was encompassed in exaltation. I went to the panoramic window, where stitches of rain fell over Bucharest, to recite: