Green Monkey Dreams

  People keep arriving and before long the hut is full.

  A small child comes to Jilia and holds a hand out to her. A little tarnished key rests in the grubby palm, and Jilia realises the child means her to take it. But a man with a moustache leans between them.

  ‘My daughter would not answer when I called,’ he tells Jilia. ‘I had to come without her, but I can’t be blamed.’

  There is a vast muffled whirring as if the air outside is full of birds. Everyone in the hut grows silent and expectant, turning to stare at an enormous window Jilia has not noticed before. She sees a vague movement: a greenish flicker and a hairy little hand that flattens itself gently against the glass for a moment.

  ‘It is nothing, really,’ says the man who has spoken of his daughter. ‘You need have no fear of them. They are nothing but winged dreams – illusions trying to intrude where they do not belong.’

  ‘Why don’t you let them in?’ Jilia asks, staring at the face pressed at the window, small and wizened with greenish fur. The creature’s eyes are as white and soft as peeled grapes. Behind it, there is a milky blur that might be wings.

  ‘I am sure nothing would happen really. Indeed one does not like to see them striving against the glass like that. It is sickening. But we cannot let ourselves be confused by sentiment. They have to know there are boundaries and limits. There would be chaos if we let them in. No one would know where anything began or ended. Everything would be blurred.’

  Suddenly Jilia remembers Random is out there, and, alarmed, she steps towards the door. The old woman strikes a match to light a candle and the flare of the flame is momentarily blinding . . .

  Jilia blinks and finds her mother is looking down at her from the door. ‘I’m sorry I woke you. I heard you call out and I switched the light on because I thought you were awake.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ Already the dream is decaying into a few images. The grape eyes at the window, and the little wizened hand fringed at the wrist with greenish fur. Random smiling back at her. The child offering her the tarnished key and that man making excuses about abandoning his daughter.

  She realises suddenly that the old woman who opened the door to the hut was her dead grandmother.

  ‘You were having the nightmare again, weren’t you?’ her mother says with a slight tone of accusation.

  Jilia smoothes the doona with one hand. She does not like talking about the dream to her mother. ‘It’s not a nightmare,’ she says at last.

  The older woman sighs as if Jilia is being difficult. ‘It’s not your fault Random died. You didn’t leave him. He went ahead of you and took the wrong trail. It might just as well have been you who took the wrong path and was lost, don’t you see that? But I wanted to tell you something strange that happened tonight. I was talking about your nightmares and there was a woman there who has a child who was severely intellectually disabled in an accident, and she says he dreams constantly about monkeys at his window. Winged monkeys! What do you think of that?’

  Jilia does not know what to think. She can only wonder why her mother is always trying to put things together like a string of beads. Life is random, Random always said in his slouchy voice, leaving the edge of his wit to show in his gaze. Only fools try to make a story out of life.

  If you didn’t look at him, you might think Random was a fool because of the way he dribbled the words out, hardly moving his lips.

  ‘Sometimes I think you go out of your way to be irritating,’ Jilia’s mother says. ‘Now get up and get dressed because I want you to meet someone.’

  ‘A doctor?’ Jilia asks warily, remembering the child psychologist who thought the dreams were because of Random falling off the cliff in the dark. Of course, no one really knows what happened to him because they never found the body. Sometimes Jilia thinks he is not dead at all, but just lost or wandering somewhere. There are times when she thinks she can hear him calling her.

  In the sitting room, there are several people. Some are from her mother’s reading group and others are colleagues. One of the women has a child on her knee who reminds Jilia of the child from the dream. It has a very red mouth as if it has been eating a red icy-pole, or smearing its mouth with cherry juice. She cannot tell whether the child is a boy or a girl.

  ‘Jilia!’ her mother cries in a startled way, as if she is surprised to see her daughter living in the same house. Her mother is sitting beside a long limp noodle of a man with round glasses and white hair tied back into a ponytail. ‘This is my daughter, Professor Caleb.’

  ‘Jilia,’ the man says in a wet raspy voice that reminds her of a cat licking her fingers. His glasses catch the light so that Jilia cannot see his eyes beyond them. She sees herself diminished and deformed in them.

  ‘As I was saying, Professor,’ a woman on the couch says pointedly, ‘primitive cultures took their dreams very seriously. They believed they were another level of existence. They would see ours as a poor thin existence by comparison.’

  ‘Miss Allot specialises in primitive cultures,’ Jilia’s mother says.

  The woman gives both of them an irritated look. ‘There is some evidence that their minds linked at some level in the fact that we find the same dreams in widely diverse cultures . . .’

  Jilia begins to fear her mother has mentioned her dream to these people, and that she will soon be asked to recite it. Being woken so suddenly from the dream has made her feel restless and somehow sad because of Random’s presence in it. He had seemed so real, and by comparison, reality seems so pale.

  ‘My research has been focused in a more individual way on the ability to dream, and the reason such an ability exists,’ the professor says. ‘I have always been fascinated by the fact that anything we can imagine exists at the level of dreams – do we not fly and pass through objects and have great strength in our dreams? The ability to dream affords us enormous power.’

  ‘But it is not a real power,’ Miss Allot says sharply. ‘It may allow some sort of other level of communication, but that is all.’

  ‘Is it all? I am less certain of that. I think dreaming holds a power which is yet unknown to us. It brings us to a plain of infinite possibility which might be tapped, if we had the key.’

  ‘Plain?’ Miss Allot says, looking puzzled.

  ‘I am suggesting that most of the brain is merely a kind of immense storage place for all that we experience. Nothing is ever forgotten. The smell of bread baking in a store reminds us suddenly of a particular day when a friend’s grandmother spread jam on her homemade bread for us. Such an insignificant memory, yet out it pops. And if our mind retains this small memory, why not every memory we have ever had – why not every memory that anyone has ever had, for are we not born of one another? Who knows that memories are not passed on, just as the ability to breathe is passed on, or the instinct to bear children, and perhaps all memories exist simultaneously in all minds? Or in some vast dark plain to which we all have access only through our unconscious mind . . .’

  An elbow digs her deep in the ribs.

  ‘Wake up,’ Random hisses into her ear, half laughing. ‘You were making noises like a guinea pig on heat and the lecturer just looked up at you.’

  Jilia straightens up, mortified. ‘I was dreaming.’ She feels groggy and her mouth tastes bad.

  ‘Obviously,’ Random says.

  ‘No, really,’ Jilia says with soft urgency, waking up properly now. ‘I was having this weird dream that I was a kid again and I was wandering in this strange plain and you were there too.’

  ‘Me! I hope I was misbehaving thoroughly.’ Random grins and it is so like the dream grin that Jilia has a sharp feeling of déjà vu.

  ‘You left me behind. I was trying to find you and I went into this hut to ask directions and there were people in there hiding because flying monkeys were trying to get inside. And then I woke up.’

  ‘You mean I woke you. And you plagiarised my green monkey dream!’

  ‘I mean I woke up into another dream. I was sti
ll a kid, and my mother was telling me to get up, only it wasn’t my mother. It was your mother . . .’

  ‘First she steals my green monkeys and now my mother.’

  ‘. . . and in the dream, something had happened to you. In both dreams. In the second dream you were dead. You fell off a cliff somehow and I had been there when it happened but that wasn’t in the dream. I was remembering it.’

  ‘Jesus, thanks a lot.’

  ‘Idiot,’ she giggles. ‘But in the first dream I was surprised to see you because I thought something had happened to you. Then you disappeared. In the second dream, I got up and went in the lounge room, only it wasn’t my lounge room except for the sofa . . .’

  ‘Don’t tell me it was my lounge room!’

  ‘No, you fool. It was nobody’s. I mean I didn’t recognise it. And there were a whole lot of people and one of them was him.’ She nods towards the podium. ‘The lecturer, only he had another name . . .’

  ‘So you fell asleep in a lecture and then dreamed of the lecture – that’s what I call dumb. Why didn’t you go to Hawaii?’

  ‘But wait. In the second dream, my mother . . .’

  ‘You mean my mother!’

  ‘Yeah. She told me she had heard of some other kid dreaming of green monkeys like I’d been doing. Dreaming of dreaming of dreaming. Isn’t that weird?’

  Behind the podium, the lecturer stares pointedly at Jilia who stops talking and pretends she has been clearing her throat.

  ‘A man thinks of his brother on the other side of the world whom he has not spoken with for months and right then, the brother calls him on the telephone,’ he says. ‘This might be seen as evidence of some sort of mind link between the brothers. Or is it mere coincidence?’

  ‘My own sister called me the other night when I was thinking about her. I said, “You must be psychic. I was just thinking of you”,’ says the girl sitting next to Jilia to her friend.

  ‘This mental connection can be even more pronounced in twins who grew in the same womb and whose minds might be said to have been irrevocably linked from the beginning,’ the lecturer says. ‘And in some so-called primitive societies, people saw themselves as possessing one mind, particularly in their dreams. They were not cut off from one another as we are now. They saw the unconscious as a vast country in which all were nomads and there were no boundaries.’

  Jilia feels an odd sense of vertigo to hear the lecturer talking about dreams now. It is like looking into mirrors reflecting other mirrors, on and on into infinity. She turns to Random to say this, but he has gone without her noticing.

  She looks around but cannot see him anywhere. ‘Did you see where Random went?’ she whispers to the girl next to her, who gives her a strange look. Jilia realises she was one of the people in the dream hut, and is shaken.

  Jilia tries to remember coming into the lecture hall and seeing the girl, but finds she can only see a small green paw resting on thick glass, and grape eyes peering into the light.

  Her heart is beating very fast.

  ‘Are you all right?’ the girl asks . . .

  ‘Jilia! Are you all right?’

  Jilia blinks. Her older sister is leaning over her, a book open on her lap. It is getting dark and there are clouds in the sky. Jilia sits up and rubs hard at her eyes. She is confused by the dreams in which she seemed to be herself but was someone else.

  ‘You slept so heavily I was starting to think you had gone and died on me,’ her sister says. ‘Imagine if you had. I would have been sitting and reading a story to a dead body. Disgusting.’

  ‘Why? It’s not like I would have had maggots yet.’

  ‘Oh, you really are disgusting!’ Her sister slams the book closed. ‘We better go back anyway. It’s going to pour any minute. We should’ve gone sooner but you were sleeping and this book is so good. I can’t believe you fell asleep. And right where the green monkeys were trying to get into the hut . . .’

  ‘I was dreaming the book,’ Jilia says but it is half a question, because it seems to her that she has just experienced a sequence of dreams all containing the green monkeys from the book. The strange thing is, she can remember the hut and the face at the window, but she doesn’t remember the story from the book.

  Random appears at the edge of the field and trots over to the blanket. Jilia pats his black silky ears, thinking of her queer dreams in which he had been transformed into a handsome young man.

  ‘God, I hate this part of picnicking. All this sticky stuff you have to wash later. Yuk.’

  Jilia is wrapping the sharp knife in a tea towel. ‘So what’s happening in the book so far?’

  ‘I can’t just tell it like that. Oh well, all right. The whole village goes to this hut and the monkeys come, thousands of them, and there is this one girl left outside . . .’

  ‘Her father left her.’

  Jilia’s sister gives her an impatient look. ‘No. It was an accident. She was up in the hills and she hadn’t heard the warning bell. When she came down, the streets were empty and then she heard the wings and she realised . . .’

  It starts to rain and they stop talking to throw everything hurriedly into the picnic basket. Grabbing up the blanket they make a run for the car. Inside the Volkswagen, they toot the horn to summon Random. Rain is making a drum of the car and Jilia’s ears are hurting.

  ‘Damn dog! Did you get the key?’ her sister asks. ‘I put it on the blanket.’

  ‘I didn’t see it when I shook the blanket.’

  ‘Oh, no!’

  ‘Don’t panic. It must be under the tree,’ Jilia says. She opens the door, slams it behind her and runs. It has grown darker and is raining so hard now she can scarcely see, but the tree looms up as an unmistakable shape on the flat horizon. The ground under it is relatively dry because of the thick foliage and Jilia begins to hunt for the key. She is distracted by Random barking somewhere. The rain lashes against her face as she calls him.

  ‘Random!’

  Jilia is pushing at the sleeping-bag. ‘Get up, lazy bones. We’re toasting marshmallows.’

  Random unzips the sleeping-bag and sits up groggily, rubbing his eyes. He is wondering at the tumbling dreams he has experienced in which he was a boy and a young man and then a dog. He doesn’t think he will tell anyone that. But how weird to be dreaming from someone else’s point of view. Especially Jilia’s. He hardly knows her. He wonders what it means to dream of being dead and disappearing over and over. Was it some sort of weird search-for-identity dream? Probably it was sparked by all that talk of dreams during their hike that afternoon, and then him getting separated from the others. He is actually having trouble remembering what he dreamed and what Mr Allot really said about dreams.

  He realises the tree the two girls were sitting under in the dream was the tree where his group ate lunch, and wonders if all this is the result of eating Jilia’s crazy chocolate pie. How could anyone think of making a pie out of nothing but chocolate anyway?

  ‘Then there are urban myths,’ Mr Allot is saying as he comes up to the campfire. He looks funny in shorts with those knobbly knees, but the old guy is surprisingly fit and it has made them all see him as less of a useless brain.

  Jilia and some of the others are spiking marshmallows onto toasting forks and handing them around, and there is a sweet burning smell in the air that makes Random’s mouth water.

  ‘What do you mean by urban myths?’ Jilia asks.

  ‘I’ll give you an example,’ Mr Allot says. ‘How many of you have heard the story of a woman travelling home at night, who stops to get some milk from the shop, and gets back into her car? All of a sudden a man is following her in another car, flashing his lights . . .’

  ‘I’ve heard that one,’ Jilia agrees, ‘but it was a paper she went to get, and she left the car door open . . .’

  ‘Yeah, and a killer got in her back seat,’ says someone else. ‘And the man in the car behind saw him get into the woman’s car with an axe . . .’

  Random thinks he heard
that story at a school camp, but it was a knife the man had, not an axe.

  ‘It was a gun,’ Jilia says. ‘The axe was in the story about this man and woman crossing the desert and they run out of petrol so he has to walk back . . .’

  ‘The woman goes to sleep waiting for him, and when she wakes up there is a thumping noise and the police are standing some distance from the car and they tell her to get out and don’t look back . . .’

  Mr Allot says, ‘See – we all know how these stories go. Urban myths. But I would be willing to bet that most of you don’t remember where you heard either of those stories. Researchers have tried to trace urban myths like these, which change in minor detail but not in substance, and have never managed to find the first person to tell the story, although sometimes they can locate the incident which might have spawned the story in the first place – often many generations back in time. I really think, as I said earlier, that the mind is a country which we choose to think of as fenced into individual and closed blocks, but it is not that way at all. We create these barriers and borders because we need them for some reason. But when we are in a dreaming state we often trespass. I would suggest that is how those urban myths travel from one mind to another.’

  Random is thinking how much of life leaks into dreams, and wonders if it works the other way as well.

  He has a sudden memory of a small green hand pressed against glass, and pale eyes in front of a blurred shiver of wings. The odd series of dreams in which he was not himself has made him feel unsettled, as if reality might be just another dream. And how do you ever know? Maybe in a minute he will wake again and find he is someone or something else.

  ‘What about recurring dreams?’ Jilia asks.

  Mr Allot nods. ‘An interesting phenomenon. I believe recurring dreams are far more common than we realise. In my experience, a recurrent dream of danger will be dreamed by many different people, but this can go unnoticed because people are reluctant to relate their dreams to life, for fear of being thought fools. We will never know of the dreams that recur and recur, rebounding through our universal unconscious all unnoticed, loud as a klaxon announcing the fall of a bomb, until dreams are taken seriously.’