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recording them. It seems simple enough.
The days flow by now, with not quite enough time for all there is to do. The doctor in charge of the
nursing home answers my letter brusquely, treating me like a child. I read it over twice before I put it on
my desk to be taken care of later. I have been able to get six people to cooperate in the dream studies,
and they keep me busy each day. People like to talk about their dreams, I find, and talking about them,
they are able to bring back more and more details, so that each interview takes half an hour or an hour.
And there are my own dreams that I am also recording.
I found the reason for my own part in this when I first typed up my own dream to be analyzed. I found
that I couldn't give it to Staunton, and the students are like children, not to be trusted with anything so
intimate as the private dreams of a grown woman. So each day I record my own dreams along with the
other six, type them all up, fill out the cards, and turn the cards over to Roger. By then the dreams are
depersonalized data.
I finish typing the seven dreams and I am restless suddenly. There is something... The house is more
unquiet than usual, and I am accustomed to the rustlings and creakings. I wonder if another storm is
going to hit the town, but I don't think so.
I wander outside where the night is very clear. The sky is brilliant and bottomless. The music of the night
is all about me: the splashing water of the creek, crickets and tree frogs in arrhythmic choral chants and
from a distance the deeper solo bass of a bullfrog. Probably I am bored. Other people's dreams are
very boring. I haven't started to categorize this latest set, and I feel reluctant to begin. I purposely don't
put any names on any of the dreams I record, and I type each one on a separate card and then shuffle
them about, so that by the time I have finished with them all, I have forgotten who told me which one.
I stop walking suddenly. I have come halfway down the path toward the creek without thinking where I
am going or why. Now I stop and the night noises press in on me. "They are alike," I say, and I am
startled by my voice. All other sounds stop with the words.
I think of the stack of file cards, and those I added tonight, and I am amazed that I didn't see it in the
beginning. Roger is right: the townspeople are dreaming the same dreams. That isn't really what he said.
What he said was that the dreams of the people here would remain stable, unchanged by the experiment,
while those of the students would change as they adapted to this life. I haven't asked about that part of
the research, but suddenly I am too curious about it to put it out of my mind.
Are they changing, and how? I start back, but pause at the door to the house, and turn instead to the
street and town. I slow down when I come in sight of Sagamore House. It is very late, almost two in the
morning. The second-floor light is the only light I have seen since leaving my own house. I take another
step toward Sagamore House, and another. What is the matter tonight? I look about. But there is
nothing. No wind, no moon, nothing. But I hear... life, stirrings, something. This is Somerset, I say to
myself sharply, not quite aloud, but I hear the words anyway. I look quickly over my shoulder, but there
is nothing. I see the apple trees, familiar yet strange, eerie shadows against the pale siding of the hotel.
Across from Sagamore House on Wisteria there is the old boarded-up theater, and for a moment I think
someone has opened it again. I press my hands over my ears and when I take them down the sound has
stopped. I am shaking. I can't help the sudden look that I give the corner where the drugstore burned
down seven or eight years ago.
We wait in the shadows of Sagamore House, under the apple trees for the movie to be over, and then
Father and Mother, Susan's parents, Peter's, come out and take us along with them for an ice-cream
soda in the drugstore. We know when the movie is ending because of the sounds that filter out when
they open the inner doors. Faint music, laughter, a crash of cymbals, always different, but always a
signal, and we come down from the trees, or from the porch and cross the street to wait for them to
come out.
I stare at the theater, back to the empty corner, and slowly turn and go home again. One of the boys
was playing a radio, I tell myself, and even believe it for a moment. Or I imagined it, the past intruded for
a moment, somehow. An audio hallucination. I stop at the gate to my yard and stare at the house, and I
am desperately afraid. It is such an unfamiliar feeling, so unexpected and shattering, that I can't move [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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