copyist had said it was obvious the prisoner couldn’t remember anything about his dream. That must be the real object of his incarceration: to make him forget it. That wearing interrogation night and day, that interminable report, the pretense of seeking precise details about something that by its very nature cannot be definite—all this, continued until the dream begins to disintegrate and finally disappears completely from the dreamer’s memory, could only be called brainwashing, thought Mark-Alem. Or an undream, in the same way as unreason is the opposite of reason.
The more he thought about it, the more it seemed this was the only explanation. It must be a question of flushing out subversive ideas which for some reason or other the State needed to isolate, as one isolates a plague virus in order to be able to neutralize it.
Mark-Alem had reached the top of the stairs and was now going along the long corridor together with dozens of his fellow workers, who disappeared in small groups through the various doors. The closer he got to the Interpretation rooms, the more the temporary sense of self-assurance he’d had in the cafeteria faded away, as it usually does when it derives from someone else’s sycophancy. In its place came the feeling of suffocation that descended on him at the thought of becoming once again an insignificant clerk in the heart of the gigantic mechanism.
As he approached he could see his desk with his file lying on top of it. Going and sitting down at it was like stationing himself on the shore of universal sleep, on the borders of some dark region that threw up jets of menacing blackness from its unknown depths. “God Almighty protect me,” he sighed.
The weather had grown even more severe. Even though the big tiled stoves were filled with coal and lighted first thing in the morning, the Interpretation rooms were freezing. Sometimes Mark-Alem kept his overcoat on. He couldn’t understand where such extreme cold came from.
“Can’t you guess?” said someone he was having coffee with in the cafeteria one day. “It comes from the files—the same place as all our troubles come from, old boy… .”
Mark-Alem pretended not to hear.
“What else can you expect to issue from the realms of sleep?” the other went on. “They’re like the countries of the dead. Poor wretches that we are, having to work on files like that!”
Mark-Alem walked away without answering. Afterward he thought the man might have been a provocateur. Every day he was more convinced that the Tabir Sarrail was full of strange people and secrets of every kind.
The things he’d heard, during this time, about the Tabir and everything that went on there! At first it had seemed as if the people who worked there never spoke about it, but as the days went by and he picked up an odd phrase in the cafeteria, and another in a corridor, or on the way out of the front doors, or coming from the next table, there gradually, unconsciously, began to build up in his mind a large and extraordinary mosaic. Some voices said, for example, that dreams, regarded as private and solitary visions on the part of an individual, belonged to a merely temporary phase in the history of mankind, and that one day they would lose this specificity and become just as available to everyone as other human activities. In the same way as a plant or a fruit remains under the earth for a while before appearing aboveground, so men’s dreams were now buried in sleep; but it didn’t follow that this would always be so. One day dreams would emerge into the light of day and take their rightful place in human thought, experience, and action. As for whether this would be a good thing or a bad, whether it would change the world for the better or the worse—God alone knew.
Others maintained that the Apocalypse itself was simply the day when dreams would be set free from the prison of sleep, that this was the form in which the Resurrection of the Dead, usually
The more he thought about it, the more it seemed this was the only explanation. It must be a question of flushing out subversive ideas which for some reason or other the State needed to isolate, as one isolates a plague virus in order to be able to neutralize it.
Mark-Alem had reached the top of the stairs and was now going along the long corridor together with dozens of his fellow workers, who disappeared in small groups through the various doors. The closer he got to the Interpretation rooms, the more the temporary sense of self-assurance he’d had in the cafeteria faded away, as it usually does when it derives from someone else’s sycophancy. In its place came the feeling of suffocation that descended on him at the thought of becoming once again an insignificant clerk in the heart of the gigantic mechanism.
As he approached he could see his desk with his file lying on top of it. Going and sitting down at it was like stationing himself on the shore of universal sleep, on the borders of some dark region that threw up jets of menacing blackness from its unknown depths. “God Almighty protect me,” he sighed.
The weather had grown even more severe. Even though the big tiled stoves were filled with coal and lighted first thing in the morning, the Interpretation rooms were freezing. Sometimes Mark-Alem kept his overcoat on. He couldn’t understand where such extreme cold came from.
“Can’t you guess?” said someone he was having coffee with in the cafeteria one day. “It comes from the files—the same place as all our troubles come from, old boy… .”
Mark-Alem pretended not to hear.
“What else can you expect to issue from the realms of sleep?” the other went on. “They’re like the countries of the dead. Poor wretches that we are, having to work on files like that!”
Mark-Alem walked away without answering. Afterward he thought the man might have been a provocateur. Every day he was more convinced that the Tabir Sarrail was full of strange people and secrets of every kind.
The things he’d heard, during this time, about the Tabir and everything that went on there! At first it had seemed as if the people who worked there never spoke about it, but as the days went by and he picked up an odd phrase in the cafeteria, and another in a corridor, or on the way out of the front doors, or coming from the next table, there gradually, unconsciously, began to build up in his mind a large and extraordinary mosaic. Some voices said, for example, that dreams, regarded as private and solitary visions on the part of an individual, belonged to a merely temporary phase in the history of mankind, and that one day they would lose this specificity and become just as available to everyone as other human activities. In the same way as a plant or a fruit remains under the earth for a while before appearing aboveground, so men’s dreams were now buried in sleep; but it didn’t follow that this would always be so. One day dreams would emerge into the light of day and take their rightful place in human thought, experience, and action. As for whether this would be a good thing or a bad, whether it would change the world for the better or the worse—God alone knew.
Others maintained that the Apocalypse itself was simply the day when dreams would be set free from the prison of sleep, that this was the form in which the Resurrection of the Dead, usually
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