National Story Project
With Paul Auster

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January 27, 2001 -- Paul Auster reads two stories of dreams, submitted by James Sharpsteen of Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Mary McCallum of Proctorsville, Vermont.

Blood

In the summer of 1972, I went home to visit my parents in Brunsville, Minnesota, for a couple of weeks. I slept downstairs in the basement. Every now and then, a fourteen-year-old boy named Matthew would come to mow the lawn. Early one morning, as I was sleeping in, I heard him outside cutting the grass. I paid no attention and went back to sleep.

I dreamt that I was in the upstairs bathroom, standing in front of the sink and looking at my face in the mirror. It looked like my face, but at the same time there was something odd about it. I could see my black hair, my blue eyes, my mustache, but the shape of my face was different. I looked down at the sink, and the water was running in a counter-clockwise circle down the drain. I held my hands under the water and started scrubbing my hands with soap. Again, I looked at the face that wasn't my face. There was something different about it, but it didn't really trouble me.

I went on scrubbing my hands, but my left thumb hurt. The pain was fairly intense, and I wondered what I had done to make it hurt so badly. It felt as though it were sprained.

Then I looked down at the sink again, and there was blood running into the water, going round and round in that counter-clockwise circle. "What's going on?" I said to myself. Blood was gushing from my thumb, pouring out from the fatty part just below the knuckle, then running down my arm and dripping off my elbow into the sink. I grabbed my throbbing arm and said to myself, "What did you do, Jim? What did you do, Jim?"

I heard a voice calling out to me. "Jim! Jim!" I woke up and realized that it was my mother calling me from the top of the stairs. She told me to come quickly. I threw on some clothes and rushed up to her. Matthew had hurt himself cutting the grass, she said, and she wanted me to go to the bathroom to help him.

Still half asleep, I walked into the bathroom and was astonished to see Matthew standing in front of the mirror and holding his left hand over the sink. Blood was pouring out from a gash between his thumb and first finger. The blood was running down his arm and into the water, going round and round as it flowed down the drain.

– James Sharpsteen
Minneapolis, Minnesota

My Father's Dream
Many years ago, my father had a dream about flying. It was so vivid to me that I told all my friends about it. As time went on, I repeated the story so often that I began to think of it as something that had happened to me.

My father was the manager of the camera department at Macy's. In the dream, he reached for the blue ballpoint pen in his breast pocket to jot something down on his memo pad. When he pressed the springy button on top of the pen, he rose up into the air. In no time at all, he was floating above the glass display cases and drifting toward the ceiling. He felt very pleased with himself, very happy.

Next, he pressed on the side-clip of the pen. With some models, that clip can make the point of the pen retract. To his astonishment, my father found himself moving forward in a straight line. By fiddling with the pen, he discovered that he could control the speed and direction of his flight; when he touched the clip again, he was able to go backward. He was elated, filled with a sense of enormous well-being. He began flitting around the store, and because he was so high up, no one could see what he was doing.

Emboldened by this new talent of his, he waved and smiled at some of his co-workers as he sailed over their departments - an airborne, mustachioed little man in a dark business suit and a clip-on bowtie. None of the shoppers noticed him as he dipped and dived above their heads. They were too busy looking at the merchandise in the store.

At breakfast the next morning, he told the family about the dream. He said it was a wonderful thing to be able to fly like that, to be powerful, free, and happy. Someone had once told him that dreams of flying were a sign of good mental health. He felt that his dream affirmed that theory.

I have thought about my father's dream many times over the years. What I liked most about it, perhaps, was the way he seemed to expand whenever he told the story, the way his face would light up as he described the joy and secret freedom of cruising along above his co-workers' heads.

My father is eighty-seven now, and he doesn't remember his dream of flight. It was just one of the hundreds of odd, uncatalogued dreams that visited him. He talked about it for a few weeks, and then he forgot all about it. But the smallest things impress a child, and his dream stuck to me. I felt its buoyancy, took it and made it mine.

In my version, I rise up, pen in hand, and watch the waves of sea grass, deep brown furrowed fields, the Great Plains, and ferocious spring rivers pass below me as I sail through the air. I arc over shimmering African villages and vast expanses of bluish snow without feeling heat or cold. I see armies of Emperor penguins on the curve of Antarctica waiting for spring like mute statues, and roiling masses of humanity crushing into subway stations. Despite the shifts in geography, my imaginary landscape is forever and always sunny, allowing me to track the wiggly shadow of my self as it speeds over the earth's pitted, craggy surface.

I think that my father was right about the power of dream flight. While I can't say that these dreams are indicators of my own sound mental health, I do know that I awake from them well rested, no matter how many miles I've traveled. I feel unrestrained, capable, and a tad sneaky. As if I had been flying on the sly.

– Mary McCallum
Proctorsville, Vermont

The National Story Project can be heard the first Saturday of every month on Weekend All Things Considered.