The Dream Master Read Online Free PDF Page A

him free rein for awhile, and in the end I had to split Atlantis in half and sink it full fathom five. He’s playing again and you’ve doubtless heard his sounds, if you like such sounds at all. He’s good. I still see him periodically, but he is no longer the last descendant of the greatest minstrel of Atlantis. He’s just a fine, late twentieth-century sax-man.
    “Sometimes though, as I look back on the apocalypse I worked within his vision of grandeur, I experience a fleeting sense of lost beauty—because, for a single moment, his abnormally intense feelings were my feelings, and he felt that his dream was the most beautiful thing in the world.”
    He refilled their glasses.
    “That wasn’t exactly what I meant,” she said.
    “I know.”
    “I meant something real.”
    “It was more real than real, I assure you.”
    “I don’t doubt it, but…”
    “—But I destroyed the foundation you were laying for your argument. Okay, I apologize. I’ll hand it back to you. Here’s something that could be real:
    “We are moving along the edge of a great bowl of sand,” he said. “Into it, the snow is gently drifting. In the spring the snow will melt, the waters will run down into the earth, or be evaporated away by the heat of the sun. Then only the sand will remain. Nothing grows in the sand, except for an occasional cactus. Nothing lives here but snakes, a few birds, insects, burrowing things, and a wandering coyote or two. In the afternoon these things will look for shade. Any place where there’s an old fence post or a rock or a skull or a cactus to block out the sun, there you will witness life cowering before the elements. But the colors are beyond belief, and the elements are more lovely, almost, than the things they destroy.”
    “There is no such place near here,” she said.
    “If I say it, then there is. Isn’t there? I’ve seen it.”
    “Yes… You’re right.”
    “And it doesn’t matter if it’s a painting by a woman named O’Keefe, or something right outside our window, does it? If I’ve seen it?”
    “I acknowledge the truth of the diagnosis,” she said. “Do you want to speak it for me?”
    “No, go ahead.”
    He refilled the small glasses once more.
    “The damage is in my eyes,” she told him, “not my brain.”
    He lit her cigarette.”
    “I can see with other eyes if I can enter other brains.”
    He lit his own cigarette.
    “Neuroparticipation is based upon the fact that two nervous systems can share the same impulses, the same fantasies…”
    “Controlled fantasies.”
    “I could perform therapy and at the same time experience genuine visual impressions.”
    “No,” said Render.
    “You don’t know what it’s like to be cut off from a whole area of stimuli! To know that a Mongoloid idiot can experience something you can never know—and that he cannot appreciate it because, like you, he was condemned before birth in a court of biological hapstance, in a place where there is no justice—only fortuity, pure and simple.”
    “The universe did not invent justice. Man did. Unfortunately, man must reside in the universe.”
    “I’m not asking the universe to help me—I’m asking you.”
    “I’m sorry,” said Render.
    “Why won’t you help me?”
    “At this moment you are demonstrating my main reason.”
    “Which is…?”
    “Emotion. This thing means far too much to you. When the therapist is in-phase with a patient he is narco-electrically removed from most of his own bodily sensations. This is necessary—because his mind must be completely absorbed by the task at hand. It is also necessary that his emotions undergo a similar suspension. This, of course, is impossible in the one sense that a person always emotes to some degree. But the therapist’s emotions are sublimated into a generalized feeling of exhilaration—or, as in my own case, into an artistic reverie. With you, however, the ‘seeing’ would be too much. You would be in constant danger of losing