Tennis!

I just had this terrible nightmare I have to tell you about, because I can't sleep and I'm keeping Alison up thinking about it. The premise of the dream was, in retrospect, very similar to the main premise of Infinite Jest: there is a joke that, once you've heard it, causes you to become deathly afraid of yourself, to the extent that you can't do anything. I guess it's also like the killing joke in Monty Python, except that you don't die from laughing, but instead enter an irrepressible state of profound dread which has no other object than your own soul.

In the dream, I'd heard about this affliction, and had seen cases of it on the news. Then I found out that a girl with whom I work, Gill, had had the affliction herself for several years. She'd gotten over it through lengthy and gruelling therapy, but could never be sure that it wouldn't return. She spoke to me of a three-year period in her life that was a complete blank because the extreme fear had made it impossible for her to do anything. Now she just spent her life trying not to think about The Joke.

Of course, anyone who had heard The Joke, gone through the paralyzing fear, and gotten over it was now somewhat of a danger to society because they could tell it to someone else at any time. But the courts had ruled that they couldn't be put away for this threat, as any of us is able to behave threateningly at any time, and we as a society just have to trust individuals to make the right choice. So sometimes the joke would be propagated when people could no longer fight or accept the obsessive secret with which they were forced to live.

Later (and probably immediately next in the dream, but as if with a cartoon narrative rectangle in the upper left corner saying "Later..."), I was sitting outside at a café when I saw a man with a strange look walk up to the man at the table next to me and hold out a gloved hand. He said, "There was a man who put a quarter in his hand and put a glove on over it." The face of the man sitting down took on a look of recognition that's hard to describe. It was like he was somewhat afraid of what he knew was coming, but was trying to overcome the fear with a bemused detachment, but the bemusement was crossing the line into gladness because he was actually relieved to be facing the thing that was scaring him, which fact made him all the more afraid. I realized that both men already knew The Joke, and that I was about to witness it.

The first man continued, "He held out his hand and asked a passing stranger, 'Do you have a quarter?'" At this point the seated man slowly removed the first man's glove and said in a zombie-like monotone, "The stranger said, 'No, but you do.'" Of course there was a quarter in the first man's hand.

I woke up from this dream in a state of absolute terror. My face was frozen into a mask of fear, and I was breathing heavily through my mouth. I couldn't move. I was also covered in sweat, probably because today was the first really warm day of the year and Alison and I took advantage of it by playing some tennis after work and then riding our bikes around. But the fact of my own sweatiness just made me more afraid of my own ability to scare myself so badly. I realized that it had only been a dream, but that didn't make me any less afraid. I was lying on my back, a position which has historically given me nightmares, and I knew that shifting positions would probably make me less afraid, but I was scared to move a muscle. It's hard to describe such an objectless fear. It seemed that I was afraid of my own unpredictable nature, and so I couldn't allow myself to will anything at all, lest I end up scaring myself more.

I had to go to the bathroom and I eventually calmed myself down enough to get out of bed. But coming back I had to walk a few feet through the dark, and that made me scared enough again that I had to call out to Alison to wake her up. I told her a little about the dream I'd had, but it started creeping her out and she asked me to stop so she could get back to sleep. Now I'm feeling a little better, having written it down, but I still can't help being haunted by this thought: if you know you are capable of making yourself paralyzingly afraid of yourself because you have actually felt this paralyzing fear, how can that knowledge help but actually make you paralyzingly afraid of yourself?