April, orgasmic green, the intensity of the green was a visual massage and she had to pass by field upon field of green pasture, vivid green, on her way to the Sleep Research Institute. The laboratory was off junction 14 of the M1, down a track through a field just after the turning for the town center. The track was barely wide enough for one car, so you had to squeeze over to the side whenever one came the other way, destroying this or that patch of plant life and aggressively rearranging the molecules of the field. A white rectangular building of simple lines, the lab shone out in the darkness against the fir trees that surrounded it. The windows ran along the length of the building from floor to ceiling, letting you glimpse the surrounding vegetation from within, and there was also a skylight that ran from one side of the roof to the other so that, inside, if you looked up, you could see the clouds by day, and the lightly starred sky by night. The architect had designed the building to be conducive to sleep. In spite of its simplicity, the building retained a palpable air of mystery because of its location in the fields, the large windows that let in light from all sides, the rounded aluminum doorways, the unseen foxes, and all the sleepers between its walls.
Those were perfect days, perhaps too perfect. Eureka had reached a strange equilibrium in her life. For once, everything was going all right. She’d just finished her masters in clinical psychology and after months of filling in forms full of squares and rectangles, waiting for and receiving negative replies, she’d been invited to work part time at the Institute, under Doctor Mossman. Eureka was hoping her new employers wouldn’t notice that her thoughts were always elsewhere, that they wouldn’t read too easily into her erratic state of mind, or find out that when she was younger she’d committed pretty much every indiscretion in the book.
Eureka headed for the lab, cruising along in her Capri 2.8i. It was a silver ’70s classic, a collector’s item. It had been a gift from Toshi, her lifelong partner. Sometimes she went on foot, taking it easy, but never when she was on the night shift. She always took the car for the night shift. The roads were pretty empty then, and driving was a pleasure. She sped along with the windows down so the night air would help keep her sharp for the long hours of work to come. She didn’t drink coffee to stay awake. She preferred guarana extract, which she found worked better. Passing by the airport, with its svelte, slight tower and palatial appearance, she allowed herself to be swept away by a dangerous fantasy, a sort of psychic recklessness. She imagined zigzagging from lane to lane, sometimes in control, sometimes letting the car veer wherever it wanted, maneuvering like a rally driver, overtaking cars on the motorway with aggressive sensuality, treating the drivers to a touch of danger, the little edge of fear their lives lacked. She liked giving in to her fantasies, letting those strange images reveal the mysterious lives that lay buried in her mind—in this case, a fantasy that was soothing and terrifying all at once. Eureka would never have hurt a fly, and she was a terrible driver anyway. But she didn’t let this knowledge interfere with her fantasy life. All those other lives she could live were always there, latent, inside her; so long as she didn’t act on them, they could be as violent or irresponsible as she liked. Now her psychic recklessness faded and she started to make out the leather of the steering wheel once more—the Capri’s outdated suspension keeping her in inescapable contact with reality, with the tarmac, with the potholes.
At dusk the orgasmic green would disappear, but its smell became stronger. The cows, whose expressions wavered somewhere between placid and depressed, let the hypermarket of fluorescent lights burning unrelentingly into the night go by. The thought of the cows made her remember a paper she had read somewhere, a study carried out by a genetic engineer who had decided that cows didn’t need heads, and so was working to alter their DNA so that they were born headless, with nothing but a tube with which to suck in nutrition.
The foxes dozed unseen around the laboratory. They were wild, urban foxes, and ever since the lab was built, they had loitered there, delighted by the chance to feed undisturbed. Eureka went inside and nodded a greeting to a triptych of photos. Three enormous images of brain scans during wakefulness, regular sleep, and REM sleep, respectively, presided over the entrance to the Institute. The active areas of the brain were shown in red, the less active areas in blue, and the background in yellow. She crossed the driving and drowsiness testing room, which housed the front end of a wrecked red car that had been sliced in half, a Volkswagen Scirocco that the lab had adopted as the emblem of their studies into the heightened incidence of sleep-related car accidents in recent years. She went into her office, put on her lab coat, and turned on one of the seemingly endless rows of equipment, which began to emit green, amber, and red light through little translucent rectangles. She thought about the Gin twins, who’d volunteered to take part in experiments recording instances of sexual arousal in sleep. They were attractive, the Gin brothers, attractive in a quirky way, with curiously blond hair and black eyelashes and eyebrows. She’d dreamed about them a few times, as if there was something about their waking presence that needed decoding. Surrounded by polygraphs, she primed herself for a hectic night and turned on her computer.
Cosmic orgasms, sexcapades, sex al fresco, sex in every room in the house, sex in the car, in garages, in lifts, sex at seventy, how to make your sex life last, start at the soles of his feet, heavenly sex, shampoos promising mind-blowing multiple orgasms, send him an anonymous erotic letter, all you ever wanted to know about sex and more, what he wants in bed, how to drive her wild, sexy alien abductions, aphrodisiac recipes, discover your submissive side, sex at ninety, turn up the heat, sex at regular intervals proven to raise life expectancy, tantric sex, amateur porn, how sex can save your relationship, tease him with a feather, what celebrities want in bed, sexual acrobatics, politicians and sex, how sex can keep you young, I often masturbate with an electric toothbrush, oysters and desire, don’t forget to stop by a sex shop, sex is everything, sex at first sight, athletic sex, how to climax in an instant, why married men with children are easiest to seduce, undress him with your teeth, the most unusual positions, I’m in charge tonight, hot sex tips, discover your sexuality, say it with sex, it’s good to talk about sex, journey to the center of sex, exploring unconventional sex, virtual sex, serial sex, quantum sex, kiss his toes one by one, the dark side of sex, everything you never dared to ask about sex, sex any time of the day, advanced sexology, sexercise, why we like sex so much, how to put the spark back into your relationship, erotic package holidays for wife-swapping in a relaxed and healthy setting, what men really think about sex, chocolate and sex, techniques that never fail to leave him begging, red-hot tricks, ice cubes and sex, try not to touch each other intimately for the first hour, fetish sex, keep at it afterward, sex and the big toe, transsexual sex, the tee-hee g-spot, put your finger in his anus and make him melt, wild Amazonian sex, how to be irresistibly sensual, how to cheat without your partner noticing, cybersex, sex, sex, sex, SEXO. Since the fifties we’ve witnessed the invasion of sex, sex filling all cavities, screens, doorways, degree courses, advertising; sex is all over the media, in the electromagnetic waves flying through the air, dissolved in tap water and enriching our breakfast cereals. No one is safe from the sexual onslaught. Sex infiltrates us by seeping into every one of our pores. It’s enough to make us want to surrender to the luxury of frigidity, chastity, or platonic love.
The study to catalogue sexual arousal began that night. Under Doctor Mossman’s orders, Eureka now found herself complicit in the incursion of sexuality into sleep science. She had been put in charge of experiments on erectile function, dilation, and oestrogen during sleep. Everything about sex had to be understood from a scientific basis. The experiments related to the physiology of sleep—it wasn’t just dream content they were after. Even the sleeping body was riddled with sex.
The Gin brothers canceled at the last minute. Eureka felt herself slump a little, the crumpling of disappointment. It was raining, halfheartedly. Thankless drizzle. Tedium hung in the air like a virus. The penile tumescence experiments were dull, routine. Although female orgasms were still an almost virgin field of study, the topic of men’s nocturnal emissions had been pretty much done to death. There were enchanting volunteers, but even so Eureka found them somewhat bland, unworldly. They did it for the money, convinced that the opportunity to get paid for having an ultra-uncomfortable plastic apparatus attached to their genitals while they slept was the greatest thing ever. She was surprised by her own irritation with the volunteers. When she was working the night shift, between one thing and another, she barely saw Toshi. His working hours meant their paths never crossed. This week they wouldn’t see each other at all, for that matter. Toshi was away on a trip to Dublin.
The nights dragged on. Eureka dragged. The polygraphs dragged. It was as though some airborne tedium virus had snuck in through the vents—unless of course it was simply the absence of the Gin brothers alongside the monotony of the tumescence experiments that was putting Eureka to sleep. Or else, perhaps it was in fact she who was infecting everyone else with the virus . . .
This too would pass. Everything started to liven up when the volunteers arrived. This lively group was made up of single women who shared a real spirit of camaraderie, as if they were going to a ladies’ sauna or some other girls-only get together. That was how she met Luciana, Doctor Mossman’s strange friend. It was also how she discovered what sort of neural circuitry delivered her up to particular daydreams, after the third study with three groups of women. It all came down to oestrogen. That was the subject of the study, oestrogen levels. It was discovered that in both the preovulatory and premenstrual phases, the subjects’ oestrogen levels rose, leading the women’s dreams to contain a higher than normal amount of sexual imagery. Oestrogen being the primary female sex hormone—as testosterone is in males—studies were always being carried out into the hormone’s relationship to libido, strength, and depression.
When she woke the participants from the three groups during different phases of REM sleep, both groups A and B described dreams full of highly attractive sexual partners, dreams that were explicitly pornographic, obscene, and unutterably exciting. Doctor Mossman dubbed group C, the one whose dreams lacked any explicit sexual content, “Group Chastity.” From both groups A and B there was just one woman who maintained that she received nightly visitations from dazzling satyrs and succubae, and that night after night she awoke rejuvenated. She insisted that she didn’t dream about the sex act in itself, but rather the act of seduction, limitless seduction. The woman was called Luciana, which wasn’t her real name but a code name, to preserve her anonymity.
Even the steeliest celibates, the most devout, faithful, chaste, pure, monogamous, and prudish among us have an intensely erotic oneiric life, a dream life that is polymorphously reckless. Its intrusive pleasures catch us by surprise: Nature turns us all into nocturnal adulterers. To deny it is to deny our true selves, our boundless sexuality. Fidelity, monogamy, and celibacy are perversities inflicted upon our real natures by the lie of our waking lives. We all have wet dreams. We all have dirty dreams, though we rarely remember them. But Luciana always did. Eureka ended up going out for a few drinks with Luciana. Vodka and cranberry juice. And on the day the sexual arousal studies finished, they met up at El Chiquito and drank yet more vodka and cranberries. They talked about war, the corruption blighting the planet, and the versatility of Meryl Streep. Between giggles and embarrassed gestures, searching for affirmation or acknowledgement, fiddling all the while with her black, metal-studded purse, Luciana confided that she had nearly total recall of her dreams. And that the vast majority of them were dirty. She had come to understand, some time ago, that these dreams would be more common when her husband wasn’t around, when they were apart for a few weeks. On her own, her dirty dreams became more regular and vivid. But these days they came all the time, who knew why: Her husband’s permanent absence since their divorce; general loneliness; the sexual apathy that left her chronically listless; her rebellious biology . . . or perhaps something had simply broken inside her?
Dirty dreams, occasionally populated by strangers, occasionally by people she knew, sometimes women or beings endowed with science-fiction genitals. They were gratifying and orgasmic dreams, dreams that crept in to add spice to her waking life, revitalizing it. Luciana looked into Eureka’s eyes, hoping for validation.
Eureka nodded and said she had recurring sexual dreams too, but usually about the same person. There were men who were hardwired into her neural circuitry, she said. About 8% of our dreams are known to be graphically erotic, she said. For men, 14% of these involved current or past lovers, whereas this was 20% for women. Generally speaking, our dream encounters are almost all with strangers, anonymous bodies conspiring with the honesty of our own. Men had a greater tendency for scenarios involving multiple partners or sex in public spaces, whereas women tended to pair off with celebrities, as from an evolutionary point of view, Eureka said, these would appear to be the best providers—at least, that was the theory. As if women could get pregnant from fucking oneiric men. All in all, our dreaming minds might be prone to make the occasional mistake, but there was no doubt that they wanted the body to have a good time.
Luciana listened, occasionally getting distracted looking at men in the bar, looking for something in her bag, playing with her black purse, or calling the waiter over. Her attention was intermittent, she needed breaks, pauses. Eureka had to get back to the lab. She could drop Luciana at home on the way back. It was no trouble. They got in the Capri and, once they had set off, Luciana told Eureka that every one of her dreams was about the same thing. That since her divorce, the number of her oneiric indiscretions had risen considerably, but so too had her waking sexual fantasies and now every night she found herself in an orgy of dreams that left her completely worn out. She added that if there was one thing she’d learned from her dreams, it was to laugh at herself. And she also told Eureka that when she’d finally divorced her husband, it was because her dreams had been crying out for it. Her marriage had been one of the most nefarious agents of habit in her life. A farce, she said.
They said good-bye with laughter and a hug. But Luciana had left a strange trace in her wake, a trace of doubt. Eureka returned to work. The traffic lights’ insistent colors took on a strange intensity by night. Desire makes everything look sharper and Eureka had recently had a series of recurring dreams about a man from Colorado who’d published several papers on the alarming stateside epidemic of narcoleptic dogs, and whenever she dreamed about someone, she would spend some of the following day thinking about that person, considering them, what particular meaning they might have for her, and so they would come to take on even greater significance in her conscious mind, until finally they had won themselves a permanent and privileged spot in her memory. Emissaries of mystery, her dream gatecrashers sometimes ended up feeling more important to her than people she knew very well in daily life, but who had never made it into her dreams.
The grotesque moans of invisible foxes could be heard as they copulated around the Institute. Eureka went into the lab, passed by the wrecked red car belonging to the drowsiness and driving studies, and went into her office. She called Toshi and they spoke for an hour about Dublin and nothing in particular, groceries they needed to buy, the dinner with their friends they’d planned for the weekend. Then she turned to analyzing the correlation between oestrogen levels and erotic dreams by age, social status, and diurnal experience.
The man from Colorado. If her desire usually manifested itself in a fairly explicit way in her dreams, as far as strangers went, or even men she knew glancingly, when the man from Colorado was involved, things were always fairly veiled. She dreamed about work meetings, about talking shop with him. It was a very long series of dreams. An empty desk in an office. The man from Colorado dressed in casual clothes. She would wake up recalling scenarios so dull that they scarcely seemed worth the effort. But on one occasion, she woke up during a particularly dull dream and was surprised to find her body writhing, the intense smell of sex surrounding her, accusing her, her conscience giving her a wink and whispering: Ah, so this is the real subtext of these nightly conversations. And it occurred to her that if all those dull conversations about work were really about desire, it was more than likely that her graphic erotic dreams were themselves about something else—that they weren’t about sex at all.
She thought about the man from Colorado, about the worrying trace of dirty dreams that couldn’t help but make her wonder whether her sexual curiosity for strangers, acquaintances, or the man from Colorado had become more powerful than her desire for Toshi. It was another kind of intensity, the thrill and exhilaration of the unknown. Undoubtedly, she went through spells of varying lengths when the erotic charge in her dreams was something she no longer knew with Toshi. Her first taste of it had been with him, but it was rare that she felt it with him nowadays. Sometimes it wasn’t there at all anymore, as if she were somehow dead. The desire she now experienced for Toshi was a washed out version of the desire she experienced in those early years. It had become pale. Diluted. Toshi equalled everyday tenderness, marital, paternal, fraternal, maternal love, kisses, caresses, nibbling, incredibly orgasmic sex, as well as normal, average, awful, and apathetic sex. He equalled attentive ears and words, shared flavours daily at the table, playfulness, joking, the same bed for so many years, a thousand intimations as well as the eternal struggle to get by . . . But, no, the proper lust she’d once experienced with Toshi, that deserted her at times. Sometimes it did come back, shooting through her like a spasm, but even then, it wasn’t quite the same. Perhaps it was just a phase. She knew that desire is by nature a changeable beast, an effervescent liquid that sometimes bubbles over, and other times goes flat. Was she exaggerating things? Had that early desire of hers taken on an ideal and fictive quality in her memories? Perhaps it did still exist with Toshi, but just lacked the element of surprise, the novelty of those first encounters?
She tidied away some saliva test results from her desk as she thought about the men from her dreams. They didn’t give her what Toshi gave her, she didn’t share a whole experience with them. Their allure came down to the enigma of the unknown. They offered her the intrigue of a first encounter, but it was an excitement she’d only truly experienced with Toshi, as if her dreams were a way of disguising that spark as something new. The effervescence she had known with Toshi was abstracted now by familiarity. It had lost its zing but gained in tenderness, become something else. And yet, Toshi always managed to surprise her in some way or another. It wasn’t quite that he’d lost his allure. It was just a different sort of allure, a different kind of enigma: the mystery of the inexhaustible familiar.
She went back to the wrecked red car from the drowsiness and driving studies. The bodywork on the left front panel was destroyed. The front windscreen had become a spider’s web of cracked glass. Yet the interior was still like new. She sat down inside. A pair of fuzzy dice hung from the rearview mirror. She’d always told Toshi everything. But not about her dreams. She’d broken into laughter the one time she’d tried. She might as well have been living some secret life that she only shared with those mystery men. There was something about monogamy that never did sit right with her, anyway—it was an impossible concept, full of contradictions. Of course, she did understand the need to trust somebody, to have a lasting relationship, to comfort and be comforted—but she also understood her limitations, her weaknesses, her infinite capacity for obsession. That’s why her dream life seemed a happy solution, a private territory in which she could indulge the promiscuity she would shrink from in waking life, then savor it when she was awake. But: solution? Solution implied that there was a problem, and maybe there wasn’t a problem, unless it was precisely there that the problem lay, the fact that there wasn’t a problem at all, no hay problema, the fact that she lived a contented domestic life by day, and a promiscuous erotic existence by night, free from the headaches that promiscuous behavior tended to cause in the real world. At least that’s how it seemed to her: Promiscuity was a sort of trap; you’re lured in thinking only of the reward, and then find yourself mired in paranoia and guilt. Sure, there were people who didn’t seem to have much of a conscience about their affairs, but she couldn’t be like that—or, at least, she wasn’t there yet.
As she stared at the petrol gauge, she wondered if those unknown men, the intimate strangers and the man from Colorado, if those men dreamed about her too, and if it was at the same time as she dreamed about them, or on other nights. The man from Colorado probably dreamed about her all the time. Though she knew that it was likely that he didn’t remember his dreams, that for him she existed only in the realm of sleep, never as a waking concern. Perhaps he might have remembered part of one dream, on some morning, but he wouldn’t be aware of the whole series of them. His recurring dreams were, paradoxically, the most easily forgotten.
She became absorbed by the little icons on the dashboard. Icons. Symbols. People too can turn into symbols. The man from Colorado was very likely a symbol of the impossible, a symbol of what was, precisely, destined not to be. But she liked his company. She liked the fact that he was there, in her dreams, to remind her that it was worthwhile, on occasion, to settle for what one had already found, as opposed to dying still searching for the impossible. And she met this man only in dreams—their paths never crossed in waking life. Conditions were always unfavorable and hostile in reality, there was always a certain asymmetry in day-to-day existence. Whenever the American phoned the office, she was always on her way out and had to hang up straight away. On those occasions he was in town, and visited the lab during the day, she would be on the night shift, and they would pass each other in the corridor heading in different directions with no time to talk. And this asymmetry no doubt extended to their dream lives as well: after all, when it was daytime for Eureka, it was nighttime in Colorado. It wasn’t just that they lived in different locations and time zones, but perhaps the whole business relied on this very asymmetry—the unlikelihood of meeting each other by happenstance.
She put her foot on the clutch. It worked. And the gears did too. Maybe it was necessary to keep the boundaries between waking and dreaming in sight because they were forever leaking into one another, eroding each other, the two zones were always merging and cancelling each other out. Was the woman who dreamed about the same man again and again really Eureka? Or some sort of double? And were the men really themselves, or their own doppelgangers? It would certainly explain her fascination with those twins—each of us has a double, by night.
And yet, wasn’t it all down to little more than a surge in her oestrogen levels? Observing those three groups of women in their different biological phases—group A in the preovulatory phase, group B in premenstrual phase, and group C in neither phase—Eureka had been surprised to see how closely erotic dreams were connected with biological cycles, with one’s biorhythms; that hormonal fluctuations determined sex drive in sleep as well as when awake. Perhaps her secret, parallel erotic reality was just a chemical joke being played upon her by her body—a gag gift from her preovulatory and premenstrual phases, a gift from that word that sounds so much like an obscure insult in some forgotten language: oestrogen.
She went back into the office. Yes, her erotic parallel life was nothing but a strange conjunction of boredom, the unknown, and oestrogen. And she found herself doodling an oestrogen molecule on an unopened letter as if it were the emblem of this mystery that had been stamped onto her body:
Underneath it she wrote slowly and neatly: The dreaming mind secretes the erotic body.
One day, the man from Colorado had vanished from her dreams precisely as he’d arrived: gently. And while the brothers Gin were the latest to sing the song of Eros in her subconscious, they too would soon vanish, since these days even fantasies have a shelf life.
Eureka soon disappeared from the lab and reappeared in her bed. The bed was waiting for her, dutiful and empty, the sheets impregnated with the scent of her and Toshi. Sharing a bed with someone night after night is a blessing. But when that person goes away, or your sleeping times just don’t line up, having the bed to yourself can be an orgasmic sort of experience. The only thing better than sharing a bed was not sharing it when you’d become used to never having it to yourself. For a few days at least, until you started to feel your partner’s absence skulk around the room, and the double bed began to feel oversized.
She undressed quickly, pulled back the duvet, snuggled down into her soft bed, turned out the light, and it was then that the room became the nightly sanctuary that harbored the most orgasmic workings of the mind. To sleep for a million hours, that was what she needed. Her bed. So strange, and yet so familiar. There it was, indifferent in the middle of the room, with its mahogany headboard and its slats, co-conspirators in her erotic games, a fantasy of smooth and cottoned intimacy that was now the shelter for her tired, naked body. She usually collapsed into bed exhausted, took it for granted, didn’t even give it the slightest thought, though that night she considered it an absurd piece of furniture and mused that while there was a chance we were conceived on a sofa, against a washing machine, in a wood, in an empty aisle at a twenty-four hour supermarket, or in a car parked in a deserted street, in all likelihood we were all conceived on a bed.
She got up, drew the curtains, slipped back into bed, and started to blend into that absurd item of furniture. She wondered what her dreams would bring. She might dream about the Gin twins, in keeping with her latest ongoing serial. Or maybe she’d dream about Toshi. Sometimes she dreamed about him when they hadn’t seen each other for a week or two, although dreams with Toshi never formed part of a series. Her eyelids started to close and a host of chaotic images flashed quickly across her mind which lay resting on that absurd piece of furniture which has always been part of our existence, as if it were a nocturnal appendage, the limb closest to our unconscious, a limb that gathered in the most intimate parts of our selves, night by night, and when everything was still, kept these secrets safe in the amniotic fluid of the mattress. Ssssshhhh. Ssssshhhhh. Sssssshhhh. Silence. She was going deep into the unknown, into her horizontal existence, where she stopped being one Eureka and became many different Eurekas. Sssssshhhh. Sssshhh. Ssssshhhh.
TRANSLATED FROM SPANISH BY ROSIE MARTEAU