Sensuous

6 May — Thursday

I had a terrible dream last night. Often dreams disturb me but this was something else. A full-fledged nightmare. I woke up violently, sat up straight in the bed with my mouth open to scream. Didn’t scream, but I must have been right on the verge of it.

Heart pounding fiercely, really hammering away. Body coated with chill sweat and the sheet damp beneath me.

I cannot remember the dream.

Been trying to. Been trying all day, then pushed it out of my mind, then tried to summon it up now while sitting at the typewriter. Just no way at all.

Never really cared much about dreams. About trying to remember them. Feeling now that the dream is a ghost which must be exorcised; it’ll haunt me if I don’t remember it, but memory won’t summon it up.

They say you can recall dreams under hypnosis. I’m sure I could never by hypnotized. Some people can’t. Won’t surrender their will, won’t let themselves go under.

Of course I would be like that. Refusing to surrender the self to a hypnotist just as I refuse to surrender self sexually.

A parallel there?

Probably. Can surrender Jennifer’s unself to strangers because that reveals nothing of me.

I could not be hypnotized, I am sure of this. But carry it further — I could not even bring myself to test this hypothesis. Could not dare to go to a hypnotist on the offchance that I might be wrong, that he (or she) might be able to get me to go under. And the pure thought so upsets me that I would never put the question to a test.

Just as I won’t have sex with anyone who knows me?

The dream. I can’t get back any of it, except for one thing. And I feel it more than I remember it.

That, in the dream, I was about to die. Don’t know how or why, but I was about to die, and I woke up at the instant before dream-death.

I read something somewhere about this. I think it was in a novel. Can’t remember exactly. Something to the effect that people often wake up on the point of dying in dreams. And that if you don’t wake up at that instant when the dream-self is about to die, the dreamer in fact dies.

Legend, it must have been. Because how would anybody know if it is true or not?

All I know is that I am afraid to go to sleep.