Dream of a Crime

As a reclusive, dreamy and well-pimpled teenager, I used to sit in my upstairs bedroom, on a big fat old lumpy armchair, next to the double-glazed window, in a little alcove no bigger than the chair, with my feet up against the door of my clothes closet, and dream, sometimes reading, books such as the multi-volumed romances of Alexandre Dumas, sometimes scribbling incomprehensible stories, sometimes just staring out the window and wondering how the world worked.  One winter evening, night having fallen early, as it does in New York City, and the street filled with thick slow-falling, feathery snow, making everything outside particularly eerie and silent, because traffic almost disappeared and no one was walking their dogs or merely strolling, as I curled up in my usual posture bad for my proper growth, my eyes grew heavy, and sleep came over me.  So what then?  I had a dream.  Or at least I thought I did.

From somewhere deep inside my mind asleep there broke in or out a sound, a horrible scream like a woman being mugged or raped or murdered.  Then, whether with my eyes open or not, I glanced through the smudged window, the street already dark, only a narrow cone of yellowish light falling from a streetlamp across the invisible road, I thought I saw two silhouettes languidly dancing in and out of the lamp’s snow-flecked beam, until one figure slid down to the cold, feather-covered street and the other disappeared into the impossible darkness. 

After that, probably after a few seconds or moments or more, I got up and went to bed, not sure not even thinking that what I had seen was real or not, and never considering until many years later, when the images returned during another event, one I considered totally unrelated to the vision I had seen and heard that night, and then, with considerable effort to sharpen the focus, the whole thing struck me as an event I should have at least reported to my parents.  Ever since, I have a deep sense of shame and fear that, by not telling anyone what I experienced, in whatever way it may have come to me, was not only a crime, but, alas, a crime that, if not prevented, could have been mitigated, or at least punished, although I now realize there were no details of identity of the assailant I could have given to the police.  Of course, it all may have been a figment of my imagination, a simple projection and elaboration of something read or heard on the radio, some fantasy transferred from a movie seen on Saturday afternoons, or maybe just an adolescent wish, twisted and bizarre as the ideas of sexuality and violence could be to an inexperienced and completely innocent child. 

But still, the thought sometimes breaks through at any improbable time to ask what if it had been real?  The more I think about it, the more strange it all seems.  Perhaps, if not played out across the street, through the falling snow, all of which was real enough, the muffled cries, the distorted silhouettes, the whole scenario of robbery and rape, may have derived from somewhere else in my still relatively limited experience, such as another room, where my parents slept, or perhaps in a glimpse into other people’s lives when on holiday at a hotel or lodge in the mountains, where we would occasionally go, and in whose rooms and corridors there always lingered a sense of antique mystery, of strangers’ presence impressed into the dusty corners, caught in the odours of dark and deep closets, in incomprehensible voices, in other languages, echoing like moving bubbles through the old-fashioned wallpaper.  Perhaps. The word lights up and fades away, like a neon sign seen through a drizzly dark night.   How can one ever know for sure?