Robert Sheckley - The Dream of Misunderstanding

Fiction by Robert Sheckley

Brenton's the name. I am a fairly well-known psychologist, well off, and with a respectable list of publications. Maybe you've read my popular book, "The Dream of Misunderstanding." It has helped a lot of people. I know a lot about misunderstanding. Despite this, I have a lot of trouble helping myself.

As a matter of fact, my wife and I are separated. I live in my office on New York's East Side, Myra is in our family apartment on the West Side.

My own books, excellent though they are generally accounted to be, have failed to get my wife to understand me. I have been brooding a lot over that lately. Maybe that accounts for my dream.

In my dream, I was standing in a bluish room with no furniture. In front of me was a man larger than lifesize. He had a noble beard, and seemed very worthy of respect.

"Well," he said, "So you finally made it all the way to me."

"Who are you?" I said.

"I am Ahriman, subdiety in charge of Earthly solutions."

"What solution are you talking about?"

"A solution to the membrane problem."

"And what is that?"

"The membrane is what separates one thing from another on your Earth. It is invisible to human eyes, but it is there all the same. It is the equivalent of a thick, semi-transparent substance that coats the world and separates one person's understanding from another's."

"This membrane," I said. "I believe it is unknown to science?"

"That is true."

"What is the effect of this membrane?" I asked.

"It interferes with human relations. It is the barrier, invisible but palpable, that prevents anyone from really understanding anyone else."

"That's a big problem," I said. "I've often thought about this, using different metaphors."

"We are aware that you have worked all your professional life on the problem of human misunderstanding."

"Without much success."

"I wouldn't say that. We are aware of your publications on the subject of the impossibility of one person really understanding another. Your books do a good job of describing life as it is lived behind the membrane."

"I have proven that understanding is a difficult thing. But to prove a negative is negligible."

"Not at all. Your attempts constitute a notable achievement."

"My attempts at clarification have only succeeded in muddying up my own situation."

"With the ability imparted by this parchment, you can clear up misunderstandings, which are all that separate one person from another."

He handed me a parchment. On it was written, "Charles Brenton is now granted the ability to pass through the membranes that separate mind from mind."

I couldn't read the signature, but it was bold and black and somehow looked holy.

I took the parchment in my hand. A feeling of competence and rightness came over me.

The parchment shrunk and flew from my hand into my head. It was glorious to feel it there. My image of my own rightness increased.

The subgod said, "Are you sure you know what to do with it?"

"I know," I said.

"Anything you want to run over with me?"

"No, I've got it. Many thanks, and I'll get to work immediately."

"I'll leave you to it, then."

I saw in a flash what needed to be done. God knows I had written about it often enough. The world was filled with misunderstandings. Ignorant and misinformed armies clashed by night, innocent women and children were killed, dictators and terrorists reigned.

There was work to be done with all of that and much more. On an international level.

Уnd there were many problems in America, too. There were some things I badly needed to tell our President, and have him understand them. I saw them all. The parchment in my head gave me the ability to do that.

There was work to be done, and no time to lose.

But first, I thought I'd begin with a situation nearer to home.

Light as air, I flew out of my apartment window and across town. I crossed Central Park, and admired the lights along the roadways. Across Central Park West, then I turned uptown for a few blocks, and then west again. I saw Myra's apartment building ahead. It used to be mine, too.

I entered through a long-remembered window. Like a breath of wind I moved through the rooms. I found my wife asleep in her bed. Alone in her room. I paused a moment to admire her beauty. Then, pursuant to the instructions of the subdiety as I understood then, I entered her mind.

The membrane at the threshhold held me back for a moment. Without Ahriman's parchment, I couldn't have done it. As it was, I feared the parchment might not work. But I found myself passing through it slowly, turning myself into something infinitesimal, ions, electrons--except for psychology I have no scientific training. Anyhow, I passed through the membrane.

Once on the other side, I reconstituted myself.

I was in a corridor that curved far away into the distance. It was lined with filing cabinets, which held the banks of dicta Myra lived by. These were the commands that she gave herself, the judgments she made, and most of them followed the commands set down from childhood. There were many she had not altered since that time.

Her mind to me was a long labyrinthine path that wound slowly into the interior of her soul.

I had gotten through the membrane. I was in another person's mind! I was in my wife's mind.

I passed the secret place where she kept her ideas about herself. I was tempted to look at them and do a little rearranging. But a tact I hadn't thought myself capable of kept me from it. I continued down the corridor.

Soon I came to where her memories of me were stored. These I scanned with some care.

I felt horror at the interlocking logic of those thoughts, those impressions. I knew she had once loved me, once thought highly of me. How could it have changed into this? How could she have thought I thought that? I would never have accused my worst enemy of the thoughts and emotions she assigned to me. "Cold" and "prissy" was the least of it.

Very gently I began readjusting her attitudes toward me.

"Basic liking" needed some tweaking to bring it up to a proper level. "Appreciation of his looks" needed a little more adjustment. "Approval of deeds as understood from motives" required a lot of attention. "Perception of gallantry" also took some work.

There were other things to adjust. I reversed a number of her perceptions so that she would wake up realizing they were misperceptions. I wanted her to think, "Oh, I don't know how I could have gotten him so wrong..."

Frankly, I wasn't too sure I had indeed meant what I wanted her to believe I'd meant, but if I was going to err, it would be in my own favor.

I saw her turn in her sleep, smile, reach toward me. For a moment I thought there was hope. But then a spasm shook her body. She rolled away, and still asleep, her face twisted in disgust. She shuddered.

"Get out of me!" she cried, still asleep.

Obviously, my actions had stirred up a rebellion in her. In the unconscious, I suppose. I watched her reject the alien thoughts. My thoughts, my adjustments!

She couldn't bear to see me through my eyes, from my point of view.

I realized that even if I had created a truer version of myself, it wasn't her truth, wasn't true for her, and maybe had never been true, maybe never could be true. This despite my good intentions.

The repair work I had done in her mind began to shake and quiver. Each place I had touched turned a dark and unpleasant color. In that darkness I saw the rejection of my own valuations, my own desired self-images that I had tried to impose on her. She threw them off as alien matter. Shame-faced, my self-conceptions had crept back inside of me.

In the midst of this, I had another vision. A vision within a vision, as it were. I caught a glimpse of that universal mind, owned by no one and everyone, to which few are given access. I saw all our differences reconciled. But this too faded away. Apparently this ultimate reconciliation with the person I loved was not allowed by the ground rules of existence.

Shortly after that, I was expelled from her mind.

Her interior filing cabinets were shaking and quaking. The corridor itself writhed. The interior of her mind suddenly semed to knot, then explode outward with an irresistable force. I was thrown from her mind against the membrane. I passed through as before, and came out the other side intact.

Someone was standing there, waiting for me. It was the Ahriman, the subgod who had given me the parchment. Now he plucked it out of my head.

Ahriman said, "Apparently you didn't understand the gift. It's not to be used for yourself. You give it to someone else. The gift to give is to be able to understand, not to be understood."

"You didn't tell me that."

"You didn't ask. You said you knew what to do."

"Why did you give it to me in the first place, among all the people you could have given it to? You must have known from the start that I was damaged."

"We can only give the parchment to the damaged ones," he said. "Unfortunately, being damaged, they don't use it correctly."

So that was the end of it. When I woke up in my bedroom, I could find no sign of the parchment, and luckily I had the sense to tell no one about it, until now, in the form of a fictitious story.

I have never again heard from Ahriman.

If I had it to do over, I think I'd start changing the minds of dictators. Adjusting their political and social attitudes seems an easier task than trying to solve those of the secrets of a human heart.