Trouble Sleeping

“I keep having this dream,” Marta told her therapist.

It was Tuesday afternoon. She’d taken a personal day from her work at the coffeehouse. She was only allowed one a quarter; that’s how Mr. Carpenter had it set up for all his employees. She was only allowed one personal day a season, and she’d taken hers today, in part because she’d not slept but a wink the night before, and also because she knew she couldn’t go on like this without telling someone. The personal day was necessary. It was urgent to Marta that she speak to her therapist about this dream, the dream she’d never mentioned before (though she’d been having it for months). It was the same dream that her therapist, a plain man named Truman Potter, would surely laugh when she revealed aloud. That’s why she never said, never brought it up. Marta never brought it up.

“A recurring dream?” He asked. Outside rain drummed its bony fingers on the window pane, the hood of a car, the pavement, an old woman’s candy colored umbrella, the ground. Marta nodded. Truman, in what Marta had grown to mentally ascribe as a “Potterism,” swept one arm in front of his body, palm facing up. He ushered her on into the telling.

“My family has a country home where we keep horses—”

“Horses in a dream often characterize our instincts.”

“Sure,” said Marta. From the sofa and across the coffee table she could see her faint reflection in his tiny round bifocals. “We had horses, my family. Lily and I would ride them whenever we left the city. We were little then, of course. Little girls.”

“Is the dream more of a memory then? A memory of you and your sister, a recollection of something that took place at this home?”

The heater along the wall drummed to life. The gutter outside the one-story building gushed frozen rain into the shrubbery. A garbage truck was stopped at the intersection, bright green and shivering in a slick city sweat. The light flashed its approval and the truck lurched forward with a jolt. Marta watched it all like a faded picture in a scrapbook.

“Marta?” Truman Potter noiselessly tapped his right foot three times upon the low Berber carpet then swiftly brought his ankle up to rest upon his left knee. Another routine “Potterism” that Marta had cataloged.

Marta took an inhale. She took an exhale. She took an inhale through her nose, an exhale through her mouth and then: “It’s not a memory. It’s a silly little dream. I don’t know why I’m dreaming it. I’ve tried to avoid dreaming it, because truly it’s silly to be dreaming it. I wish I knew what it meant. I wish I knew. I stay awake, I keep from falling asleep because I have this dream so often.” The words spill out like rice from a torn sack. The words and their letters skitter across the floor and pile in a jumble. Marta’s reflection is in Truman Potter’s spotless bifocals; her reflection is in his eyes. They are blue eyes. She blinks them from her mind, an unfurling of her long black lashes. “It frightens me, ” she finally adds. “It frightens me what I may have to do to stop it.”

“Dreams are subconscious, Marta. I can control what I dream no more than I can control the weather, no more than I can control—” Truman Potter stops short and looks Marta from head to toe. It’s a swift glance, as if she were a box of macaroni and his gaze the grocery store scanner in search of a black and white UPC bar code. “They are just dreams,” he finds himself saying then. “And so there’s nothing really to—” His eyes meet hers, as they have on hundreds of occasions during many hours worth of sessions. Only a thin piece of glass seems to separate her, Marta, a twenty-seven-year-old waitress in a coffeehouse, from him, Truman Potter, a forty-nine-year-old therapist. She is acutely aware of the claws her hands are making tucked just inside the sleeves of her scratchy grandma cardigan. He is present enough to feel the taut pull of his suspenders along his knobby shoulders and the tightness of his paisley bow-tie tied high and just so beneath his chin.

“The horse is licking my face!”

“It was… I’m sorry— What?”

His stuttered, offset reply was not what Marta had expected. She’d expected his pitched, twee laugh. She had expected the laugh that started high in his head and rolled like a marble down his slender build, down into his belly. Marta had expected the ultimate “Potterism.” There was no laugh, however. Truman Potter did not laugh at Marta.

“Every night practically. Every night, that horse is licking my face, Truman. And I’m laughing like a girl again. I’m laughing like a girl again, like when my sister Lily and I used to ride all day. We used to ride until nightfall, until our bottoms were sore. We’d ride and we’d laugh. Up at that house. But I hadn’t thought of those horses in years, how happy they made me. And now I think of one every night while I sleep! And he is licking my face!” Marta shook as she recounted these details, as she then told Truman Potter the temperature of the stallion’s tongue, how it nearly always started at the base of her neck before working, “like one of those tentacles in a car wash,” up the side of her face and into her hair. Marta shook and a strand of her dark hair fell loose from behind her ear. Truman watched it fall like sunburned autumn leaves; he felt an urge to run to it, to catch it before it fell into her eyes, to catch it and tuck it back safely behind her delicate elfin ear.

“I, well, I’m sure that—”

They’re talking over one another. Marta feeling so free, yet shaking (with excitement?), finally revealing these thoughts and images that had plagued her sleepless mind over so many cold winter months. She was an uncorked fire hydrant. She was sloshing like the icy rain in the gutter outside; she was belching her contents into the warm heat of Truman Potter’s office. She felt loosened, given so much slack, hopeful.

“Every night, Truman. That horse licks my face and I giggle like I haven’t giggled in—He cleans my face like a dinner plate and then we stare at one another.”

Truman Potter swallows hard. “Stare?”

“For hours? All night? We stare at one another. Or, I wake up troubled by what it all means.”

“I’ve—

“It’s absurd! Horses! A horse licking my face!” Marta kept saying it to make up for all the times she’d not been able to say it. And then she chuckled at the hilarity, as if that horse was licking her face right then and there in that moment, bending over the couch and licking her heart-shaped face. Marta laughed. Truman Potter thought it sounded like a wind chime, one his mother had hung on the porch of his childhood home. Truman Potter thought it was beautiful, Marta’s laugh. He’d never heard her laugh before then. He thought it was special.

“You are so special, Marta Montgomery,” he said.

And then they both laughed. She laughed, a balmy breeze that mingled in the trees around a home he’d not seen in years; he laughed, a head to belly tussle between a songbird and a bear cub. They laughed their laughs together and, also, they laughed their laughs apart. Because there was something in that warm room of taupe Berber, lazy watercolors and Venetian blinds that was not said. Truman Potter didn’t say it. Marta didn’t say it.

After her session, it was nearly two o’clock in the afternoon. Marta went home and fell into bed, that puff of cushioned fabric and feathers at the back of her small studio apartment. She fell onto that bed thinking the very thing that she hadn’t said when she’d stopped laughing. She fell onto that bed believing it no longer needed to be said. She fell, knowing for certain that it somehow had been said. Marta, shy Marta, fell asleep on her bed then, twenty minutes later, and she did not dream of horses. No horses with car wash mouths and foamy, spit lathered tongues appeared to her. That dark stallion did not arrive at the fence, wash her face, make her laugh and retreat toward the darkness of the western woods. No.

Marta dreamed instead of Truman Potter, her funny little therapist. She dreamed of his soft hand on her heart-shaped cheek, of those kind blue eyes behind his bifocals. She was not troubled, nor was she surprised. When he touched her, she heard his laugh. And when they kissed, she slept clear until nine o’clock the following morning, no longer afraid. Marta was no longer afraid of what it meant.

Inspired by “Trouble Sleeping,” an original Ian Dingman illustration.