Nothing is more obnoxious than someone who grabs you by the lapels and insist upon telling you a dream. What is remarkable to one person is, often, uninteresting to others and this is particularly true of dream narratives.
But, nevertheless...
In my dream, I was trying a case somewhere on the East Coast, a morbid, gloomy place. The lawsuit involved a woman who had lost a great deal of money in some sort of Spiritualist enterprise. In other words, she had been convinced to invest her inheritance in a scheme involving contact with the dead. I represented the unfortunate heiress.
The trial took place in a vast, dim courtroom. The Judge was a giant, a huge grim man in a flowing black robe. He reminded me of the late actor, Fred Gwynn as he appears in the movie My Cousin Vinny, a role in which he plays a judge. In my dream, the Judge was broader and heavier than the movie star, a brooding, even menacing presence.
After the case had been argued, the Judge instructed the jury, making various comments that I interpreted as critical of my presentation of the case. It was Autumn with overcast skies and there were solemn grey quadrangles outdoors, public spaces drowned in darkness.
At a chophouse, I was eating my supper. As it happened, the Judge occupied a nearby table with several cronies and I heard him remarking on my appearance in his courtroom. The room was dim with dark paneled walls and dimly lit stained glass windows. I approached the Judge’s table to ask him what he meant by his criticism.
He said that I had failed to present the conduct of the Defendant as fraud and that I hadn’t argued that my client had been the victim of intentional misrepresentation. It was true, I recalled, that I had presented the case as one involving an error, but in good faith, perhaps, some sort of negligence but without intentional wrongdoing. I told the Judge that I had no evidence of the defendant’s fraudulent intent.
“Oh, yes, of course, there was wrongful intent,” the Judge said. And he proceeded to tell me of another case involving the same defendant in which a gullible person had lost their life savings as a result of fraud. I was unaware of the case and wondered whether my investigation had gone awry in not uncovering this evidence, although I was skeptical as to whether it would be admissible.
The Judge rose to his full height and glowered at me and all the darkness of his court and the chophouse with its dark-paneled walls and the gloomy harbor city in which I had tried this case was condensed in his glare. Then, I knew that I had botched the case, that I had failed my client, and that this was the reason that the heiress would lose the lawsuit. (It seemed that the jury had not yet returned a verdict and were still deliberating on the outcome.)
Later, I found myself back in the dismal city where I was conferring with my client. Although I couldn’t perceive her very clearly, she seemed an earnest woman of color with dark skin wearing an old fashioned white blouse and a black skirt. I thought her name was Florence Newton. Something led me to conclude that the Judge was secretly related to her, perhaps, her father as a result of a clandestine affair or, at the very least, her uncle. On the basis of this belief, I questioned the Judge’s objectivity.
I awoke and was unable to fall asleep again. For a long time, I imagined arguments for my failure to present the heiress’ claim as a matter of fraud. Perhaps, her reliance on the spiritualist representations made by the defendant had been unreasonable. In any event, the facts were now becoming uncertain and became more hazy as I thought about them. I couldn’t recall the identity of the defendant or what exactly he had done. Perhaps, I was the defendant. Someone called Dtroner was involved in the case, It seemed that I might have been influenced by Henry or William James, although nothing was clear. Some of the events involved in the litigation had occurred on the island of Martha’s Vineyard.
Maybe, I would understand the dream better if I wrote it down and, so, I rose, quickly dressed, and went to my office where I write to type these words. Snowfall was predicted for the day and it was before dawn, dark, with wet sheaths of snow clinging to the trees and parked cars. Some birds were singing as I walked to my garage and the cold in the air was moist with the imminent rain.
The radio was turned-on in my car. A woman with a British accent said that she would answer the question of a listener named Oscar – could dreams be manufactured to order? The presenter spoke with someone named Dr. Adam Har, a postdoctoral associate specializing in the neurology of sleep at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He had invented a device called Dormio. You strap this machine to your wrist and it measures biological factors to determine when the sleeper is entering the so-called hypnogogic phase of sleep. As hypnagogia occurs, a voice simulator in the machine whispers a preprogrammed suggestion to the sleeper – a word like “tree” or the name of a person. Dr. Har explained that this was a way of incubating dreams and inserting themes into them. “We can seed dreams by this technology,” he told the woman with the British accent. The name of the show is The Unexpected Element. It can be accessed on the web at unexpected@bbc.co.uk.
My computer advised me that I typed this note on the 150 anniversary of the birth of Harry Houdini, the great magician and crusader against Spiritualism and its hoaxes.
Florence Newton was an Irish maidservant accused of witchcraft in 1651. Before I looked up her name on the internet, I had no knowledge about her. Denied a piece of beef in the home where she worked, she mumbled imprecations about the master of the house and he later developed severe stomach cramps. On the street, she violently kissed a fellow maid in the household where she worked. That afternoon, that woman became very ill. While she was imprisoned, Newton seized the hand of guard through the bars of her cell and kissed his fingers. The guard also suffered an immediate and devastating illness. Before she could be tried, she apparently died in jail. She is sometimes called the Witch of Youghai.
March 24, 2024
