THE LAST NIGHTMARE

The Last Nightmare

In my anger and confusion upon leaving Vietnam, I had promised myself to study the war, and the human condition, until I understood the workings of the monstrous situation I had just lived through. I even promised myself that I would fix it! (See earlier  chapter “Danang.”) 

     I have been engaged in that study since then, and this book is the result, so far. What I didn’t know when I made the promise was that the arc of that study would parallel the arc of the healing of my emotional wounds from the war (I was never hit by bullets or shrapnel, only narrowly missed). In fact, the arc of my personal healing was the SAME as the arc of my awareness. I began to feel the war moving from a place deep inside me to a place outside, where I could see it, and myself, for what it was – for what I was.

     I’m still angry, of course. (see chapters “Townies,” “Hunger 3,” “Seminar,”
“J. Glenn Gray and Kierkegaard and Abraham and Isaac.”)

     That’s how I moved from nightmares to laughter, or from nightmares with no relief to nightmares from which I would waken in a fit of laughter so physically intense it would hurt my gut.

     The “Rattlesnake Dream” was the pivot point in that process. In the dream, my own people were pleading with me to do their killing for them, and I was ready. I was good with weapons; I performed well in dangerous situations. But my conversation with the snake taught me the deep wrong in my warrior’s assignment from my people, as the baby boy I was holding at bayonet point had begun to teach me that April day in 1966 in Tho An (see “Prologue,” and the chapter “Tho An.”).

     So I turned and walked away.

     María Patricia Fajardo Valbuena and I met on the Internet in July, 2008. We were married in March, 2009, in the office of the alcalde in Cota, the town next to Chía, Colombia, where she was born and grew up.

     Before dawn one morning in 2009, my wife and I were still asleep in our apartment in Chía. I was sitting upright on the bed. She was behind me, shaking me, shouting in my ear: “Dean! Dean! ¿Qué está pasando contigo?!”( What’s happening to you?!)”

     I was shaking violently, still not awake. She thought I was having a heart attack.

       But I was laughing. 

   I was laughing as violently as if I were having an epileptic seizure, shaking the entire bed. I was dreaming this:

 A group of rich old men have a mansion on a hill. The entire exterior is plate glass windows. The old men stay inside, keeping company only with themselves. But there is one other old man outside: I am scurrying about, laughing, placing large mirrors close to the mansion, one in front of each window. The old men inside see their own reflections in the mirrors, become horrified at the sight, and fire at their own reflections with shotguns. Each time the old man outside places another mirror, the old men inside blast away, destroying another section of their own house. I, the old man outside, am having a high old time, placing the mirrors and cackling and howling with laughter as the rich old men destroy their own mansion.

     Finally, Patricia was able to waken me. She was terrified that something awful was happening. She was trying to get through to me, but couldn’t.

     I woke up and fell back in the bed, still laughing, and told her the dream. We laughed together for a long time.

     The violent catharsis I felt upon waking from that dream was a feeling the like of which I had never before experienced in my life. It felt as if my body had physically split open. I haven't had a nightmare since; it's been at least four years. That process will be the subject of my next book.