The Reincarnation of Peter Proud Read Free

he was always this same man, the man he thought of as X. And this strange and mysterious lady, Marcia, was usually with X. They seemed to live in a particular city or town. The town seemed very familiar to him in these dreams. He could see the main street with the arched railroad bridge spanning it. He could see a kind of municipal tower facing a central square. He could see the shops, the houses, the faces of the people on the streets. He knew he had never been in this particular town in all his life. He wassure of it. Yet he could see it all so clearly. Neighborhoods, even suburban streets.
    Many of the dreams were winter scenes. Deep snow on the ground. Blizzards. But the fact was that he had rarely seen snow, except on the tops of the mountains surrounding the Los Angeles basin. Or when he had gone skiing at Aspen or Mammoth. He had been born in California and had lived there all of his life.
    But even more weird was this “Puritan” thing. The word “Puritan” occurred not only in the Lake Dream, but also in the other fragments. He saw it on signs, on buildings, and in limbo. It seemed to suggest New England. But he had never been in New England in his life. He’d been east several times, in New York City and Washington, but never in New England.
    Now, it seemed, he had a new problem. He was beginning to talk in his sleep, not he, really, but the man he had come to think of as X.
    A couple of weeks before, he had stayed overnight at the house his parents owned in Palm Springs. He had awakened to find them both in the room, dressed in night robes and staring at him. They had looked terrified. They had heard someone shouting in his room. Like Nora, they said it had sounded like someone else, a stranger. They had thought it was a burglar who had broken in and who had perhaps awakened him and had been shouting in the middle of a struggle …
    And even before that, in the hotel at Las Vegas. That night with Sybil Wilson. They had been shooting some film about the Apache at Twentieth Century Fox, and they had decided they wanted everything really authentic—the tribal dress and customs and so forth. So they had hired him in the capacity of what they called a technical adviser. They had been shooting desert locations in southern Nevada, using Vegas as a base, and Sybil Wilson had been the script girl. One thing had led to another, and finally she had come to his room.
    Early in the morning, he had awakened from the Lake Dream to find her staring at him white-faced and throwing on her clothes. She had run from the room terrified. When he called her later, she coldly informed him that she did not like men who talked in their sleep, especially in some weird kind of voice. In effect, she had implied that he was some kind of crazy.
    He knew he was going through some strange psychic experience. He didn’t know where these fantasies came from, or why they were happening to him. And naturally he was disturbed. He had gone to see a psychiatrist, a Dr. Ludwig Staub, very expensive and highly recommended. After a few sessions with Staub, he could sense that the psychiatrist was baffled.
    “These dreams of yours,” Staub had said, “do not seem to be dreams at all in the ordinary, classical sense. I would call them hallucinations. They are fixed and repetitive, and you have extraordinary recall. They do not seem to come from any subjective sensory stimuli we can trace. If it is of any comfort to you, they are not schizoid in character. The dreams of the schizophrenic are usually flat, vacant, unevocative. He might dream of a chair, or a tea kettle, or a road leading somewhere—an object of some kind. These dreams have no action and no people. Your dreams—or, again, let us call them hallucinations—are much more elaborate than that. And you do not have any apparent symptoms of schizophrenia.”
    He had found
that
a relief. And Dr. Staub had gone on: “You do not seem to be greatly disturbed at this point—I mean emotionally.