down. She seemed confused. But only for a few seconds, then her spasmodic movements resumed with an even greater vigour. Far from averting her gaze, she now deliberately aimed her look directly at me, as if deriving pleasure from this. At one stage she even winked at me, as if letting me know that we were partners in a conspiracy. Then I sank into darkness again, into a black abyss, which saved me from what I was witnessing.
Out of the darkness I slowly emerged back into the world of consciousness. Rather strangely I found myself exactly where I remembered losing it: on the wall of the dam. I turned my head, expecting to see Father and Eve still there. But I was alone; the only thing moving were the shadows of the tree branches swaying above me in the summer breeze. This happened a long time ago, but I still remember the unfamiliar feeling which swept over me: the feeling of, almost, regret at no longer being able to watch Father and Eve making love (for, awake, I knew only too well what they had done in my dream). This feeling was immediately followed by deep embarrassment at having such a desire. Although the image of them was very much alive in my memory, it was surrounded by misty uncertainty, and I began to wonder whether the whole afternoon had not been a dream, from the moment I thought I became aware of Eve lying next to me in the grass. Maybe she never came to sunbathe near the stream; maybe everything was no more than one of my strange imaginings.
But how did I find myself on the wall of the dam? And why was I naked, with my bathing shorts lying next to me? This did not seem to support my hope. As I slowly walked home, my confusion grew to the point of despair. How could I look Father in the face ever again? I knew he would soon be home; it was Saturday, when he only worked till two. As I was nearing the house I decided that it might be best to run away into the woods and stay there until both Father and Mother began to worry if I was still alive; then, surely, neither of them would dare mentioning anything that might drive me away again. But it was too late: just as I decided to slip past the hedge and run across the fields towards the safety of the nearest beech-trees, I heard the wheels of Father’s car on the gravel driveway in front of the house.
“Adam, wait,” he shouted.
I ran as fast as I could, but his hands grabbed me from behind just as I reached the edge of the wood. Gasping for breath, we collapsed on the grassy fringe, already in the shade of the nearest trees.
“Adam,” Father wheezed and panted above me, “Adam, I’m sorry.”
After calming down a bit more, he added, “I’m sorry I hit you.”
With his apology, my hope that the whole thing had been a dream was blown away. Suddenly I was filled with dread that all the rest might have been true as well. It was with immense relief that I heard Father say, “What did you dream?”
“People don’t dream when they’re unconscious,” I put my final doubt to the test, “they only dream when they’re asleep.”
But Father insisted that I had not been fully unconscious, I had merely slipped into some kind of intermediate state, resembling the phase of sleep during which dreams are most vivid. He employed a medical term in support of his theory, REM, rapid eye movement. While we dream, our eyeballs roll around under the eyelids, and that was what he had seen as he bent over me to revive me. Seeing that I was dreaming, he decided not to wake me. It is essential, for the sake of mental well-being, that dreams are not interrupted, especially not if they are in any way unpleasant or shocking. Unpleasant dreams especially are an excellent means of clearing out the garbage which accumulates in the psyche, he concluded.
“So,” he returned to what seemed to bother him, “what did you dream?”
I stared at my feet and said nothing. How could I possibly describe the dream I had on the wall of the dam without dying of embarrassment?
“Listen, Adam,” he said. “You know I have never hit you before. But this time I had a good reason. Do you realise that?”
Again I said nothing, I merely shrugged.
“I have nothing against your desire to follow your natural drives. This is perfectly normal at your age, and I approve of your efforts to lose virginity. The problem is Eve. She may be a year older than you, but she is still underage. What would her grandfather say, to whom her parents entrusted her in good faith that she would be safe with him? And that’s not all. She is my patient. As her doctor I am responsible for her. Can you imagine what would happen if people learned that the doctor’s underage son was having sex with his father’s underage patient? You would be sent to a correction school. I would end up in jail.”
Silence was all I could offer in reply to that.
“Are you telling me you don’t care?”
I shook my head and mumbled something.
“Speak up, so I can hear you,” Father said.
I looked up and said clearly and loudly that I did care. But I still didn’t dare look him in the eyes. Now even less than before, for now I wouldn’t be embarrassed only because I dreamed what I could never tell him, but because he caught me doing things which I would have preferred to do without his seeing it.
“Eve is of course very charming and quite mature for her years,” Father said. “But not the sort of girl you should hang out with. She’s got a serious problem. I should know, I’m treating her. Even more important: you shouldn’t talk about this to Mother. We don’t want her to suffer a stroke, do we? There’re things men have to keep to themselves. Do we understand each other?”
I said nothing, I merely shrugged. I felt that my dream could much more easily be confided to my dream diary than either to Father or Mother. Suddenly I felt a great need to write it down, and so lessen its burden. I decided not to show my diary to anybody. And I knew where I was going to hide it so that no one would find it.
After some hesitation, Father put his arm round my shoulders and gently drew me toward him. “Still writing your diary?”
I looked at my feet again and shook my head. I said I had thrown the yellow notebook into the well in the school’s courtyard on the last day of school. I no longer dreamed as often as I used to, so I had nothing to write about. In any case my dreams had become very vague and fragmented, I hardly remembered any of them. There seemed to be no point in recording senseless jumble, I said.
“Actually,” Father said, “it wasn’t a bad idea to get rid of that diary. If you dream anything unusual, anything that bothers you, you can always tell me, and we’ll talk about it. Not as doctor and patient, but as father and son.”
I nodded.
“Shall we go home then?” Father said and got to his feet, visibly relieved.
I could never clearly remember the days that followed. From the very start they were suffused with a strange, surreal mist in which, with the passing of time, things and events became less and less discernible, let alone definable. Very often I felt that I wasn’t seeing things with my eyes, but rather feeling them with some inner tentacles. Although I recorded every detail in my dream diary, it was difficult to tell from these notes whether I was talking about dreams, hallucinations or real events. Only I knew, or thought I knew, that I was describing dreams, and only I knew that dreams were about Father and Eve. In fact, after the event on the wall of the dam I hardly dreamed about anything else. If I did, it was always at night, and forgotten so fast that any diary entry would not exceed a couple of lines.
Dreams about Father and Eve usually took possession of me in the afternoon or early evening, always without any indication that they were about to start, as if I had been sucked into sleep by an invisible power which
