Another Echo of Ishiguro's The Unconsoled: Dreams of Frustration

A year ago I went on a cross country road trip out East to visit kin, friends and family. It was a very special time during which I listened to a powerful novel by Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled. It's an amazing, surreal story which I wrote about here last April.

I'd already read a couple of his books, and when visiting my daughter earlier that year I saw that she also had several books by this Nobel Prize winning author on her bookshelf. When I asked her favorite she said "this one." I ordered the audiobook to accompany me on that road trip.

A primary feature of this story is its dreamlike scenes and imagery coupled with extreme frustration. From time to time since reading it I've had similar dreams, including this morning, which I'll try to relate to you here. It's an interesting tale.

14 APRIL 2020

The setting is Canal Park here in Duluth during it's busiest season, summertime. Sidewalks are crowded, parking lots crowded, and the Lakewalk is crowded, which is totally contrary to the emptiness you'll find there right now during our lockdown.

I'm driving near Lake Avenue and returning to my car when I see a friend whom I haven't seen a while, so I pull over to chat. It's not a legal parking spot but it will only be a minute. I cut the conversation short for some reason, perhaps anxious about where I'm parked, so I return to my car and start to pull away.

But my conscience bothers me for the abrupt ending to our conversation and I stop again, leaving the car running as I jog over to properly close our conversation with a Minnesota goodbye. A police officer pulls into the slot where my car had just been and blocks the view of my car with its engine running. When I return to my car it's now missing.

I swing around to tell the cop and he's gone, too. Now what?

When I pull out my cell phone there's some problem getting it to function properly. I press the buttons for 9-1-1 but instead the screen shows 9-11 and says this is not a number. No matter how many times I try the error message comes up.

I begin walking through the crowded sidewalks, jostled and disturbed. I find myself in front of a small sidewalk cafe and see a woman whom I recognize there serving customers. I go take a seat and John Heino, another friend who retired a few years back, steps out from within. He's a server there and he comes over and sits with me, as does the other woman whom I recognized but couldn't recall her name.

Two more people join us from the sidewalk and everyone is chattering on about things. I can only think about my car being stolen. I wait patiently for my turn to say something, but it never comes so I finally interrupt and tell them my car has been stolen and I need to call the police.

Everyone stops talking, not knowing what to say. Then John and the woman, who may have been the manager, get up and return to work. As they do I overhear her comment to John something like, "I don't remember him being so rude."

The other couple gets up and leaves also. I want to defend myself but now don't know what to say, so I head over to the Lakewalk. There's a long sandy path there with something like an arts and crafts show taking place with lots of vendors on my right and left, and people jostling me. My mind is in a fog as I weave through various comical scenes. Some of the vendors are in teardown mode. One vendor had a tipi-like cone shaped display with a dog in the middle wearing something like a millstone collar around its neck like those paintings by the Dutch Masters of the 16th century.

As I look down I see a leather case on the ground, slightly larger than a checkbook. When I open it there's a cell phone inside, but just as I start to call 9-1-1 a middle aged man with a dark mustache leathery skin grabs it out of my hand saying, "Hey, that's mine." He's very angry with me for having his phone.

I ask him to call 9-1-1 but he turns and walks the other direction in a huff.

As I proceed down the path I continue to be jostled, and then come to a mottled grey-green wall that I can't get over. Looking up I see a walkway going perpendicular along the top of the wall which is heading back to Canal Park where I'd started.

When I finally get atop the wall and start heading back I have someone's infant accompanying me. Now I must not only find a phone and my car but also the child's parents. The thought I'm having at that point is that if I call the police they'll accuse me of kidnapping.

It's at that moment of extreme frustration that I awake.

* * * *

In the event that you are wondering how I, or anyone, could remember so many details from a single dream, well, there's some backstory to be aware of. I first began recording my dreams when I was in seventh grade. Upon awaking I would write what I remembered. Over time, and I did this for near six years, I could pull up three, four and sometimes five dream sequence stories. It is a skill one can cultivate, like playing the piano. It's a matter of practice. It also involves writing what you remember as soon as you wake.

The seed for a few of my published stories began with a scene from a dream. My novel The Red Scorpion began that way. A crisis point late in the book began with eight or ten pages of notes that I wrote out longhand one morning upon waking. More than a dozen years later it became fodder for what developed into a full length book which many have found rewarding to read.

As for this morning's nocturnal misadventures, let's just say that fortunately I haven't felt as stressed as that dream during our quarantine period here in our coronavirus era. The dream, however, does seem to hint toward an underlying anxiety beneath the surface of my consciousness. One way or another we'll get through.