I wish I had pleasant dreams but I only have nightmares. Here's one of them. Beginning with early adolescence and continuing to this day, I've had a recurring dream in which I've murdered someone--I don't know whom. The victim is always an unidentifiable male, and his death is always violent. Ordinarily, I beat him to a bloody pulp with a shovel. I have problems disposing of the gory body, but usually I bury it next to the neglected garage that lay behind our house on East 9 Street in Flatbush where I lived my first seventeen years. It's an anguishing dream not because I've killed someone, but because I've failed to conceal the body properly and because I'm going to be arrested and punished. It's amoral -- I don't feel guilty that I'm a murderer -- just embarrassed because I'm incompetent. It's a very realistic nightmare. A couple of times it's been so vivid to me that even after I was wide-awake, it took me ten or fifteen seconds to realize that I was not being hunted by the police and that I could proceed normally with my life.
I don't know why I should be so oppressed with this fantasy. In the daylight hours, I'm your run-of-the-mill peaceful person. Never killed anyone.
Imagine my surprise when I read (and studied the illustrations of) J. M. DeMatteis's 100% autobiographical "graphic novel" Brooklyn Dreams (Paradox, 2003) and discovered that my nightmare is not entirely my own. DeMatteis suffers from exactly the same recurring dream. "I remember the body -- buried out behind my apartment building... or maybe stuffed in a trash can across the street.... Some poor, innocent schmuck I've either hacked up with a machete... or machine-gunned with Cagney-like ferocity... or maybe just kicked down a flight of stairs." DeMatteis labors under the guilt that's provoked by this dream, and, like me, he can't explain it except to speculate that his life is a nightmare from which he's trying to awake. But here's what's so fascinating to me: DeMatteis is a product of the exact same Brooklyn neighborhood as I (see map). He grew up at the corner of Ocean and Foster, and he hung out at Newkirk Plaza, a commercial island that would nowadays be called a shopping center, where I endured painful haircuts, carried my mother's dry cleaning back and forth, and entered and exited the BMT subway. Was there something about Flatbush, or, more particularly, something about "the Plaza" that made us killers in our dreams. Yes, I rather think there was.
Is it significant that DeMatteis is a kind of replacement child? He is the survivor of a pair of fraternal twins. His potential sibling was spontaneously aborted -- although DeMatties speculates, that, prescient about life's forthcoming difficulties, he might have "jumped." DeMatties' mother was about to be "scraped" when the doctor had second thoughts. In Brooklyn Dreams, DeMatteis describes his mother's and father's hysterical, debilitating and inconsistent protectiveness -- traits often discovered in parents who haven't properly grieved the loss of a child.
Is it possible that the person whom DeMatteis thinks he murdered is, on some level, the unborn twin?
And so we have still another variation of the replacement child syndrome.
Comments