Metafiction: A Dream is a Small Bell Beneath Your Pillow

It was 3 am. I’m reading a book that’s halfway interesting. Because it’s halfway it only has a beginning and end but no middle, or the middle begins at the end or, more likely as is the case with so many metafictions, the end is at the beginning. I was reading because I couldn’t sleep and I couldn’t sleep because I was reading.

The theme of the metafiction I was reading: writers and writing. The theme is very artfully disguised as a story of a relationship between a woman and her dog, though it’s not her dog, it’s the dog of a friend of hers who’s just died and who she, the writer, has agreed to take into her home and care for. The theme allows the writer to explore and expound on many other themes: the value or non-value of literature; the competitive nature of writers and their inherent smallness; the subtle differences between silence and speech and actually having something to say; the similarities between animal intelligence and human intelligence…I won’t go on, to go on would ruin both the beginning and the end I haven’t yet come to, to go on would be to create a new metafiction I have no conscious desire to create.

By now, it’s 4 am, too late to take a Tylenol PM and too early to wake and begin the day. So I create a dream instead.

My dream presses a button. A small bell rings beneath my pillow. Sleeping I wake, still asleep. Dreaming, I rush downstairs to rescue the woman I love, having heard her screams in the street down below and believing she’s in grave danger. By the time I get there she’s nowhere to be seen. I’m either too early or too late to save her. I tried, I tried, I did my best to save her, I failed. Heartbroken that the love of my life is missing, faithfully walking in my dream up and down the street of her disappearance trying to find her, I finally realize she’s not there. Perhaps she never has been there.

Then I begin to fear for my own life and return to bed, reading another page or two of metafiction, tucking my loved one into bed before I too fall asleep.