Dream of a Mannikin,
or the Third Person
Thomas Ligotti

When Tom Ligotti's stories began to appear in small magazines such as England's Fantasy Tales and the artier American journals Nyctalops and Grimoire, a lot of collectors began murmuring "dark genius" and "must be a real paranoid." His work is finally beginning to find professional acceptance thanks in part to Ramsey Campbell and myself, his first major anthologists who brought him to Tor and Ace. For too long only small press editors were open to his work, which is, perhaps, too good and too personal to have had instant recognition from complacent, well-established editors. His stories can be found in Grue, Crypt of Cthulhu, Fantasy Macabre; and Fantasy & Terror. "Dream of a Mannikin, or the Third Person" appeared originally in Eldritch Tales, and then was included in Tom's collection Songs of a Dead Dreamer, published and illustrated by Harry Morris, whose magazine Nyctalops appears too seldom but is invariably worth the wait between issues.

The girl who came into my office Wednesday for a session at two o'clock said her name was Amy Locher. (And didn't you once tell me that long ago you had a doll with this same first name?) Under the present circumstances I don't think it too gross a violation of professional ethics to use the subject's real name in describing her case to you. Certainly there's something more than simple ethics between us, ma chere amie. Besides, I understood from Miss Locher that you recommended me to her. This didn't seem necessarily ominous at first; perhaps, I speculated, your relationship with the girl was such that made it awkward for you to take her on as one of your own patients. Actually it's still not clear to me, my love, just how deeply you can be implicated in the overall experience I had with the petite Miss L. So you'll have to forgive any stupidities of mine, which may crudely crop up in the body of this correspondence.
My first impression of Miss Locher, as she positioned herself almost sidesaddle in a leather chair before me, was that of a tense and disturbed but basically efficient and self-seeking young woman. She was dressed and accessorized, I noticed, in much the classic style, which you normally favor. I won't go into our first-visit preliminaries here (though we can discuss these and other matters at dinner this Saturday if only you are willing). After a brief while we zeroed in on the girl's immediate impetus for consulting me. This involved, as you may or may not know, a distressing dream she had recently suffered. What will follow, as I have composed them from my tape of the September 10th session, are the events of that dream.
In the dream our subject has entered into a new life, at least to the extent that she holds down a different job from her waking one. She had already informed me that for some five years she'd worked as a secretary for a tool and die firm. (And could this possibly be your delicate touch? Tooling into oblivion.) However, her working day in the dream finds her as a long-time employee of a fashionable clothes shop. Like those state witnesses the government wishes to hide with new identities, she has been outfitted by the dream with what seems to be a mostly tacit but somehow complete biography; a marvelous trick of the mind, this. It appears that the duties of her new job require her to change the clothes of the mannikins in the front window, this according to some mysterious and unfathomable schedule. She in fact feels as if her entire existence is slavishly given over to doing nothing but dressing and undressing these dummies. She is profoundly dissatisfied with her lot, and the mannikins become the focus of her animus.
Such is the general background presupposed by the dream, which now begins in proper. On a particularly gloomy day in her era of thralldom, our dummy dresser approaches her work. She is resentful and frightened, the latter emotion an irrational "given" at this point in the dream. An awesome load of new clothes is waiting to attire a window full of naked mannikins. Their unwarm, uncold bodies repel her touch. (Note this rare awareness of temperature in a dream, albeit neutral.) She bitterly surveys the ranks of crayon-like faces and then says: "Time to stop dancing and get dressed, sleeping beauties." These words are spoken without spontaneity, as if ritually used to inaugurate each dressing session. But the dream changes before the dresser is able to put one stitch on the dummies, who stare at nothing with "anticipating" eyes.
The working day is now finished. She has returned to her small apartment, where she retires to bed... and has a dream. (This dream is that of the mannikin dresser and not hers, she emphatically pointed out!)
The mannikin dresser dreams she is in her bedroom. But what she now thinks of as her "bedroom" is from all appearances actually an archaically furnished hall with the dimensions of a small theater. The room is dimly lit by some jeweled lamps along the walls, the lights shining "with a strange glaziness" upon an intricately patterned carpet and upon the massive pieces of antique and highly varnished furniture around the room. She perceives the objects of the scene more as pure ideas than physical things, for details are blurry and there are many shadows. One thing, though, she visualizes quite clearly as the dominant feature of the room: there is a wall that from the floor to the lofty ceiling is completely missing. In place of the absent wall is a view of star-clustered blackness, which she sees either through a great window or irrationally in the depths of an equally great mirror. In any case, this maze of stars and blackness appears as an enormous mural and suggests an uncertain location for a room formerly thought to be nestled at the cozy crossroads of well-known coordinates. Now it is truly just a lost point within an unknown universe of sleep.
The dreamer is positioned almost on the opposite side of the room from the brink of the starry abyss. Sitting on the edge of an armless, backless couch of complex brocade, she stares and waits "without breath or heartbeat," these functions being quite unnecessary to her dream self. Everything is in silence. This silence, however, is somehow charged with strange currents of force, which she can't really explain, an insane physics electrifying the atmosphere with demonic powers lurking just beyond the threshold of sensory perception. All is perceived with, elusive dream senses.
Then a new feeling enters the dream, one slightly more tangible. There seems to be an iciness drifting in from the area of the great mirror or window, perhaps now merely a windowless aperture looking out on the chilly void. Suddenly our dreamer experiences a cumulative terror of everything that has happened, is happening, or will happen to her. Without moving from her place on that uncomfortable couch, she visually searches the room for clues to the source of her terror. Many areas are inaccessible to her sight -- like a picture that has been scribbled out in places -- but she sees nothing specifically frightening and is relieved for a moment. Then her horror begins anew when she realizes for the first time that she hasn't looked behind her, and indeed she seems physically unable to do so now.
Something is back there. She feels this to be a horrible truth. She almost knows what the thing is, but afflicted with some kind of oneiric aphasia she cannot articulate any words or clear ideas to herself. She can only wait, hoping that sudden shock will soon bring her out of the dream, for she is now aware that "she is dreaming," for some reason thinking of herself in the third person.
The words "she is dreaming" somehow form a ubiquitous motif for the present situation: as a legend written somewhere at the bottom of the dream, as echoing voices bouncing here and there around the room, as a motto printed upon fortune cookie-like strips of paper and hidden in bureau drawers, and as a broken record repeating itself on an ancient Victrola inside the dreamer's head. Then all the words of this monotonous slogan gather from their diverse places and like an alighting flock of birds settle in the area behind the dreamer's back. There they twitter for a moment, as upon the frozen shoulders of a statue in a park. This is actually the way it seems to the dreamer, including the statue comparison. Something of a statuesque nature is back there.
Approaching her. Something that is radiating a searing field of tension, coming closer, its great shadow falling across and enlarging her own mere upon the floor. Still she cannot turn around, cannot move her body, which is stiff-jointed and rigid. Perhaps she can scream, she thinks, and makes an attempt to do so. But this fails, because by then mere is already a firm and tepid hand that has covered her mouth from behind. The fingers on her lips feel like thick, naked crayons. Then she sees a long slim arm extending itself out over her left shoulder, and a hand that is holding some filthy rags before her eyes and shaking them, "making them dance." And at that moment a dry sibilant voice whispers into her ear: "It's time to get dressed, little dolling."
She tries to look away, her eyes being the only things she can still move. Now, for the first time, she notices that all around me room -- in the shadowed places -- are people dressed as dolls. Their forms are collapsed, their mourns opened wide. They do not look as if they are still alive. Some of them have actually become dolls, their flesh no longer supple and their eyes having lost the appearance of moistness. Others are at various intermediate stages between humanness and dollhood. With horror, the dreamer now becomes aware that her own mouth is opened wide and will not close.
But at last, through the power of her fear, she is able to turn around and face her menacer. At this crescendo of the dream she awakes. She does not, however, awake in the bed of the mannikin dresser in her first and outer dream, but instead finds herself directly transported into the tangled, though real, bedcovers of her secretary self. Not exactly sure where or who she is for a moment, her first impulse on awaking is to complete the movement she began in the dream -- that is, turning around to look behind her. The hypnopompic hallucination that followed she claims as a "strong motivating factor" in her seeking the powers of a psychiatrist. For when she turned around in her bed, there was more to see than a dumb headboard with a blank wall above. Projecting out of that moon-whitened wall was the anterior half of a head, the face upon it that of a female mannikin. And what particularly disturbed her about this illusion (and here we go deeper into already dubious realms) was that the head didn't melt away into the background of the wall the way other post-dream projections she'd seen in the past had done; but instead, this protruding head, in one smooth movement, withdrew back into the wall. Her screams summoned a few unsympathetic eavesdroppers from neighboring apartments.
End of dream and related experiences.
Now, my darling, you can probably imagine my reaction to the above psychic yarn.-Every loose skein I followed led me back to you. The character of Miss Locher's dream is strongly reminiscent, in both mood and scenario, of matters you have been exploring for some years now. I'm referring, of course, to the all-around astral uncanniness of Miss Locher's dream and how eerily it echoes certain notions (very well, theories) that in my opinion have become altogether too central to your oeuvre as well as to your vie. Specifically I mean those "other worlds" you say you've detected through a combination of occult studies and depth analysis.
Let me digress for a brief lecture apropos of the preceding.
It's not that I object to your delving into speculative models of reality, sweetheart, but why this particular one? Why posit these "little zones," as I've heard you call them, having such hideous attributes, or should I say anti-attributes (to keep up with your lingo). To whimsically joke about them, as I've heard you do, with phrases like "pockets of interference" and "cosmic static," belies your talents as a thinker in general. And the rest of it: the hyper-uncanniness, the warped relationships that are supposed to obtain in these places, the "games with reality," and all the other transcendent nonsense. I realize that psychology has charted some awfully weird areas in its maps of the mind, but you've gone so far into ultramental hinterlands of metaphysics that I fear you will not return (at least not with your reputation intact).
To speak of your ideas with regard to Miss Locher's dream, you can see the connections, especially in the tortuous and twisting plot of her narrative. But I'll tell you when these connections really struck me with a hammer blow. It was just after she had related her dream to me. She was now riding the saddle of her chair in the normal position, and she made a few remarks obviously intended to convey the full extent of her distress. I'm sure she thought it de rigueur to tell me that after her dream episode she began entertaining doubts concerning who she really was. Secretary? Attirer of mannikins? Other? Other other? She knew, of course, the identity of her genuine, factual self; it was just some "new sense of unreality" that undermined complete assurance in this matter. (So what else is newrotic?)
Surely you can see how the above identity tricks fit in with those "harassments of the self that you say are one of the characteristic happenings in these zones of yours. And just what are the boundaries of self? Is there a communion of all things or just some things? How do animate and inanimate relate? Really boring... zzzzz.
It all reminds me of that trite little fable of the Chinese (Chuang Tzu?) who dreamed he was a butterfly but upon waking affected not to know whether he was a man who'd dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterly now dreaming, etc. The question is, "Do things like butterflies dream?" (Ans.: no. Recall the lab studies on the subject, if you will for once.) The issue is ended right there. However -- I'm sure you would continue -- suppose the dreamer is not a man or butterfly, but both... or neither, something else altogether. Or suppose... really we could go on and on like this, and we have. Possibly the most repellent concept you've developed on this subject is that which you call "divine masochism," or the doctrine of a Bigger Self terrorizing its little splinter selves, precisely that Something Else Altogether scarifying the man-butterfly with uncanny suspicions that there's a game going on over its collective head.
The trouble with all this, my dear, is the way you're so convinced of its objective reality, and how you sometimes manage to infect others with your peculiar convictions. Me, for instance. After hearing Miss Locher tell her dream story, I found myself unconsciously analyzing it much as you might have. Her multiplication of roles (including the role reversal with the mannikin) really put me in mind of some divine being that was splintering and scaring itself to relieve its cosmic ennui, as indeed a few of the more conventional gods of world religion supposedly do. I also thought of your "divinity of the dream," that thing which is all-powerful in its own realm. Contemplating the realm of Miss Locher's dream, I came to deeply feel that old truism of a solipsistic dream deity commanding all it sees, all of which is only itself. And a corollary to solipsism even occurred to me: if in any dream of a universe one has to always allow that there is another, waking universe, and then the problem becomes, as with our self-scaring Chinese, knowing when one is actually dreaming and what form the waking self may have; and this one can never know. The fact that the overwhelming majority of thinkers reject any doctrine of solipsism suggests, perhaps, the basic horror and disgusting unreality of its implications. And after all, the horrific feeling of unreality is much more prevalent (to certain people) in what we call human "reality" than in human dreams, where everything is absolutely real.
See what you've done to me! For reasons that you well know, I always try to argue your case, my love. I can't help myself. But I don't think it's right to be exerting your influence upon innocents like Miss Locher. I should tell you that I hypnotized the girl. Her unconscious testimony seems very much to incriminate you. She almost demanded the hypnosis, feeling this to be an easy way of unveiling the source of her problems. And because of her frantic demands, I obliged her. A serendipitous discovery ensued.
She was an excellent subject. In hypnosis we restricted ourselves to penetrating the mysteries of her dream. I had her recount the events of the dream with the more accurate memory of her hypnotized state. Her earlier version was amazingly factual, only one thing missing, which I'll get to in a moment. I asked her to elaborate on her feelings in the dream and any sense of meaning she experienced. Her response to these questions was more in the incoherent language of delirium than literal sense, or even dream logic. She said some quite horrible things about life and lies and "this dream of flesh." I don't think I need expand on the chilling nonsense she uttered, for I've heard you say much the same in one of your "states." (Really, the way you dwell on and in your zones of the metaphysically flayed self is appalling.)
And you, my dear, were present in Miss Locher's hypnotic statement in more than just spirit. That little thing which Miss Locher mentioned only under hypnosis, and which I temporarily omitted above, was a very telling piece of info. It told on you. For when my patient first described the scenes of her dream drama to me, she had forgotten -- or just neglected to mention -- the presence of another character hidden in the background. This character was her boss at the clothes store and proprietor of the nameless establishment, played by a certain lady psychoanalyst. Not that you were ever on stage, even in a cameo appearance. But the hypnotized Miss Locher did remark in passing on the identity of the employer of her oneiric self, this being one of the many underlying suppositions of the dream.
I found this revelation immensely helpful in coordinating my and my patient's separate items of evidence against you. The nature of the evidence, however, was such that I could not rule out the possibility of a conspiracy on your and Miss Locher's part. So I refrained from asking her anything about the relationship between you two, and I didn't inform her of what she said about you under hypnosis. My assumption was that she was guilty until proven otherwise.
Alternatives did occur to me, though, especially when I realized Miss Locher's extraordinary susceptibility to hypnosis. Isn't it just possible, sweet love, that Miss Locher's incredible dream was induced by one of those post-hypnotic suggestions, which you're so good at? I know that lab experiments in this area are sometimes eerily successful, and the eerie is, without argument, your specialty. Still another possibility involves the study of dream telepathy, in which you have no small interest. So what were you doing the night Miss Locher underwent her dream ordeal? (You weren't with me, I know that!) And how many of those eidola on my poor patient's mental screen were images projected from an outside source? These are just some of the bizarre questions, which lately seem so necessary to ask.
But the answers to such questions would still only establish your means in this crime. What about your motive? That I know very well, too well. It seems there is nothing you won't do to impose your ideas upon common humanity -- deplorably on your patients, obnoxiously on your colleagues, and affectionately (I hope) on me. I know it must be hard for a lonely visionary like yourself to remain mute and ignored, but you've chosen such an eccentric path to follow that I fear there are few spirits brave enough to accompany you into those zones of deception and pain, at least not voluntarily.
Which brings us back to Miss Locher. By the end of our first, and only, session I still wasn't sure whether she was a willing or unwilling agent of yours; hence, I kept mum, very mum, about anything concerning you. Neither did she mention you in any significant way, except of course unconsciously in hypnosis. At any rate, she certainly appeared to be a genuinely disturbed young lady, and she asked me to prescribe for her. As Dr. Bovary tried to assuage the oppressive dreams of his wife with a prescription of valerian and camphor baths, I supplied Miss Locher with a program for serenity that included Valium and companionship (the latter of which I also recommend for us, dolling). Then we made a date for the following Wednesday at the same tune. Miss Locher seemed most grateful, though not enough, according to my secretary, to pay up what she owed. And wait till you find out where she wanted us to send the bill.
The following week Miss Locher did not appear for her appointment. This did not really alarm me, for, as you know many patients --armed with a script for tranquilizers and a single experience of therapy -- decide they don't need any more help. But by men I had developed such a personal interest in Miss Locher's case that I was seriously disappointed at the prospect of not being able to pursue it further.
After fifteen patientless minutes had elapsed, I had my secretary call Miss Locher at the number she gave us. (With my former secretary -- poor tiling -- this would have been done automatically; so the new girl is not as good as you said she was, doctor. I shouldn't have let you insinuate her into my employ... but that's my fault, isn't it?) Maggie came into my office a few minutes later, presumably after she'd tried to reach Miss Locher. With rather cryptic impudence she suggested I dial the number myself, giving me the form containing all the information on our new patient. Then she left the room without saying another word. The nerve of that soon-to-be-unemployed girl.
I called the number -- which incidentally plays the song about Mary's lamb on the push button phone in my office -- and it rang twice before someone answered. This someone had the voice of a young woman but was not our Miss Locher. In any case, die way this woman answered the phone told me I had a wrong number (the right wrong number). Nevertheless, I asked if a Miss Locher could be reached at that number or any of its possible extensions, but the answering female's voice expressed total ignorance regarding the existence of any person by that name. I thanked her and hung up.
You will have to forgive me, my lovely, if at this point I had begun to feel like the victim of a hoax, your hoax to be exact. "Maggie," I intercommed, "how many more appointments for this afternoon?" "Just one," she immediately answered, and then without being asked to, said: "But I can cancel it if you'd like." I said I would like, that I would be gone for the rest of the afternoon.
My intention was to pay a visit on Miss Locher at the, probably also phony, address on her new patient form. I had the suspicion that the address would lead to the same geographical spot as had the electronic nexus of the false phone number. Of course I could have easily verified this without leaving my office, but knowing you, sweet one, I thought that a personal visit was warranted. And I was right.
The address was an hour's drive away. It was in a fashionable suburb on the other side of town from that fashionable suburb in which I have my office. (And I wish you would remove your own place of business from its present location, unless for some reason you need to be near a skid-row source that broadcasts on frequencies of chaos and squalor, which you'd probably claim.) I parked my big black car on the street I was looking for, which also turned out to be the main street of the suburb's shopping district. Harwell Ave. is its name, as you know.
This was last Wednesday, and if you'll recall it was quite an unusual day (an accomplishment I do not list among all your orchestrated connivings of my adventure). It was dim and moody most of the morning, and so prematurely dark by late afternoon that there were stars seemingly visible in the sky. Presumably a storm was imminent -- though I don't recollect our really having one -- for the air was appropriately galvanized with a pre-deluge suspensefulness. The display windows of stores had on their nightlights, and one jewelry sellers I passed twinkled with electric glory in the corner of my eye. Shivering in the stillness were the little leaves upon a row of curbside trees, each slender trunk emerging from a complex mosaic planted in the sidewalk.
Of course, there's no farmer need to describe the atmosphere of a place you've visited many times, dear love. But I just wanted to show how sensitive I was to a certain kind of portentous -mood, and how ripe I'd become for the staged antics to follow. Very good, doctor!
Distance-wise, I only had to walk a few gloomy blocks before arriving at the address I sought, the address purported to be the home of our Miss L. By then it was pretty clear what I would find. There were no surprises so far. When I looked up at the neon-inscribed name of the place, I heard a young woman's telephone voice whispering the words into my ear: Mademoiselle Fashions. A fake French accent here, S.V.P. And this is the store -- no? -- where it seems you acquire so many of your own lovely ensembles. But I'm jumping ahead with my expectations.
What I did not expect were the sheer lengths to which you would go in setting up a weird experience and revelation for your beloved. Was this, I pray, done to bring us closer in the divine bonds of weirdness? Anyway, I saw what you wanted me to see, or what I thought you wanted me to see, or some combination of the two, in the window of Mile. Fashions.
The thing was even wearing the same plaid-skirted outfit as, or one very similar to, the one worn by Miss Locher on her only visit to my office. And I have to admit that I was a bit shocked -- perhaps attributable in part to the strange climatic conditions of the day -- when I saw the head of the thing. Then again, I was looking for a resemblance and possibly made myself see an exaggerated likeness between Miss Locher (your fellow conspirator, whether she knows it or not) and the figure in the window. You can probably guess what I noticed, or thought I noticed, about the figure's eyes -- what you would have had me think of as a partially human moistness, like those metamorphosizing things in Miss Locher's dream.
Unfortunately, I was unable to linger long enough to positively confirm the above perception, for a medium-intensity shower began to descend at that point. The rain sent me running to a nearby phone booth, where I had some business to conduct anyway. Retrieving the number of the clothes store from my memory, I phoned them for the second time that afternoon. That was easy. What was not quite as easy was imitating your voice, my high-pitched love, and asking if the store's accounting department had mailed out a bill that month for my, I mean your, charge account. My impersonation of you must have been very good, for the voice on the phone reminded me that I'd already taken care of all my recent expenditures. You thanked the salesgirl for this information, apologizing for your forgetfulness, and then said good-bye. Perhaps I should have asked the girl if she was the one who helped rig up that mannikin in the window to look like Miss Locher, if indeed the situation was not the other way around. In any case, I did establish a definite link, of which I was almost sure beforehand, between you and the clothes store. It seemed you might have accomplices anywhere, and to tell you the truth I was beginning to feel a bit paranoid standing in that little phone booth.
The rain was coming down even harder as I made a mad dash back to my black sedan. A bit soaked, I sat in the car for a few moments wiping off my rain-spotted glasses with a handkerchief. I said I was becoming a bit paranoid and what follows proves it. While sitting there without my glasses on, I thought I saw something move in the rearview mirror. My visual vulnerability, combined with the claustrophobic feeling of being in a car with rain-blinded windows, together added up to a momentary but very definite panic on my part. Of course I quickly put my glasses on and found there was nothing whatever in the backseat. But the point is that I had to check in order to relieve my spasm of anxiety. You had succeeded, my love, in getting me to experience a moment of self-terror, and in that moment I, too, became your accomplice against myself. Bravo!
You have indeed succeeded -- assuming all my inferences thus far are for the most part true -- perhaps more than you know or ever intended. Having confessed all this, possibly now I can get to the real focus and "motivating factor" of this correspondence. This has much less to do with A. Locher man it does with us, dearest. Please try to be sympathetic and, above all, patient.
I have not been well lately, and you well know the reason why. This business with Miss Locher, far from bringing us to a more intimate understanding of each other, has only made the situation worse. Horrible nightmares have been plaguing me every night. Me, of all people! And they are directly due to the well-intentioned (I think) influence of you and Miss L. I'll describe one of these nightmares for you, and therefore describe them all. This will be the last dream story, I promise.
In the dream I am in my bedroom, sitting upon my unmade bed and wearing my pajamas (Oh, will you never see them). The room is partially illuminated by beams from a streetlight shining in through the window from outside. And it also seems to me that a whole galaxy of constellations, although not actually witnessed firsthand, are contributing their light to the scene, a ghastly glowing which unnaturally blanches the entire upstairs of the house. I have to use the bathroom and walk sleepily out to the hallway... where I get the shock of my life.
In the whitened hallway -- I cannot say brightened, because it is almost as if a very fine and luminous powder coats everything -- are these things lying up and down the floor, on the upper landing of the stairway, and even upon the stairs themselves as they disappear into the darker regions below. These things are people dressed as dolls, or else dolls made up to look like people dressed as dolls. I remember being confused about which it was.
But people or dolls, their heads are all turned in my direction as I emerge from the bedroom, and their eyes shine in the white darkness. Frozen -- yes, with terror -- I merely return a fixed gaze, for some reason wondering if my eyes are shining the same as theirs. Then one of the doll people, slouching against the wall on my near left, turns its head laboriously upon a stiffened neck and looking upward speaks to me. Its voice is an horrific cackling parody of speech, but even more horrible are its words. It says: "Become as we are, sweetie. Die into us." Suddenly I begin to feel very weak, as if my life were being drained out of me. Summoning all my powers of movement, I manage to rush back to my bed to end the dream.
I don't wake up until the next morning, and even then my heart pounds like anything. This very much disturbs me, for I've read studies of the relationship between nightmares and heart attacks. For some poor souls that imaginary incubus sitting upon their chest can do very real harm. And I do not want to become one of these cases.
You can help me, sweetheart. I know you didn't intend it to turn out this way but that elaborate joke you perpetrated with the help of Miss Locher has really gotten to me. Consciously, of course, I still uphold the criticism I've already expressed about the basic silliness of your work. Unconsciously, however, you seem to have awakened me to a stratum (zone, you would say) of uncanny terror in my mind-soul. I will at least admit mat your ideas form a powerful psychic metaphor, though no more than that. Which is quite enough, isn't it? It's certainly quite enough to inspire the writing of this letter, in which I now beg you to get in touch with me so that we can resolve this whole situation. I can't go on like this! You have strange powers over me, as if you didn't already know it. Please release me from your spell, and let's begin a normal romance. Who really gives a damn about the metaphysics of invisible realms anyway? It's only emotions, not abstractions, which count. Love and terror are the true realities, whatever the unknowable mechanics are that turns their wheels, and our own.
In Miss Locher I believe you sent me a concrete message of your deepest convictions, a love note if you will. But suppose I start admitting weird things about Miss L? Suppose I admit that she was somehow just a dream. (Then she must have been my secretary's dream too, for she saw her.) Suppose I even admit that Miss Locher was not a girl but actually a multi-selved thing -- pan Man, part mannikin -- and with your assistance dreamed itself for a time into existence, reproduced itself in human form just as we reproduce ourselves with an infinite variety of images and shapes, including mannikins? You would like to have me think of things like this. You would like to have me think of all the mysterious connections between different things. So what if there are? I don't care anymore.
Forget other selves. Forget the third (fourth, nth) person view of life; only first and second persons are important (I and thou). And by all means forget dreams. I, for one, know I'm not a dream. I am real, Dr. ----. (There, how do you like being anonymized?) So please be so kind as to acknowledge my existence.
It is now after midnight, and I dread going to sleep and having another of those nightmares. You can save me from this fate, if only you can find it in your heart to do so. And you must hurry. Time is running out for us, my love, just as these last few waking moments are now running out for me. It is late in the night but still not too late for our love. Please don't destroy everything for us. You will only hurt yourself. And despite your high-flown theory of masochism, there is really nothing divine about it. So no more of your tricks with strange places and communications. Be simple. Good night, and then. Good
Night, my foolish love. Hear me now. Sleep your singular sleep and dream of the many, the others. They are also part of you, part of us. Die into them and leave me in peace. I will come for you later, and then you can always be with me in a special corner all your own, just as my little Amy once was. This is what you've wanted, and this you shall have. Die into them. Yes, die into them, you simple man, you fool, you lover, you silly dolling. Die with a nice bright gleam in your eyes.