Memories of My Dreaming Men

So I have this thing, where I like to watch men while they sleep. And, yes, I’m perfectly aware that that is the kind of sentence that will have even my best friend connecting this fact with the suicidal goldfish I had in college, and the numerous Barbie decapitations that occurred during my childhood, to ultimately conclude that I have all the textbook qualities of a notorious serial killer – but I promise, I’m not a creep. There is just a simple, authentic, and sweet impression about a sleeping man that, try as they might, they can never manage to tap into when they’re awake. Quiet and vulnerable, their breathing steady, their arms always poised to receive, and their guards shamelessly down in mid-dream, they suddenly are fundamentally incapable of even the easiest deceptions, of being and appearing anything but earnest.

As the girl who makes it her business to sniff out lies and the rat bastards who pass them around, this moment  in the dark is more than a relief – it’s a hopeful promise that deep down, in even the most deceitful guy, there’s something innocent, boyish, and real living just beneath the surface. It’s this moment that’s completely intimate in a way that no amount of physical contact can replicate – so intimate that it requires only one person to actually be awake.

I’m almost positive this “benevolent, harmless, and passive Peeping Tom” mentality was not what Gabriel Garcia Marquez was aiming to channel when he wrote Memories of My Melancholy Whores, but nevertheless, the sensibility is the same (but, you know, clearly I’m not equating my sleeping men with whores…obviously). Marquez’s protagonist is an aged writer, promiscuous in his youth, who on the eve of his ninetieth birthday, finds love for the very first time in the paid company of a sleeping young virgin. He barely touches her, and he certainly doesn’t make love to her, in any sense or manner of the phrase. He simply watches, barely moving, barely blinking, as the girl stirs and moves in and out of the recesses and stages of sleep. He names her for himself, pieces together a pastiche of her personality based on trivial observations on her appearance and her clothes. He continues to see her again and again, in the same capacity each time, and in this way falls madly in love with her, without a single shared word or a single shared glance. To him, she is her complete self when reclined, nude and dreaming, not necessarily because she cannot shatter for him any of his perceptions, but more because she cannot hide herself with personal defenses and shields.

Marquez’s question, then, is whether reality can still be reality when it exists mostly in one’s mind – and, moreover, whether or not it even matters where reality exists, so long as it has the irreversible impression of being more real than everything else. If a man believes himself to be in love, who can argue with him, no matter the circumstances?

The last man I watched sleeping, I watched a year ago, his face turned to me, lips slightly parted and anticipating a trademark smirk, one arm splayed out, fingers uncurled, hands apt for catching things. I knew exactly who he was, when he was asleep. But the difference that time, in comparison to all the others, was that when he woke up, his face turned to me, his lips were still parted, he did smirk, his fingers did reach out, his hands did catch mine. He looked the same. So I guess you can say he’s my favorite.

Jayne Wilson writes fiction about the likes of decapitated gnomes, compulsive hoarders, and sardonic old men. She laughs pathetically at her own jokes and is generally an impish mess. She graduated from the University of California, Davis in 2010 with a degree in English-Creative Writing.