As convoluted
and multifaceted as an intricate Chinese box puzzle, Dream of a Manikin
features a psychoanalyst writing a letter to his psychoanalyst wife
regarding one of his patients, a young lady by the name of Amy Locher,
the same name as one of the dolls his wife had when she was a little
girl. Also, the narrator lets his wife know that Amy told him directly
that she, his wife, recommended him as a therapist.
The narrator
conveys the details of their session: Amy, a loan processor for a bank,
tells him about her recurrent dream: how she works in a fashionable
dress shop, has a complete biography as a dress shop employee and how
she feels herself a slave to dressing and undressing the shop’s
manikins, manikins that become the focal point of her animus.
Sidebar:
"Animus" is a term used in the psychotherapy developed by Carl Jung,
animus representing the masculine inner personality of a woman. By this
specific term and others cited in Ligotti’s tale, it becomes clear both
the narrator and his wife are Jungian analysts.
Amy tells the
narrator/therapist how she is overwhelmed by anxiety when dressing the
manikins and when she, as dress shop employee, returns to her apartment
in the evening and has a dream where she retains her identity as manikin
dresser and dreams her bedroom is transformed into a archaically
furnished hall the size of a small theater. However, one of the walls of
the theater is missing; instead, there is a star-filled blackness. In
the supercharged silence, peering in the direction of this starry
blackness, she senses an unseen demonic presence. Icy coldness envelops
her and she grasps how she cannot look behind her - and something is
definitely behind her!
No sooner does she become aware
of this fact than she realizes she is, in fact, dreaming. With this
heightened awareness, she now thinks of herself in the third person. And
not only does she have this realization but the words "she is dreaming"
becomes more pronounced and insistent, almost as if these three words
were a legend written at the bottom of her dream, three words she hears
repeated as if on an old phonograph record.
Then, all of a
sudden, Amy’s weird dreams becomes weirder: As if a flock of birds
settling on a statue, all those repeated phrases "she is dreaming"
settle on a phantom statue, a statue she can’t see but she can certainly
feel standing directly behind her. At this point, she wants to scream
but she can’t since the statue’s firm right hand covers her mouth. Then,
the statue’s left arm stretches out and its left hand dangles some
filthy rags, making the rags dance before her eyes. The statue speak,
telling her “It’s time to get dressed, little dolling.”
Amy can
only move her eyes; she looks away from the dancing rags and sees for
the first time her room is filled with people dressed as dolls, their
bodies collapsed and their mouths wide open. The people do not look as
if they are still alive, not at all - some of them instantly become
actual dolls while others occupy a stage between humanness and
doll-ness.
With horror, Amy realizes he very own mouth is open
wide and will not close. Also, at this very moment, she realizes she can
turn around and look at the menacing statue behind her. And she does:
in the dream Amy wakes up to her very real loan processor self in her
very own bed. In a state of bloodcurdling shock and as an attempt to
completely and totally break the spell of her nightmare, Amy turns
around to look at the chalk white bedroom wall behind her. To her
wide-awake astonishment, she sees the face of a female manikin, a face
that very smoothly, very slowly, recedes back into the bedroom wall. Amy
screams so loudly several of her apartment neighbors become alarmed.
The
narrator notes how Amy’s dream has much in common with his wife’s own
exploration of the occult and Jungian depth analysis. For example, he
tells her how she is continually classifying extrasensory pockets of
hidden realities as “little zones” or “cosmic static.” Then,
acknowledging how such occult studies are truly bizarre, he warns his
wife she is taking the discipline and science of psychology too far.
Returning
to his patient, the narrator relates Amy’s reaction to her recurrent
dream, how the dream is so powerful she begins to question her very own
identity: Is she a loan processor or is she really an employee of a
dress shop? Or, some other identity? Amy’s newly acquired sense of
“unreality” is causing her serious emotional instability. The narrator
then links Amy’s emotional instability and sense of multiple selves with
his wife’s theories on this subject, especially her theory of a "bigger
Self," that is, a cosmic transpersonal masochistic jumbo self that
enjoys tormenting all its little splinter selves.
The narrator
tells his wife he finds her theories and such ancient notions of life as
nothing but a dream both boring and absurd, notions reminding him of
that famous Chinese story of a man who has a dream where he is a
butterfly and then wakes, prompting him to question if he is a man who
dreamed he was a butterfly or if he is a butterfly who is now dreaming
he is a man. Totally ridiculous, even silly.
After listening to
her recurrent dream, their therapy session continues and Amy practically
demands that he, the therapist, put her under hypnosis. The narrator
acquiesces to her plea and what he discovers and relays to his wife is
not pretty. Turns out, by his patient’s testimony under hypnosis, he
uncovers something extremely unsettling: Amy relays how there is a
hidden, unseen presence in the background of her recurrent dream, a
deep, undercover agent: the domineering boss of the clothing store, a
boss who is played, as if within a theatrical play, by a certain lady
psychoanalyst. And Amy gives the name of that lady psychoanalyst – his
wife’s name!
Now the narrator has substantial evidence that
points to how perhaps Amy and his wife are in a conspiracy against him.
Or, then again, perhaps his wife as psychotherapist is using Amy as an
unknowing subject for her own psychological experiments with
post-hypnotic states or questionable forays within the realm of dream
therapy. The session ends and our narrator/psychiatrist prescribes a
tranquilizer and then sets a time for Amy’s next session. However, the
following week, when Amy fails to show up for her scheduled appointment,
the narrator conducts his own secret investigation of Amy’s background,
and to this end, drives to the address she provided as her home
address.
Turns out, the address is not residential but
commercial, specifically, the address is of a fashionable dress shop, a
dress shop that has in the window, to the narrator’s horror, a manikin
with the same exact plaid dress Amy wore to her one and only session
with him. And the eyes, oh, those manikin eyes, have an eerily familiar
gleam. Alarmed beyond belief, thinking more conclusive evidence must be
gathered, the narrator disguises his voice on a phone call to the store.
Horror of horrors - the narrator discovers this fashion shop is exactly
the very one where his wife purchases her cloths!
At this point
the narrator feels a vague sense of paranoia coming on. In subsequent
nights, he begins experiencing a series of horrible nightmares, a
repetition of seeing the hallways of his own house lined with either
people dressed up as dolls or dolls dressed up as people, all with that
eerily familiar fixed gaze. Still in his dream, he returns their gaze
and wonders if his own eyes are equally fixed. One of the doll-people
beckons to him: “Become as we are, sweetie, Die into us.” He wakes with a
start and begins to scream.
The tale continues, the strangeness
and eeriness is ratcheted up again and again. Was Amy a manikin all
along? Is he a real human psychotherapist or only a sophisticated
human-looking doll manipulated by a higher sadistic intelligence?
This is my very favorite Ligotti tale. I highly, highly recommend.
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