Dream of a Manikin by Thomas Ligotti

 
 

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.