There was a man who could not tell his memories from dreams. At a job interview he was asked if he had ever dropped a class because he thought he might fail it. He replied that he had dropped out of calculus at U.C. He couldn't keep up because he was working full time and taking thirteen credits. He didn't get the job and he wondered if his candidness had lost it for him. Then he started to think and it occurred to him that he had taken all the calculus he ever had in high school. In his memory of failing, he remembered the class room as big and old and airy with metal grooves in the floor for subdividing the space. No California class room. He was remembering Peddar's Lane Primary half a world away. An anxiety dream remembered as fact had cost him a good job.
``I dreamed that failing dream,'' he thought, ``I've dreamed that dream a lot of times - I've made it real. Maybe I should call that interviewer - no, I'd look even worse. A person who can't tell dream from reality - who'd hire such a person?''
He began to go over other remembered events of his past life. Had he pulled a gun on his ex-wife that bad night? Had she fainted and did he run out into the street screaming ``Help, I just shot my wife!'' Yes. No oddities in this memory. The street, the house, the frightened children in their Winnie-the-Pooh PJs.
His favorite memory of Hawaii - the one he told over and over, of swimming with the sea turtles in the warm dark night. But in his memory the ocean was illuminated with a soft green light. Surely not. Surely just a dream of sea turtles.
He started writing down his dreams as soon as he woke, but he knew that others were slipping by him. The ones he didn't remember. The ones that went direct to dream memory.
He found himself telling a woman at work that he had played baseball in the minor leagues - he was so shocked at himself - what could he say to her? ``Oh, I was just remembering a dream.''
``It shouldn't really matter,'' his girl friend said, ``None of it is real anymore. The past and past dreams - all that should have no value. It's just who you are and what you can do that should count.''
But the man felt that he was going mad. He went to a psychiatrist, but the psychiatrist was no help at all. He seemed a little irritated.
``Just look on all life as a dream,'' the psychiatrist said, ``and stop worrying about it.''
So the man lived a dream life from then on. Nothing really surprised him - it was all a dream after all- and his gentle laughter rang through the empty streets as he wandered naked to the bus stop one morning.