Chapter Text
“I had a dream about Greg last night,” Alex said, scanning his therapist’s face for any possible signs of judgment.
“Mm hm?” said his therapist, whose face seemed to reflect nothing more than her usual, relaxed attentiveness.
Silence: for one beat, two beats, three beats.
Alex could feel a leaden weight in his stomach. His therapist had tried to help him become more aware of when he was feeling anxiety - of feelings in general - in the months they had been meeting, but he didn’t like it. Of course he had feelings; he loved his wife and his children and felt fondness and compassion for his friends, but these were orderly, expectable, acceptable feelings. Not unruly feelings you didn’t know what to do with. He had created his comic persona around hiding his need for control while sort of displaying it at the same time, but he and his comic persona were not that dissimilar, to be honest. He liked things orderly and rule-bound, and he also liked the anarchy of creativity and play that could be created within those rules. This was what his show was all about, really.
One comes to therapy to talk about one’s dreams, doesn’t one? he thought. And I can be in control here. She’s not going to force me to talk about anything I don’t want to talk about. I wish she did. No, I don’t. I do and I don’t. I don’t know where to go from here if no-one makes me.
“Where did your mind go, Alex?” asked the therapist gently. She was a sturdy brown-skinned woman with shortish hair whom Alex had chosen partly because she had a kind face, perhaps because she looked nothing like his wife, and perhaps because it seemed likely to him that she was queer - a lesbian or bisexual, maybe. Her website had said she worked with people of all sexual and gender identities. While Alex had always thought of himself as a straight man, he had noticed this, and felt like a good, open-minded straight man would want to work with exactly this kind of a therapist. He hoped she hadn’t already come to the conclusion that he wasn’t a good man.
“I don’t really want to talk about the dream. It doesn’t make me feel great to think about it. And in any case, it was nothing. Just a dream, really.”
“Sure,” she said. “You don’t have to. Although, and I might be wrong here, it sounds to me as if a part of you wants to.” After a moment, she added: “What’s the anxiety about?”
Damn. He wished he had a clipboard or an iPad he could hold in his hands so he wouldn’t have to look at his hands trembling. “It’s just… you know, it’s rather awkward. Having a dream about a coworker who I don’t even know that well, despite the… the…” He blinked his blue eyes owlishly. His therapist didn’t say anything, leaving him to complete his sentence. She was regarding him with what he hoped was a kind of a neutral fondness. Thank goodness she wasn’t as demonstrative as one of the other therapists he had had a consultation with, a Russian woman with a thick accent and eyes that rolled around in her face in a way that made her appear almost unhinged. Alex liked comedians to be unhinged, but he did not think he would like that in his therapist. (It was very strange to him to think that Jimmy Carr had trained as a therapist.)
He tried again: “Well, despite the dynamic of the show. Maybe that’s it - my unconscious got caught up in the pretend mode of the show. The whole ‘Little Alex Horne’ thing he started doing... Well, obviously I started writing the bits about living with him and being his servant or lover or whatever the…. And the audience seemed to really like it, and so we… I… kept writing more of it and he just keeps reacting to it in funny ways, and everybody laughs… although I believe I really do irritate him during the filming… but off camera he’s always fairly cordial and collegial. And tall. So… tall. Well, I guess he can’t help it, really.”
He hunched his six foot two frame a little in his chair, making himself a little smaller.
“Hmm,” said his therapist.
Alex was starting to feel irritated at himself. This is therapy, he reminded himself. I am allowed to say whatever I want here. Those are the rules: “Say whatever comes to mind. You have fifty minutes. You win by saying most of the things on your mind.”
“Well, it was kind of an…. erotic dream,” he said, “although nothing really happened. Nothing at all.” He scanned his therapist’s face again for any signs of judgment that he was a sad creep. Intellectually this made no sense to him - he was certain she’d heard more shocking confessions on a weekly basis - but apparently there were parts of him that weren’t governed by reason and logic. This far they had been talking about stress from juggling multiple projects of work and parenting, and touched very lightly on some marital issues - what he imagined was fairly usual therapy fodder for middle-aged, middle-class men seeing a therapist for the first time in their lives.
Alex had mentioned Greg, of course, talking about his show - he still wasn’t sure whether his therapist had ever seen an episode or not, but he had done his best describing the premise and some of the funniest and more challenging moments in the course of creating his very own show. He had mentioned Greg, but had certainly never mentioned having any sexual feelings towards him. Any man. She had, perhaps, let an eyebrow twitch as he was describing some of the tasks on his show that had led to him being cuddled, stripped or humiliated by the contestants, both male or female, but she hadn’t said anything. Seemingly, she was willing to wait until he was ready to talk more about his feelings around those tasks. Sometimes he really wished she would… force him a bit more.
But he knew that she wouldn’t. Those were the rules here. It was up to him to say what was on his mind. He took a deep breath, balled his hands into fists, and started speaking quite fast, to get it over with.
“We were at a party, it was one of those dreamscapes where it wasn’t any particular place in reality, and there were plenty of other people there and I was talking to them and then Him, and somehow we just kept talking and it just kept getting clearer that there was this powerful attraction between us… it kept building and building, we didn’t have to acknowledge it in words at all, it was simply… this incredible gravity that it was clear we both felt… then we were outside, in a garden by a stone wall and He was towering over me, so. fucking. big. and there was no fighting it, I had to say it to Him, ‘I want to have sex with you so badly. Right now. So, so badly!’ And He was leaning down to kiss me and I lifted my hand almost like the stupid little wave I do on the show between parts, to show my wedding ring, and said ‘But I can’t! I’m married!’ … And then I fled the garden… and went looking for my wife, and I found her. And then I woke up. And I felt so… elated and guilty and confused… and excited… and troubled. And guilty. Did I mention guilty?”
“I think you did,” said his therapist. “You feel terribly guilty about having a dream. As if you ought to be able to control your dreams.”
“Well, yes,” said Alex, “but… Yes. I feel guilty. I also just want to go back to the dream. And have a chance to do it all over again, and not stop myself this time. God, I’m so tired of stopping myself. I can’t believe I said that. Of course it’s important to be able to control oneself.”
A beat, two, three, of silence.
“A part of me knows dreams don’t hurt anyone… but what if they do?Maybe I’ll act strangely around Greg. Although I think I always act awkward around him, so that won’t necessarily be a big change. But… I don’t know, am I bisexual now? All of a sudden? In my fourties?”
“Maybe it’s not so important to rush into deciding who you are or what label would fit,” said his therapist. “It sounds like you enjoyed the dream very much even though it terrified you.”
“Yes. Yes, I did. Shit. Sorry!”
“Well, that’s something to be curious about.”
“Is it time?”
“It is. I will talk to you next week.”
“Perhaps I will have another dream,” Alex said, with an awkward laugh.
“Perhaps you will.”