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My ex-friend and -guru Harvey Bell called dreams “the gibberish of profundity.” Sometimes it was “the profundity of gibberish”; Harvey was all about the music, not the words. I still smile when I think of him, grifter that he was, a short blobby Jew whose eyes grew more protuberant as he fasted down to bantam holy man trim. You’ve got to smile when you think of a professional Eastern Mystic in a turban who continued to call himself Harvey Bell.

He believed that if you hear the funniest joke in the world in a dream, and you wake up remembering “Dog walks into a bar then it rains”; and if the Dalai Lama confides the meaning of life in a dream, and what you’ve written in the notebook by your bed is “Folks needs Skittles,” you have in fact heard the funniest joke in the world and known the meaning of life. The gibberish comes from what Harvey Bell calls the “Semipermeable Membrane.” It’s the barrier between sleep and waking where the gold coins of dreams are exchanged for the slugs of idiocy. This daily gyp is necessary just to go on living. Because . . . and here Harvey, who imparted his wisdom with a certain amount of weary rote, quoted Eliot . . . because “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”

I’m thinking of Harvey and his theories because I performed the first unassisted human flight as I was coming out of a dream. I wasn’t sleeping well at the time. Rebecca was on some panels at a film conference at Ann Arbor—the Otto Preminger wars had broken out again among film scholars—and she’d taken Max to see his grandparents who lived nearby. I had to stay on to teach my classes at Northwestern, meet an article deadline, and serve on a dissertation committee, but I spent much of my time pacing the house. They’d never been gone this long. I have two Sylvia Herschel Awards for Outstanding Contributions to Criticism and Hermeneutics; just wanted you to know it wasn’t typical of me to spend an afternoon playing with Max’s soft trucks—VROOM!—or arranging Rebecca’s bras and panties on the bed in invisible-woman poses.

The fourth day I got into bed at two in the afternoon, mashing her pillow over my face to try to catch a whiff of her herbal shampoo. The next thing I remember I was sitting on the beanbag chair in the living room, facing Rebecca and Max on the couch, my friend Toby in the armchair to the left of the coffee table, a vague blur in the armchair to the right (dream specialists always perked up at the mention of the vague blur. But it neither spoke nor stirred in its chair and played no further part in the dream). “Sorry, I’m not convinced,” I said. “I think I’ve mentioned I have a little test to see if I’m dreaming.” I struggled up from the beanbag chair, took my shoes off, and stepped up on the coffee table.

Max pointed and laughed. “Get dow!” he yelled.

“Good luck keeping him off the table now,” Rebecca said, “but never mind. Let’s see the famous test.”

“Okay, move aside, please.” Before I stepped off I looked around for something dreamlike. Apparently the blur in the armchair didn’t qualify as dreamlike to my dreaming self. The daylight in the room was seething, but that was just leaves in the windows behind me. “The actual test is almost redundant. I never perform it unless I’m already dreaming.”

I heard my old friend Toby say, “Why do you get to do the test? If anybody’s dreaming here it’s me.”

“Sounds like the real Toby,” I said and stepped off. I have parsed the distinction between flying and hovering many times since that afternoon, but this was hovering. I was standing still three feet above the carpet, positioned like the cartoon character who hasn’t yet looked down. I looked down—Max’s Ernie doll gaped up from the carpet—and remained in position. It was no big deal; I’d performed the test thousands of times. I started performing the test in puberty, I might as well add, just to give those of you who haven’t given up studying me something to think about.

“This is creeping me out,” Rebecca said. She and Toby were kneeling in front of me, chopping at the air between my feet and the carpet. “What happens now?”

“I wake up.”

“Just a minute. Max wants to tell you a secret.” She lifted him up; his breath was warm on my ear, apple juice and cookies. He whispered “bzz bzz bzz.”

“That’s just pretend whispering, buddy,” I said. “You have to whisper the secret.”

“A child whispers the secret,” Toby said. “Come on, George, what kind of treacly Romanticism are you dreaming?”

The dream hadn’t quite evaporated; my figments and I avoided eye contact while we waited for it to end. While we waited, Rebecca kneeled and rubbed a Kleenex at the corner of Max’s mouth. He winced and tried to squirm away. Dream Rebecca was identical to my wife down to her dark, shiny new bob and her habit of crinkling her chin when scared or on the verge of tears. She glanced up, forced a brave closed-lipped smile, shrugged. Toby tapped his foot on the carpet and checked his watch.

That’s all I could reconstruct over the years with the aid of a therapist, a federally indicted guru, and four hypnotists. I don’t know how much extraneous material was added by the process. I’m not absolutely certain there’s even a connection between the dream and what came next.

I awoke on my side of the bed, ensnared in the blanket and sheets, my head and chest dangling over the edge. I was half-asleep—sleepy enough to wonder what might happen if I performed the test. But first I had to extricate myself. I recall thinking that I’d like to surprise Rebecca and Max with a Houdini act; one minute straightjacketed in bedding and the next . . . my writhing landed me on the carpet, still entangled. I decided to lie there for a while. My polyester pajamas itched. These were supposed to be the new polyester. The room was cool but I was covered in sweat. All I had to do to get free, I reminded myself, was sit up. Instead I flailed at my confinement, still sleepy enough to imagine I could burrow deeper and come out the other side.

At this point of my account the therapist, hypnotist, or guru would pause and say, “Ah. The other side.”

Static cling. It just occurred to me. Harvey thought my fight with the bedding was really the struggle to haul secret dream knowledge into the light of day. But I did laundry that morning and might have forgot to put in the dryer sheets.

I told myself to relax. I was like the man thrashing in quicksand, turning against the direction of the skid, flipped by my own judo. I breathed in, out. I was starting to fall asleep again. No problem, I thought, I’ll just—I punched, rolled, kicked, scratched, tore. I don’t know where this rage came from, but I was like those cartoon show antagonists I’d been watching all week, brawlers merged into a cyclone of arms, heads, stars, and exclamation points.

In the midst of these exertions I closed my eyes against a seasick feeling. I stopped thrashing, and my body—horizontal and facedown, unsupported by hands or feet or limbs—slowly touched down on the floor. I was awake enough now to wonder where it had just been.