The Daydreamer by Ian McEwan

Author:Ian McEwan
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781409096337
Publisher: RHCB

‘Oh well,’ the friend said. ‘I could just pinch myself and it would hurt and I’d wake up.’

‘But suppose,’ the first girl said. ‘Suppose you were just dreaming that you pinched yourself, and you just dreamed that it hurt. Everything could be a dream and you would never know …’

They turned the corner and were gone. Peter stopped to think. This was an idea he himself had half formed, but he had never put it quite so clearly. He looked about him. The library book in his hand, the bright, broad corridor, the ceiling lights, the classrooms off to the left and right, the children coming out of them – they might not be there at all. They might be no more than thoughts in his head. Right by him on the wall was a fire extinguisher. He put his hand out and touched it. The red metal was cool beneath his fingers. It was solid, real. How could it not be there? But then, that was how it was in dreams – everything seemed to be real. It was only when you woke that you knew you had been dreaming. How was he to know he was not dreaming the fire extinguisher, dreaming the red, dreaming the feel of it?

The days passed and Peter thought more about this problem. He was standing in the garden one afternoon when he realised that if he was just dreaming the world, then everything in it, and everything that happened in it, was caused by him. Far above him an airliner was beginning its descent. Sunlight flashed silver on its wings. The people up there who were straightening their seat backs and putting away their magazines could have no idea they were being dreamed by a boy on the ground. Did this mean that when a plane crashed it was his fault? What a terrible idea! But then, if that were so, there were no real plane crashes any- way. They were just dreams. Even so, he stared at the plane and wished hard that it would make it safely to the airport. It did.

One night, a couple of days later, Peter’s mother came into his bedroom to kiss him good-night. Just as her lips touched his cheek he had another thought. If he was dreaming, what would happen to his mother when he woke up. Would there be another mother, more or less the same, only real? Or someone completely different? Or no one at all? Viola was rather surprised when Peter put his arms round her neck and wouldn’t let go.

As the days passed and Peter turned the problem over in his mind, he began to think that it was probably true that his life was just a dream. There was something quite dream-like about the way the children streamed into school in the mornings like a human river, and the way his teacher’s voice floated around the classroom walls, and the way her skirt stirred as she moved across to the blackboard.

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