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connection which no sane person will consider seriously, if he is wise.
Albert Moreland was, and perhaps still is, a professional chess player. That fact has an important bearing
on the dream, or dreams. He made most of his scant income at a games arcade in Lower Manhattan,
taking on all comers the enthusiast who gets a kick out of trying to beat an expert, the lonely man who
turns to chess as to a drug, or the down-and-outer tempted into purchasing a half hour of intellectual
dignity for a quarter.
After I got to know Moreland, I often wandered into the arcade and watched him playing as many as
three or four games simultaneously, oblivious to the clicking and whirring of the pinball games and the
intermittent reports from the shooting gallery. He got fifteen cents for every win; the house took the
extra dime. When he lost, neither got anything.
Eventually I found out that he was a much better player than he needed to be for his arcade job. He had
won casual games from internationally famous masters. A couple of Manhattan clubs had wanted to
groom him for the big tournaments, but lack of ambition kept him drifting along in obscurity. I got the
impression that he thought chess too trivial a business to warrant serious consideration, although he was
perfectly willing to dribble his life away at the arcade, waiting for something really important to come
along, if it ever did. Once in a while he eked out his income by playing on a club team, getting as much
as five dollars.
I met him at the old brownstone house where we both had rooms on the same floor, and it was there that
he first told me about the dream.
We had just finished a game of chess, and I was idly watching the battle-scarred pieces slide off the
board and pike up in a fold of the blanket on his cot. Outside, a fretful wind eddied the dry grit. There
was a surge of traffic noises, and the buzz of a defective neon sign. I had just lost, but I was glad that
Moreland never let me win, as he occasionally did with the players at the arcade, to encourage them.
Indeed, I thought myself fortunate in being able to play with Moreland at all, not knowing then that I
was probably the best friend he had.
I was saying something obvious about chess.
 You think it a complicated game? he inquired, peering at me with quizzical intentness, his dark eyes
like round windows pushed up under heavy eaves.  Well, perhaps it is. But I play a game a thousand
times more complex every night in my dreams. And the queer thing is that the game goes on night after
night. The same game. I never really sleep. Only dream about the game."
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Then he told me, speaking with a mixture of facetious jest and uncomfortable seriousness that was to
characterize many of our conversations.
The images of his dream, as he described the, were impressively simple, without any of the usual
merging and incongruity. A board so vast he sometimes had to walk out on it to move his pieces. A great
many more squares than in chess and arranged in patches of different colors, the power of the pieces
varying according to the color of the square on which they stood. Above and to each side of the board
only blackness, but a blackness that suggested starless infinity, as if, as he put it, the scene were laid on
the very top of the universe.
When he was awake he could not quite remember all the rules of the game, although he recalled a great
many isolated points, including the interesting fact that quite unlike chess his pieces and those of his
adversary did not duplicate each other. Yet he was convinced that he not only understood the game
perfectly while dreaming, but also was able to play it in the highly strategic manner of the master chess
player. It was, he said, as though his night mind had many more dimensions of thought than his waking
mind, and were able to grasp intuitively complex series of moves that would ordinarily have to be
reasoned out step by step.
 A feeling of increased mental power is a very ordinary dream-delusion, isn't it? he added, peering at
me sharply.  And so I suppose you might say it's a very ordinary dream."
I did not know quite how to take that last remark, so I prodded him with a question.
 What do the pieces look like?"
It turned out that they were similar to those of chess in that they were considerably stylized and yet
suggested the original forms architectural, animal, ornamental which had served as their inspiration.
But there the similarity ended. The inspiring forms, so far as he could guess at them, were grotesque in
the extreme. There were terraced towers subtly distorted out of the perpendicular, strangely asymmetric
polygons that made him think of temples and tombs, vegetable-animal shapes which defied
classification and whose formalized limbs and external organs suggested a variety of unknown
functions. The more powerful pieces seemed to be modeled after life forms, for they carried stylized
weapons and other implements, and wore things similar to crowns and tiaras a little like the king,
queen and bishop in chess while the carving indicated voluminous robes and hoods. But they were in
no other sense anthropomorphic. Moreland sought in vain for earthly analogies, mentioning Hindu idols,
prehistoric reptiles, futurist sculpture, squids bearing daggers in their tentacles, and huge ants and mantis
and other insects with fantastically adapted end-organs.
 I think you would have to search the whole universe every planet and every dead sun before you
could find the original models, he said, frowning.  Remember, there is nothing cloudy or vague about
the pieces themselves in my dream. They are as tangible as this rook. He picked up the piece, clenched
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his fist around it for a moment, and then held it out toward me on his open palm.  It is only in what they
suggest that the vagueness lies."
It was strange, but his words seemed to open some dream-eye in my own mind, so that I could almost
see the things he described. I asked him if he experienced fear during his dream.
He replied that the pieces one and all filled him with repugnance those based on higher life forms
usually to a greater degree than the architectural ones. He hated to have to touch or handle them. There
was one piece in particular which had an intensely morbid fascination for his dream-self. He identified it [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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