The Dreamers

by Karen Thompson Walker

When one’s life seems broken beyond repair, there remains one last move: a person can at least shut her eyes.

the zombie tree. He calls it that for the kids, this ancient stump. No trunk, no branches, no leaves, just a hollowed-out stump, and yet, somehow, this stump lives on. The bursts of green in the grain of its wood—chlorophyll—are proof of ongoing life, as if this remnant of a tree is at once alive and also dead.

A symptom of delusion, he recalls, is the inability to distinguish between reality and dream.

Think of William James, one floor down, back in Philosophy, who once compared any attempt to study human consciousness to turning on a lamp in order to better examine the dark.