Orwell's Luck by Richard W. Jennings Read Free Book Online Page A

before using a pale yellow notebook divider and a page from a glossy magazine. Cut into a traditional heart shape, it showed a hilly countryside in full bloom, with a thatched-roof cottage in the distance and a young girl picking flowers in the foreground. At the last minute, I had decided to write the message in French, thinking this would make the valentine both more special and, to the casual uninvited eye, more private. "
Les enfants aiment se moquer d'un singe,
" I had penned in purple marker across the top, intending to say, "Kids like you are a world of fun." My hope was that he would think the same about me.
    Fate would have been kinder to me if, at that moment, it had blown up the pipeline in a boiling ball of flame. The phrase that I had so hastily and ineptly assembled from the worksheets in my notebook did not say what I thought. As I was to learn to my profound dismay in French class the following day, what I had expressed so earnestly to the tousle-haired boy was, "Children like to make fun of a monkey."
    I went home to my silent rabbit in shame.

The science of dreams
    Forget being a private detective! I decided. Forget weather! Forget basketball and trombone playing and veterinary medicine! I was now interested only in the world of dreams, in the science of them, in discovering how they work.
    There are principles that apply to motion and matter in dreams, just as there are scientific laws that rule our waking lives. The only problem is that with dreams, no one has ever figured out these principles.
    With ordinary earth physics, if you step from the edge of a cliff, you fall and hit the rocks below. Nine times out of ten, you're history. But in dreams, if you step out into space, you never die. You're always transported safely to someplace else. No matter how many times you dream of stepping off the edge, you're always saved. This is dream physics at its finest.
    In my dreams, my mother and my father do not fight, my father has a job that he enjoys, the tousle-haired boy at school is my friend, and Orwell can hop like other rabbits.
    For a while my favorite place to be was in bed. I went to school, of course, and fulfilled my obligation to care for Orwell and the family dog. But I did little else but lie upon my pillow and think about the science that applies to dreams.
    I wondered if there might not be some project I could do for the science fair this year. Some dream experiment. I knew from all my hours of thinking that thoughts can stick to things. A dream fact that was forgotten when you stepped into the bathroom suddenly comes back when you return to bed. That's because thoughts swirl around like smoke. They attach to objects, like smudges, like grime, like dust, and thus, on contact, this memory dust can be stirred back into consciousness, or something close, before it goes away.
    This was my theory. My hypothesis was that if you changed your pillow, you would change the content of your dreams. Old pillow, old dreams. New pillow, new dreams. A brand-new pillow would work to clean the windows of the mind, making dreams fresher, more vivid, clearer. A new pillow, I conjectured, would be a fresh start for the subconscious. And did I ever wish for a fresh start!
    Everything that happens in our lives is connected to everything else. It's all strung together end to end. First this, then that. Fetch the newspaper, find the rabbit. Find the rabbit, receive the messages. Receive the messages, then what?
    I didn't know.
    But messing up on the lottery and the valentine put me in bed thinking about dream science, and that, in turn, got me to wishing I had a new pillow, and the act of asking my mother to get me a new pillow caused the next thing to happen.
    Who can say if it was luck or fate?
    Who really knows the difference?

Animal magnetism
    My grandmother is as healthy as a horse. Even so, once a week she goes to the doctor, just as once a week she goes to the hairdresser and once a week she attends the sale at