Illegal Dream

Several months into the class, my girls and I discovered that almost every one of us had had at least one nightmare in some form or another in which we either had forgotten to wear our veil or had not worn it, and always in these dreams the dreamer was running, running away. In one, perhaps my own, the dreamer wanted to run but she couldn't: she was rooted to the ground, right outside her front door. She could not turn around, open the door and hide inside. The only one among us who claimed she had never experienced such fear was Nassrin. "I was always afraid of having to lie. You know what they say: to thine own self be true and all that. I believed in that sort of thing," she said with a shrug. "But I have improved," she added as an afterthought. Later, Nima told us that the son of one of his friends, a ten-year-old, had awakened his parents in horror telling them he had been having an "illegal dream." He had been dreaming that he was at the seaside with some men and women who were kissing, and he did not know what to do. He kept repeating to his parents that he was having illegal dreams.
    In Invitation to a Beheading, on the wall of Cincinnatus C.'s jail, which is decorated like a third-rate hotel, there are certain instructions for the prisoners, such as: "A prisoner's meekness is a prison's pride." Rule number six, one that lies at the heart of the novel, is: "It is desirable that the inmate should not have dreams at all, or if he does, should immediately himself suppress nocturnal dreams whose context might be incompatible with the condition and status of the prisoner, such as: resplendent landscapes, outings with friends, family dinners, as well as sexual intercourse with persons who in real life and in the waking state would not suffer said individual to come near, which individual will therefore be considered by the law to be guilty of rape." .

Reading Lolita in Tehran