Harlan Ellison's "The Function of Dream Sleep"

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]Wheel a genre, the show for readers who feel that cold wind a tickling their ribs at the midnight hour. Right now we are reading every story in the weird anthology by Jeff and Anne Vaneir, including this one, Haron Ellison's the function of dream sleep. I'm Zach and this week I'm really interested in Harlon Ellison his his like more mature years. I don't know why, but this felt like texturally very very different than the other examples of Harlon Ellison that we've read together in this long long spin of the wheel.

[00:00:34]I'm Bob and I this story is very near and dear to my heart, Zach, because I'm asleep right now. Uh, you know, it reminds me that he is maybe writing this later, too. And I think we can see that in a lot of these scenes. It's like it's directly from experience and he's just putting things into the story. What a fascinating uh very similar story to what we've read from him before, but also like you said, more mature. And I'm really interested in how it's similar to a lot of Philip K. Dick ideas because we've been reading lots of Philip K.

[00:01:05]Dick. And I'm curious, are these gaping open mouths like the empathy boxes >> from Android Stream of Electric Sheep?

[00:01:14]>> Interesting. Interesting. Well, a little background on this story. It was a Hugo finalist in 1989, a Bram Stoker nominee for 1998, and it won the 1989 Locust Award for best novellet. And the title of it comes from Francis Crick and Graeme Mitches's 1983 article in Nature magazine called the function of dream sleep, which proposes that dreaming helps remove quote undesirable models of interaction in the brain, weakening certain traces rather than reinforcing them. Or in other words, uh, dreaming helps the mind unlearn or clear harmful patterns.

[00:01:55]It's very interesting story where a lot of dream theory is put in here. We have Freud, we have Jung, we have Dr. Sir Francis Crick as you just talked about and it seems like this story is trying to say its own dream theory as well. We have a character who see named Lonnie but seems to maybe be a stand-in for Harlon. We have a doctor's visit. We have these weird, strange jumping dreamlike sequences that are real for the character. Sometimes questionable as to whether they're a dream or not.

[00:02:27]Sometimes seem to be a blackout and come back to consciousness experience. But we also have these very strange things that seem supernatural happening. And we also seem to enter into a totally new world through dreaming. It is a puzzling and kind of almost mesmerizing story like looking into what are those called? A kaleidoscope like the the thing that goes around and around and around.

[00:02:54]>> I like the kaleidoscope image. I think that part of that kaleidoscope aspect for me was that I felt like the story continually was changing the the genre presentation that it was giving us or like the situation felt like it was constantly coming into different stories that I've heard before. The the protagonist, the narrator voice felt very very stable. You know, this was a stable, trustworthy protagonist that we could follow all the way through. But when you get into these shifting scenarios that Ellison is giving us, you know, a mouth opening up in your body, you know, uh, right in your rib cage that is exhaling this wind. To me, it feels like we are doing a body horror story. It feels like something that David Croninberg could have written.

[00:03:42]Actually, there's a classic uh David Croninberg image, right, with the the the VCR tape being pushed into someone's body uh and it opens up like a like a VCR player.

[00:03:57]But we also get, you know, when he when he talks to the the dream therapy group and they invite him to the secret, you know, the secret dream group, >> we're met with these people who have this kind of special power to absorb the trauma and pain of other people.

[00:04:18]And to me, it felt like, you know, each one of them had their own like physical characteristic, their own physical traumas that you could see clearly on their body.

[00:04:27]It felt like we were in a superhero story or an X-Men type thing. You know what I mean? Like super secret knowledge speculative fiction where it's like actually there's a secret world of people behind the scenes who all have this this this power. Very very different vibe, very very different world that we're building from the body horror beginning. And then finally with the last twist of the kaleidoscope, the introduction of this lab character, this kind of foil character, >> total mad scientist. I felt like I was suddenly watching a black and white 1940s horror film, you know, from uh the olden days of Hollywood or maybe even someone like Herbert West, you know, Reanimator, the the HP Lovecraft story and and movie. How did you feel about like the movement between these different scenes and settings and feelings? Did it feel smooth to you?

[00:05:24]Were you jarred by it at all? Did it even register like it might even be, you know, sewn together in any way or did it feel smooth? I don't really have a good reason why. But it reminds me a little bit of um I have no mouth and I must scream, but almost as if that were turned inside out.

[00:05:39]>> You know, here he's got a big mouth that's right in the middle of his chest.

[00:05:41]But it also feels to move again just like dreams. we're shifting as if there are things that are slightly associated uh you know or going from one to the other or we're also shifting suddenly in time. There seems to be kind of like that weird tracing back phenomena of a dream where it's almost like as if you suddenly realize you're in a dream and you kind of leave the dream place but you're still in that dream coming back.

[00:06:06]It is structured just like what is being talked about. What I mean is when the dreams are brought up and you as you said Dr. Sir Crick uh after Freud, after Jung, after the soothsayers, uh they bring up this guy and they say it's just like uh what do they call it? Like cleaning up a room or something like that, getting rid of things and um disposing of them slowly. It feels like kind of a disposal process until um maybe it's because we're reading so much Gnostic fiction, we get into some sort of um truth where Dr. Lebras and this weird creature that seems to have caused LeBraw been caused by Lebras is tied up with or at least living in this same strange world with Dr. Lebras and it comes out and says what this is is the than mouth. You've hit the true deep uh secret about dreams and here it is. It's very horrifying and we have kind of stepped slowly back into that horror like falling into a dream I guess.

[00:07:13]>> Yeah. Wow. I really like what you're saying about it feel well it does feel like a dream. I think I did read at one point that some part of this maybe the mouth did begin with a dream that he had but if you told me this entire narrative was a dream narrative that he dreamed the whole thing and then sat woke up and wrote it down. The movements feel very dreamlike to me. especially like the dark turns of when we meet Lebras and >> you know this uh this creature. I I like LeBraz as a kind of foil. Like if the idea that we're working with here is you have to let go of your traumas and I we haven't even talked about the kind of background of like not only the main character but Harlon Ellison was reeling from several deaths of friends and family very fast pace um and the idea behind the story is you know you need to well okay so the broader psychological principle I'll say is you need to let go of people you need to grieve them and and naturally and not move on but just kind of like let them go. You know what Ellison is doing is kind of elevating this to a universal principle of of reality. You know what I mean? We have a substance within us called grief and we have a hidden psychic mouth that when we sleep exhales all that grief out. And what happens if you don't exhale that grief out? Well, you'll do something you do something crazy like this mad scientist character who brought his wife back and look what horrible thing happened when he did that. No, that's the wrong thing to do. The right thing to do is grieve and process naturally. And the only reason why this main character has not been able to do that is because his sleep has been interrupted. He has not slept because he's so sad from all of the tragedies that are happening. And therefore he finds himself in this like uh strange occult pickle.

[00:09:18]What a place to be in. Deprived asleep and in a strange occult pickle. Someone let me out of the jar. I'm pruning. Um yes, I think. And what a great image too. This idea of grief. You know these this the gritted teeth. Like if you don't let go of your grief grief, you're going to have these teeth that are just gritting and holding everything in inside of your chest. And it feels like clenching your teeth, you know, keeping everything there. And then finally exhaling, the breath comes out and the grief goes away. And I think it's a great image too. We have that creature which not sure, but it seems to be maybe it's what his wife turned into. this creature that is kind of wandering around in the room and seems to be almost kind of amorphous. This thing that has so many joints in its arms, it can move its arms in different directions. It looks extremely burned.

[00:10:10]You can't really tell where its mouth is. We have this idea of these memories of someone uh or this wanting to hold on and not grieving and not exhaling. And when it gets trapped, it turns into this this creature. It's a lot like the crawler creature of the the first book in the Southern Reach series, Annihilation. This this enormous creature that can deliver so much pain.

[00:10:33]It seems to be in charge, but it also is so impossible to look at, so um like malformed or disfigured that you can't even see or really tell what it is. And that is that process of keeping the teeth clenched and keeping that inside >> the teeth clenched. Okay, I like the image of the teeth clinch, but I was wondering the whole time while I was reading it, why a mouth? You know what I mean? Like for for the process of grieving, he could have used any image.

[00:11:05]Uh, you know, a wound is probably a pretty good like very literal image of a uh, you know, grief or like psychic trauma. An eye maybe weeping a single tear or something like that. What does a mouth mean to you? You know, I I had a hard time grasping like this symbolic like what's going on with it.

[00:11:28]Let's read this.

[00:11:31]I'm a mess. I'm a mess. Sorry. I want to read this quote because I think it will give us a strong image to see what it looks like and then we can kind of see maybe why choose a mouth. But he describes this. So, uh, this man has been dreaming. Lonnie's been dreaming of this mouth and so he goes to the doctor and said, "Look, come and check this out." But it just seems to be like this kind of not even a scar, just kind of slight irritation of the skin. The doctor says, "Look, there's nothing wrong with you." But when he when he dreams and when these other people experience the mouth as well, it's described like this. He had seen the mouth. It lay across the ribs vertically just below his left nipple, running down to the bulge of fat parallel to his navl. down his left side there had been a lipless mouth filled with teeth and it had been opened to permit a breeze of something to leave his body. It makes me feel of the idea of um grieving or mourning or finally letting go and having to exhale having to sigh and let all of that go. So for me it feels like a an interesting decision also just having it here like when you are so upset about something nervous about something refusing to let go of something you feel tightness here like in your heart we often talk about that and to have this passageway to need to open up and let it out it feels appropriate maybe it's the image of the teeth that kind of sent me down the wrong path right because I think when I see the teeth I imagine something consuming him >> or you know what I mean like >> uh something aggressive something that is uh in some way a predator and maybe that's you know >> maybe part of what's going on here I think is that >> the imagery is being pulled from like uh I don't want to say stock but kind of like archetypical images archetypical images of the weird a big open mouth swallowing and consuming things if you if You see a mouth on the side of your body. I assume that what it's doing is ingesting things in, but I forget about the many other functions of the mouth, including breathing in and out. And it feels to me like that's such a quiet and meditative and um like peaceful, you know, a peaceful view of the mouth that maybe because it's Harlon Ellison and I've read so many like violent and disgusting stories from him that I was just expecting this story to go in a in a much different direction.

[00:14:04]But I guess speaking of the many expectations we bring to a Harlon Ellison story, you know, one of the reviews I read of this from uh Kirus Kirkus review, it started out so they were reviewing the whole collection that this came in.

[00:14:20]>> Um it says 17 fairly recent stories from the script writer, essaist, lecturer, new wave guru, movie critic, and prodder of complacent psyches.

[00:14:32]And I got kind of stuck on that line because well I I want to ask you, do you feel like this time around he's like particularly interested in proddding complacent psyches in the way that he was uh during the entirety of the Dangerous Visions run or maybe during I have no mouth and I must scream.

[00:14:53]I was wondering the same thing, Zach, if this, you know, if if it used to be I have no mouth and I must scream. This is like I thought, oh my god, I found a mouth and I need to learn how to sigh.

[00:15:01]Um, but this it makes me think too what he gets accused of most. So proddding psyches, but also and other authors will say this too is he's running his mouth off, >> right? Aron Ellison is a big mouth and he said lots of interesting things. He did lots of amazing things, but I think he got himself in trouble sometimes. Uh, you know, I mean, he's really good at arguing and he would say things and I think offend people. But another thing that's very interesting is that he wrote 17 as you were just talking about how much he was writing and this is another collection. Is he different? He wrote 17,000 stories essays and whatever he wrote 17,000 when they wrote that in the introduction.

[00:15:46]>> I was like I was like I don't >> has to be a misprint.

[00:15:49]>> That can't be right.

[00:15:53]>> It's insane. I don't think I've written 17,000 days.

[00:15:58]>> Yeah, you'd have to write like five stories a day, six stories a day. Um, but to think of the the the tradition of, you know, saying a story out loud, but now Harlon Ellison is writing a story, that doesn't really connect really here. But the idea of Haron Ellison always needing to speak, always needing to do something, always needing to produce, but also getting in trouble for running his mouth off. It feels interesting that the image for death or the image for moving on or the image for processing death is also going to be gritted teeth until the teeth can open up and the um spirit or whatever is inside uh can move out. And I think to bring it back to uh the story itself, you know, so he has a mouth, but then when we meet this kind of superhero group, all of these people with different maladies who live up in San Fernando Valley, like looking over it, they eventually as Lonnie goes to sleep, they also experience the mouth. And so uh I think her name is Anna. She says this mouths in each of us opened and the wind it just it just hissed out of us.

[00:16:56]Each of us and the pain we held. No, that they held. I'm just their contact for the world. They can't go anywhere.

[00:17:03]So I go and shop and bring and do the pain. They absorbed it. Took some of them. And then she just goes on goes on.

[00:17:09]These different people around us, they won't live. I know they have all had mouths open up suddenly in them. And they have this strange experience. And that is after they've told us of what they normally do. They are like pain processors or kind of absorbers of different diseases to let people suffer less. But they have suddenly had this mouth of Thanoos open up into them. I think it's interesting to have passed this um exhale along. So now they all are doing it and it kills most of them, right? Like it it it is severely >> violent and traumatic.

[00:17:47]>> You know, this this moment in particular I thought was like written for TV in a really interesting way. Actually the the feel of this I felt like I was reading like a movie script in many ways. like not not a not a disc by any means, but like I feel like his later style to me feels extremely vision forward, image forward, and very cinematic in its pacing to where I felt like it, you know, if I was uh I mean, if I was him, I'd be sending this one off to like script development, you know, get get this thing to Hollywood. But that moment I thought would was particularly fitted to film. This idea that someone, you know, comes to you and says, "Go to sleep." And then your eyes shut and then your eyes open and a significant amount of time has passed and everyone around you who was previously sitting is now either dead or bleeding or missing fingers or burnt. And it was just like, oh my gosh, what a moment.

[00:18:41]>> Carnage.

[00:18:42]>> What a moment.

[00:18:44]>> What do you think then of this this this talk of the other side? So the creature has been um talking about how LeBro made the wrong decision to try and bring his wife back. says, "Uh, I went to the machine. I sought the aid of the circuit and the chip. I was cold and could never stop crying. I missed her so much it was unbearable," says Lebras. And the creature has told us that this is why he's trapped here and that he should not have interrupted uh sleep. But it's interesting that Lonnie goes into this other side after having this this idea of breathing out and processing something and being able to move on and that dreams do not really mean anything.

[00:19:23]They are what what the creature says is um they are what permits us to live.

[00:19:27]They flinch the mind of that which dismays us. But then we actually go to what seems like the other side.

[00:19:35]You know, the creature and the doctor, they've all said that sleep does not the dream world is not a real world. It's just a recycling of images that get dumped out so you can um relax while you sleep. It's just a biological process.

[00:19:50]Well, part of the denum of the story, right, is this idea that there is a function to the exhaling which helps the people who have died move on in the afterlife. like there's a sense in which uh they are incomplete until we can release them from ourselves and that gust of wind travel like goes to them in some way. It's very it's just a throwaway line, but I thought it was extremely interesting, you know. Um I think it builds off the idea that those who are dead live on in the memories of those who remember them, you know, but it's like in this model, what it's saying is actually those who remember them need to in a certain sense let go of those memories and process and move on with with life and respect them. But but let them go because physically a piece of that person whatever piece of that soul was living within them appears to return to the source with the person who has died. Um I thought that was really really interesting. But I want to ask you, um, if we're put in this place, this spectrum of like, you know, loving the dead too much is bad and >> and grieving and moving on is good. Uh, do you is that like consoling to you? Is that horrifying to you? Like where do you sit between between this pole this polarity, right? this polarity between we need to forget about the dead and move on which the story is saying or a kind of more like romantic vision of like you know we must we we must remain true to those who have passed on before us you know we must keep our bond keep our word and keep them in our memory forever remain reverent to those who have moved on before us feel so intensely ambivalent and I think this story even though it seems to come out on one side I think it feels feels so weird in that same kind of ambivalence of uh you know lots of supernatural stories are about dealing with the dead.

[00:21:59]We have zombie stories. We have vampire stories. We've been reading all sorts of stories that have to do with what happens after you die. And here the idea of letting go of someone so completely that you forget them is deeply troubling. That's going to happen to us in like two generations.

[00:22:17]No one will know who we were. You know, can you remember your great great grandfather's name or your great great great grandfather or grandmother's name?

[00:22:25]>> I can't.

[00:22:26]>> No one. Yeah. See, no one's going to remember us in two generations. And that's deeply troubling. Uh but it feels inappropriate, too, to just let go of those memories. But this is such an interesting idea of that that memory itself. If you want to keep it enclosed or if you want to keep it in a bell jar or whatever it is that you want to do with it in that preservation, it might sulify. It might rot and it might turn into this kind of monster that's going on. It's disturbing, but there might be a bit of a grain of truth in there, too.

[00:22:55]If you hold too dearly onto something without letting it change over time, it might turn into uh something repressed in a way, something sick that will come back out worse.

[00:23:08]>> Yeah. Yeah, I think that Ellison is like fundamentally on the right path here.

[00:23:13]You know what I mean? Like I I I you know, for me it doesn't it doesn't really bother me at all that I'll be forgotten in two generations. Maybe less. You never know. You never know.

[00:23:24]But like, you know, I think it's kind of like freeing in a sense that it's all just kind of transitory that it's all just uh like a like a dream, you know? You fade in and you fade out. And hey, maybe you'll fade back in again, you know, if uh that great wheel of Samsara keeps on turning. You never know. You never know.

[00:23:42]Uh but I I think I agree with Ellison and I've seen this with you know people in my life where you know after after the death of someone you know they can really hold on to them in ways that I don't want to say are limiting because that's limiting isn't the right word but in a way that I think like is like trying to cling on to sand that's falling between your hands. You know what I mean? there's no way to grasp onto it. It's it's an impossible task.

[00:24:14]And I think that, you know, it comes from a place of uh of course grief, loss, insecurity, wanting to hold on to something. But I think that Ellison is on the right track of gesturing towards the idea that it's all transitory.

[00:24:37]But I read something that I want to read to you that throws a little bit of complication on this.

[00:24:47]Or rather maybe not complication but it questions whether you know what you know if the insight is good whether this was the right form for the content being expressed here. I'm going to read from uh Ellen Wild and Gary K. Wolf's book called Harlon Ellison, The Edge of Forever, which they kind of seems I I was reading through it. It's kind of part biography, kind of part critical appraisal. Here's what they say. The main problem is twofold. In the first place, the bizarre image of the mouth serves as an image not of McGrath's pain and loss, but is of his refusal or inability to process mature grief, a refusal or inability that results in the injury of or death of several people. In second place, the structure of the story seems inappropriate for the tale of suffering. McGrath is presented not as an individual of extraordinary sensitivity, nor even as a job-like figure, but rather as a figure of power.

[00:25:46]His progression follows that of any number of science fiction wishful fulfillment fantasies involving secret masters from A. Vanvox, Jimmy Cross to Frank Herbert's Paul at Trades, who realize that something is different about themselves, seek assistance, and find themselves working their way through increasingly secret tiers of power until they arrive at the final stronghold of secret masterdom. And I'm going to skip ahead while they give a summary of the plot because they end with this idea. It is not at all dramatically convincing that McGrath's grotesque encounter with Labraz's tortured, disfigured wife should somehow release him from his grief. But it is consistent with the science fiction hero whose final prize is self-nowledge.

[00:26:26]Grief alone does not earn heroic status.

[00:26:30]However, so here's my question for you and it got me thinking after I read this.

[00:26:35]Is there anything heroic about overcoming grief? Or maybe to flip the question slightly, should the overcoming of grief be cast as a hero's journey? The first thing that comes to mind is when we were reading Dangerous Visions, I watched an interview that I think was from Dark Dreamers with Harlon Ellison, I think a few years before his death. And he tells a story about why he's doing all this, you know, because it comes up, well, why have you written 17,000 stories? But he says legacy.

[00:27:08]And he gives a story about his doctor calling him. He said, "Uh, look, my heart's not feeling that great." He says, "Well, okay, your heart's not feeling that great, Harlen. You you've like had hurts." He's basically saying, "You have to come in right away. Right away, right away." And he said, "No, I'm I'm fine." Then his wife calls the doctor, said, "No, call him again. You need to convince him to come into the hospital right now." And Har Har Har Har Har Har Har Har Har Har Har Har Har Har Har Har Har Har Har Har Harland said he refused because he was in the middle of a draft and he didn't want to forget the idea. He needed the story to come out to be able to uh get that legacy. He said, "That's part of it. I need to make these things uh a part of me and leave that legacy behind me. I think it's interesting to grieve yourself or to see all of the people around you dying. Know that you will die too, hoping that you will not forget them, but also hoping that you will not be forgotten and signing your name onto so many stories, keeping them alive. I hope we don't ever forget Harlon Ellison, but eventually everything will be forgotten. And it seems like a shame because there's so many important things and so many important people that we hope won't be forgotten, but you know, millennia go by and people will just inevitably be forgotten. I think that's all true. I I I mean, but it's not all loss, right? It is a constant process of renewal. Like just because one person fades away and their life's work is inevitably lost to time, meaning is not lost. New people are born, new lives are created, new works are created. Often works that are more receptive and more fitting with the time period that people are making them, right? Like I wonder I wonder if creating 17,000 works of art like in a sense what he's doing is he's searching for his immortality you know pill his sorcerer stone he's saying if if just one of these will be one that can stand the test of time if I can write my Homer's Odyssey or you know what what think of any story that is uh as old as you know all h you know human civilization. If I can just do that, then I will have lived forever. It's chasing of glory in a very Greek sense.

[00:29:24]But is it humorous? I don't know. I don't know. And when you tell me things like, oh, you know, he needs to go to a hospital, but he has to get this idea down for his short story, you know, it feels like in the chase for immortality were actually um neglecting those things that make life healthy and worth living and uh are just like the foundation of of good living, of taking care of ourselves.

[00:29:56]I don't know. Uh, you know, I'm I'm not here to condemn or, you know, agree with anything about Harlon Ellison. That's really not what I'm trying to do. But, you know, when you have a story that deals with life and death and how to deal with life and death so explicitly, I think that, you know, I think it's all on the table for trying to answer for ourselves individually, how do we respond to this story? How do we feel about it? How does it change us?

[00:30:24]It makes me feel like I've got a big giant mouth in my chest. So, I'm going to make a doctor's appointment tomorrow.

[00:30:32]>> I have a big mouth and I must dream. All right, I'll talk to you later.

[00:30:36]>> Oh, that's what I should have said. Talk to you later, Zach.