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Excerpt | Prologue
Right now, I’m dreaming that you’re reading this. If you divide your attention and notice your thoughts as you read, you’ll see that at this moment, the following words are going through your mind: “This is strange.” See? Proof positive. Of course, you believe that you thought this phrase only because you read it, that you’re wide awake and chose to read it, and that this is starting to sound like the rattling of a mind coming off its hinges. That’s all right. Try to understand that all of these reactions are also part of my dream. From this point on, you’re a character in the dream of a storyteller you believe you’ve never met, and everything you experience while moving through these pages, including those moments when you dream that you’re awake and that I am grandiose or solipsistic or a crackpot, is part of my dream. Period. That said, we can proceed.

As a character in this story (and every dream is a story), you’re in for a bizarre jog around the block. Because unlike you—that is, the you that I’m dreaming you think you are— I’ve learned how to stay awake even when I dream, so what I dream instantly takes form and becomes real for both of us, and even affects subsequent dreams, mine and yours (“yours” being mine, too, of course—this is a language problem; we’ll be past it in a minute). Now, when you’ve finished reading this dream-story, something even stranger will happen: You will wake up within the dream. Then you’ll know that what you had called “I” was a dream-figure, and from the point of having awakened, you will already have become something else. It’s always like this: Dorothy never left Kansas, and neither have you, but we can only know we were dreaming when we wake up. Once you’re awake, you’ll be able to dream like me, without passing out first, whether in the dead of night or in full sunlight falling on sidewalks that seem so real, you can actually walk on them.

As much as I hate metaphysics, I should mention that it will help matters enormously if you remember that the word dream does not mean “not real.” Believing, as sleepwalkers do, that dreams aren’t real is no way to merrily row your boat. Besides, you miss a lot; worse, it’s cheating. We call real only those dreams from which we haven’t roused ourselves yet, that’s all. Hindsight isn’t wisdom if you’re looking straight ahead (or behind), and every dream is a dream within a dream. So, there are no lines here, only nested boxes. Sorry, I’d like to say that I didn’t write the book on all this, but I did, and you’re reading it. Anyway, this nest of boxes sits nicely inside everybody’s head, so don’t take it personally.

If you’re wondering about the reference to chameleons, I admit it’s theatrical. Dreams, when they come true, undo other dreams, and there you are, colors nicely changed to match the new surroundings. Seamless tailoring, if I do say so myself. You know, you wake up one morning and your happy marriage turns out to be a marriage you only thought was happy. A year after the divorce, you can’t honestly say that it was a marriage at all. Unless the two of you should happen to fall in love again. Life, the master magician, pulls you through its fist like a silk, and presto, everything is what it wasn’t and isn’t what it was. Sometimes it hurts, sometimes it even kills you, but there’s no use complaining; it’s always been this way. Take Oedipus Rex. Every time that goofy Greek cleared his throat he unwittingly passed the shuttle through the shed, and wove another thread of his private nightmare into being. Poor bastard probably suffered the worst case of the old cosmic turnaround that ever came down the pike, but we’re all standing in the same conga line, and I don’t see why he should get all the credit. You see, then, that nothing is safe from the annihilating hand of dreams and waking, not even the past, or rather, that slippery bar of soap we call “the past.”

Where was I? Yes, chameleons. These creatures are famous for changing color to blend in, and in this, they show us the dreamy danger of even a small suicide. That’s a nice lizard, turn green now, come on, yes, good boy, well done. The great cafeteria of the world slings this slop around ceaselessly, piles it high on the plate, and what are we really eating? Death. Self-denial, non-being, the void, nothingness, cessation, the last roundup, the bucket-kick, the daisy-push, the Final Fizzle, el kaput. It’s the poison du jour, served up hot and proper. Eat enough of this suicide-hash and before you know it, you’re a chameleon, changing color, blending in, jerking your knee as the situation requires, and as if all this weren’t embarrassing enough, actually defending this disappearing act as an inalienable right, though with the slightest self-respect, one will at least turn a little red in the face while doing it.

Red. The color of choice for depicting Satan, the color of anger and business losses and conspiratorial traffic lights. Yellow, on the other hand, is the first crayon in the box that gets broken by kindergartners keen on pleasing their parents, and is also the color of cowardice and liver ailments. We become green with envy, purple with passion—we can even get the blues. Sooner or later, it all comes down to color. You might say it’s primary.

But before you get too comfortable with the symbolism, let me throw a chameleon into the works. The symbol itself changes color, you see. One moment, the chameleon represents suicide, crowd-consciousness, the relinquishing of identity, people-pleasing, the Zelig syndrome. Then, even as we watch, it diffuses into its opposite: adaptability, spontaneity, the flush of creative infusion, the epiphany of endorphins, the Muses, the gods. Such color-changes signal the presence of an irrepressible truth, a waking rather than a sleepwalking, like the blush that suffuses the young woman’s face when the young man she secretly fancies, unable to hold himself back any longer, finally tells her that he loves her, how much he has always loved her. Or so it seems on the Wednesday in question.

So, dreams both are and are not chameleons, depending on which color the symbol has taken. Dreams are not chameleons in that they know what they are, and are what they are whether you like it or not, and cannot be intimidated or bought or made to do poodle tricks against their nature. You can cite the latest book on dream symbols, you can ignore a dream, you can figure it out or fantasize about it or blink it away, but you’ll never get it to put on a gray flannel suit, gray being the monocast of the corporate chameleon, who gives up even his ability to change color, poor thing. But dreams are chameleons in that they are wild and hard to catch and alive with color and quick-change artistry. They specialize in the unexpected, and when we muster the courage to consciously slip through the door of a dream, we can’t be sure where we’ll end up—or, to paraphrase that sly Taoist, Chuang Tze, whether we’ll awaken to find that we’re humans dreaming that we’re chameleons or chameleons dreaming that we’re human. Or that it makes a shade of difference.

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Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury
If you put a chameleon on something red, it will explode, yes? Have I stated it fairly? All right now, this myth, which provides the statutory basis for the case before you, originated among white children here in South Africa, as in other states where color has been particularly worrisome. As you can imagine, many a bewildered chameleon in Cape Town has been plucked off a tree by an enterprising schoolboy eager to put it to the test. To date, there is no case on record of any of these delinquents having succeeded in their attempts to confirm the exploding-chameleon theory, though I heard of one lad who became so frustrated by the reptile's refusal to discharge, that he fired a pellet gun at it, getting pretty much the same result. Obviously, the prosecution did not bring an indictment against the boy—a problem of habeas corpus , that one. But many chameleons, thousands before and since, including my client, have been dragged into court to stand trial for the crime of not exploding as expected, and those of us entrusted with arguing and interpreting the law should be able to read the handwriting on the wall. These lizards, whose only desires in life are to bask in the sun unmolested, roll their eyes, and practice marksmanship with their tongue on annoying insects, have suffered shameless prejudice and cruelty at the hands of so-called civilized human beings in the name of a heartless justice that we cannot, in good conscience, leave unexamined or unremedied any longer.

The evidence has shown beyond doubt that the charge of maliciously refusing to explode on a red surface is completely unsubstantiated, and so real justice demands acquittal. As several witnesses have testified, my client was abducted by a pack of marauding schoolboys and, against his will, slapped down on the red tin roof of a squatter's camp lean-to, whereupon no explosion ensued. Now, the prosecution would have you believe that my client was criminally negligent since, as the popular wisdom has it, chameleons, when placed on something red, are supposed first to turn red themselves and then blow up without so much as a by-your-leave, and my client did neither. This failing, the prosecutor argues, is a clear breach of the law. And the punishment for this crime, as we all know, is death by explosion.  

Now, it takes little intelligence to realize that by this law and its enforcement, we are committing an unconscionable wrong against the poor chameleon, similar to the despicable acts that were considered good and right and even divinely sanctioned during the witch hunts of the seventeenth century, a time rightly regarded as an indelible blot on the history of jurisprudence. Imagine: A woman suspected of consorting with the devil was lashed to a boulder and pitched into the nearest river. If she floated, she was adjudged guilty of sorcery and condemned to death by drowning; if she sank, she was considered to have been innocent. So much for due process. Of course, such lunacy, wearing the robes of justice and truth, has afflicted the world since much older times, under the Code of Hammurabi, for example. Torquemada used similar tactics, extorting confessions through torture, the darling. So did Ropespierre. Yes, we have seen this sort of "justice "many times—the justice of Hitler's tribunals and Stalin's gulag interrogations, the justice dispensed by the Khmer Rouge and certain Arab and Latin American governments of late, the self-serving and situational justice of the so-called superpowers. In each of these examples, we recoil from the presumption of guilt, from the cruel efficiency of legalized murderousness and complete disregard for protection of the innocent. In each, we feel the terror of what it would be like to live in a world where being accused of a crime was considered tantamount to having committed it, and where the method of trial amounted to little more than a formal hearing to determine whether the left or right hand would carry out the sentence.

But I have digressed. Let me come straight back to the point, then. The real criminal on trial today, ladies and gentleman, is the law itself. The prosecution will claim that this is histrionic and an avoidance of the issue, that to indict the law itself is an infernal diversionary tactic of desperate defense barristers, a romantic notion borrowed from dreamers, from bleeding-heart liberals and poets and revolutionaries, and set upon normal and right-thinking people such as ourselves to no good end. But I ask you to consider that it is we who are dreaming, we who are asleep. Wake up, my friends! For we are in danger. While we sleep, we dream that we are awake, and in this living dream we may commit many heinous acts and believe by them to secure our virtue. Shall we put to death an innocent on the authority of children's fairy tales and a law that is no wiser? Shall we murder Creation's gentlest creatures simply because they were not given by their Creator the means to fulfill our idiotic expectations? No, we shall correct our children and our laws and our own thinking. We shall wake up, and by waking up, save ourselves and my client from a grievous miscarriage of justice.  

The path before us is clear. It is not the chameleon's fault that we humans have this notion—-that simply because it can change certain colors under certain conditions, it therefore can and should turn red and self-detonate according to our bidding. It is not the chameleon's fault that it is abducted and oppressed and sold into slavery and hacked up at will by human beings for its skin or its meat or the entertainment value of bullying something small and helpless. It is not the chameleon's fault that it does not explode when placed on a red surface, nor that the law and the prosecuting attorney who would punish it for not exploding construe this as a "failure to explode." It is not the chameleon's fault that it is kidnapped and tormented by children with mercenary grins and vacuous eyes under the approving nod of their parents, their peers, and the judiciary. And it is not the chameleon's fault that the State seeks to put it to death for its unwillingness to commit suicide on demand according to the dictates of a deranged legality that is itself guilty of criminal negligence in following not facts, but folklore.

You must, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, find in favor of my client, and establish here, today, a new precedent for all similar cases to follow. You are about to decide not only the fate of a single chameleon, nor even the entire species of chameleons, but our own fate, as well, for no society that persecutes the innocent will escape its own hands for long. I thank you for your diligence in this serious matter and urge you to acquit my client of all charges, as justice demands.

The jury returned a verdict of not guilty. On the following day, the chameleon was eaten by a house cat.