Who Visits Us When We Sleep?

Sixteen Nights, One Story Each, for the Year After a Goodbye

The Questions in This Book

Why do the people we have lost come back in our dreams? Because the sleeping mind works with what it loves and misses.

Can such a dream carry a message or show the future? Reading dreams for messages or omens has no scientific basis; the old readings are told here as stories, for interest and comfort.

What did people long ago tell about these dreams? Sixteen of their stories follow, one for each night of a year.

What does sleep science know about them? Enough to make them feel less strange and more like our own.

What can we do with such a dream when we wake? Each night brings one small, calm thing to try.

If bad dreams come back night after night, or if sleep troubles go on for weeks and weigh on your days, please talk to a doctor.

Did Someone You Miss Visit You Last Night?

My brother was sitting on the stairs at two.

Did someone you miss visit you last night? I ask because it happened in our house on the first night after the funeral, and I have since learned that it happens in a great many houses. Maybe you woke with the feeling that a person had just left the room. Maybe you heard a voice you know better than your own, and then the room was only a room again.

It was early spring, and the nights were still cold enough for a coat.

I woke at two in the morning because the stairs creaked. In our grandmother's house every step has its own sound, like the keys of an old typewriter, and I knew from the note that someone was sitting on the third one. I put on her cardigan, which still hung on the back of my door, and went out. My brother was there in the dark, sixteen years old, his knees pulled up and a pair of drumsticks in one hand. He plays drums in his school band and takes the sticks everywhere, even to bed, the way some travelers keep hold of a ticket they are afraid to lose.

"She was here," he said. "In the workshop. She was fixing the blue radio, and she told me to pass the small screwdriver."

I sat down one step above him. I did not tell him it was only a dream. He knew that already, and it was not the part that mattered.

The house still kept her timetables on the wall.

Our grandmother died in the hospital on a Tuesday, a little before dawn. The night nurse, who was changing the water in a vase when I arrived, told me that she had been calm and that the window had been open a crack, because she liked to hear the buses. That was like her. All her life she rode night buses and ferries to visit family scattered along the coast, and she kept old timetables the way other people keep photographs.

After the funeral our mother took the last train back to her job far away. She would come home on Friday night, as she does every weekend. So it was the two of us in the house, with the timetables still pinned beside the kitchen door, their corners curled and her pencil marks fading on the routes she liked best.

At the funeral the neighbor who keeps bees had stood at the back in her work boots, holding a jar of honey wrapped in a cloth, and on the way out she gave it to my brother without a word. It was on the kitchen table now, next to the timetables, catching the light from the hall.

The back of the house was her workshop. She repaired clocks, radios and bicycles there, and anything else people brought her in a cardboard box. On the night after the funeral, nearly every clock on the shelves had stopped, because nobody had wound them for a week. The silence in that room was the kind you hear in a station after the last train has gone, when the platform still smells of engines and nothing moves.

My shift at the bakery started at four.

I work the early shift at a bakery, so my nights are short and oddly shaped. I sleep in the evening, wake for a while, sleep again, and leave the house at half past three while the streetlights are still on. My body has learned to wake before three without help, the way an old station clock clicks over to the hour whether anyone is watching or not. That night I had perhaps an hour before my alarm.

I could have gone back to bed. Instead I made two cups of warm milk, and we sat on the stairs, and I asked my brother to tell me the dream from the beginning.

He told it slowly, like someone reading out the stops on a route. She was at the bench, and the lamp was on. Her glasses were pushed up into her hair, and she was humming the tune she always hummed when a screw would not come loose. She did not seem ill. She did not seem dead. She seemed busy, and a little impatient with him for being slow with the screwdriver.

"Then I reached for it," he said, "and I woke up with my hand out."

I knew a story that ends almost exactly like that. It is more than two and a half thousand years old. I told it to him on the stairs that night, and I will tell it to you now.

Tonight's Story

The story comes from the Iliad, the long Greek poem about a war fought around a walled city. Near its end there is a night that has nothing to do with battles.

Achilles is the greatest fighter in the camp of ships drawn up on the beach. His dearest friend is Patroclus. They grew up together in the house of Achilles' father, where Patroclus had come to live as a boy, and they have stood side by side ever since. In the war Patroclus is killed by Hector, the prince of the walled city, and Achilles, wild with grief, kills Hector in return.

The poem does not pretend that this settles anything. Achilles still cannot rest. In the twenty-third book of the poem, after a long day of mourning, he goes away from the tents and lies down on the open shore, where the waves wash up on the sand, groaning among his own men. At last sleep comes over him the way a tide comes in, without asking.

Then Patroclus stands at his head.

The poet is careful here. The friend who comes is like Patroclus in every way: the same height, the same fine eyes, the same voice, even the same clothes. He speaks to Achilles almost as a reproach. You are sleeping, he says, and you have forgotten me, though you never forgot me while I was alive. He asks to be buried quickly, because the spirits of the dead will not let him cross the river into their country until his body has been given to the fire. Then he asks for one more thing. When Achilles dies too, their bones should lie together in one vessel, the golden jar that Achilles' mother gave him, because the two of them were raised together as boys.

Achilles promises everything. Then he says: come closer, and let us hold each other for a little while and weep together.

He stretches out his arms, and he cannot catch hold of him. The spirit slips away under the earth like smoke, with a thin, faint cry.

Achilles leaps up and strikes his hands together. So something of us does remain, he says, a spirit and an image, though there is no living mind in it. All night long, he says, my poor friend stood over me, weeping and telling me what to do, and he looked wonderfully like himself.

At dawn the men go out to the hills to cut wood for the funeral fire. Achilles keeps his promise. Standing beside the fire, he cuts off a lock of his own hair and places it in his dead friend's hands.

When I finished, my brother said nothing for a while. Then he said, "He woke up with his hands out too."

The friend in the dream looked exactly like himself.

What strikes me most in that old poem is how plainly the poet says it. Patroclus is not a shadow or a monster. He is himself, down to his clothes. It was the same thing my brother kept saying on the stairs: she looked like herself, she sounded like herself, she was impatient with him in exactly her own way.

I noticed something else on the stairs, while the milk went cold. Patroclus does not bring a prophecy or a secret. He asks for practical things: a funeral without delay, and one jar for two friends. Our grandmother asked for a screwdriver. Even in the oldest poem, the dead in dreams are busy with the same small business they had in life, like a conductor still checking tickets on the last run of the night.

People who have lost someone often describe their dreams like this. The person who died is not strange in them. They are ordinary, and that is what makes waking so sharp. You do not wake from a fairy tale. You wake from an afternoon in the workshop, and you have to remember all over again that it is over.

My brother asked me why it had felt more real than real life. I did not have a full answer that night, but I had part of one.

A dream borrows from everything we have stored.

The sleeping mind does not invent a grandmother out of nothing. It builds her from what it already holds: the sound of her humming, the angle of the lamp, the smell of machine oil, the small edge in her voice when he was slow. A dream works like a film projector that has found a drawer full of old reels. It does not play one reel from start to finish. It joins a frame from one year to a frame from another and runs them together so smoothly that the seams do not show.

Because every piece is true, the whole thing feels true.

And while we are dreaming, we rarely stop to ask whether we are dreaming. The meeting arrives without a label on it. It is like stepping off a night bus in a town you know so well that you never once wonder how you got there.

Then morning comes, or a creaking stair, and the projector stops. The light goes on in the hall. That is the hard minute, and it is the same for a sixteen-year-old with drumsticks as it was for the greatest fighter on the beach.

Many people meet the dead in their sleep.

I want to say this early, because I wish someone had said it to us that first week. Dreams of people who have died are very common after a loss, and many people describe them as comforting, even when they wake up in tears.

It does not mean that anything is wrong with you. It means that the person mattered enough to take up a great deal of room inside you, and the mind goes on walking through those rooms at night, the way a night watchman walks through a building he knows by heart.

My brother turned the cup in his hands and asked whether it would happen again. I told him I did not know. Some people dream of the person they lost many times, some once, some not for months, and none of these is the right amount.

The old poets knew it too. That is why their stories are full of these visits, and why I decided to tell them.

Something to Try Tonight

Before you sleep, put a small notebook and a pencil beside the bed, the way my grandmother kept a timetable beside the door.

If you wake from a dream of someone you miss, do not reach for your phone first. Sit up slowly. Put your feet on the floor and feel how solid it is. Then write down three things from the dream, and only three: something you saw, something you heard, and something you felt. A blue radio. The words pass me the screwdriver. Impatience, warm and familiar. Write them quickly and badly, without trying to make them beautiful.

Then breathe out slowly, a little longer than you breathed in, four or five times, like an engine cooling after a long drive. Close the notebook. You do not have to read it again until you want to. The three things are kept safe now, and you can lie down and let sleep come back on its own.

I made my brother a promise about the nights.

At a quarter past three I had to get ready for the bakery. My brother stood up and stretched, and I could see that he did not want to go back to his room alone.

He tapped the drumsticks lightly against his knee, a slow count of four, the way he does before a song begins. Then he looked up at me and waited.

So I made him a promise. On any night when one of us dreamed of her, or was afraid to, or was hoping to, I would tell him a story. It would not be a cheerful one made up to distract him, but an old story from somewhere on the world's long shelf of books, in which someone who has died comes back in a dream. Beside each story we would set whatever is honestly known about sleep, the way you lay a map beside a timetable to see how the two fit together.

"Like a series," he said.

"Like a bus route," I said. "One stop a night."

Later I wrote each of those nights down, and this is the first of them. There were sixteen in the end, from that cold spring to the next one.

The workshop clocks waited for someone to wind them.

Before I left, I went into the workshop. I do not know exactly why. Perhaps I half expected the lamp to be on.

It was dark. The clocks stood on their shelves with their hands stopped at different hours, like travelers who had each missed a different train. The blue radio sat on the bench with its back off, just as she had left it. The small screwdriver lay beside it.

I picked it up and put it in my coat pocket. Across the street, the window of the clock repairer was dark, and the whole road was waiting for the first bus. All the way to the bakery, under the streetlights, I kept my hand closed around the screwdriver, its handle worn smooth by her thumb.