Do People Everywhere Treat These Dreams the Same Way?

The longest night of the year began before five o'clock.

Many people believe that a dream of someone who has died is met in the same way everywhere. You wake with a strange weight in your chest and say nothing to anyone. By lunchtime you have pushed the dream out of sight, the way you push a suitcase under a bed.

That is not how it works, and it never has been. Some families tell these dreams at breakfast, between the toast and the school bus. Some light a stick of incense and set out a cup of tea for the visitor. Some keep the dream folded inside them for years and never say a word about it. Many old traditions do not treat a visit from the dead in a dream as a problem at all. They treat it as a guest who has come in on the night train, tired from the journey and welcome at the door.

I learned how many ways there are on the longest night of the winter.

It was already dark when I woke from my afternoon sleep. On bakery days I start at four in the morning, so my nights begin in the middle of the afternoon. In winter I often get up into a darkness that looks exactly like the one I went to bed in. The kitchen window was black. The bus shelter across the street had frost on its roof, and the clock repairer's shop beside it showed a single lamp, bent low over his bench.

My brother was at the kitchen table with his phone lying flat in front of him. He turned it around so I could see. Our cousin had sent a photo from the hospital: a small red face in a white blanket, eyes shut tight against the bright new world. A girl, born that afternoon, healthy and loud, the message said.

We looked at her for a long time without speaking. Then my brother said the thing he had been carrying home from school.

My brother's friend had never told her mother her dreams.

He had spent the afternoon at band practice with his friend from the band. During a break, sitting on an amplifier case with a bottle of water, she had asked him whether he still dreamed of our grandmother. He said yes, quite often, and that he told me about the dreams at breakfast.

"She looked at me like I'd said we eat breakfast on the roof," he said. "In her house nobody talks about dreams. She dreams of her dad sometimes. She told us in our hall in the spring, but she has never told her mother. Not once."

He wanted to know which of our two houses was doing it wrong.

I told him that neither house was. A dream is not a train that can run on only one track. The same kind of dream comes to grieving people all over the world, most often in a way that feels kind. What changes from house to house is not the dream itself. It is what people do with it in the morning. Every station on a long line has its own platform, its own clock and its own voice announcing the trains.

In our house we tell. It began on the first night after the funeral, when my brother sat on the stairs at two in the morning, and it has never really stopped. We report our dreams the way the radio reports the weather: briefly, in plain words, before the kettle goes cold. In his friend's house dreams are kept, and keeping is also a way of looking after something. A dream that is told can be shared and carried by two people. A dream that is kept stays exactly the shape it had, like a ticket that nobody ever punched.

The neighbor sets out a cup of tea for her visitor.

Later that evening I took a loaf of bread next door. The neighbor who keeps bees was standing in her yard with a torch, brushing snow off the lids of her hives with a gloved hand. The bees were inside, packed close around their queen, keeping one another warm through the dark months.

I asked her, because it was the longest night and because she had known my grandmother for most of her life, what she did when she dreamed of her husband.

She said she lit a stick of incense on the shelf by the window and made two cups of tea, one for herself and one for him. She drank hers and let his go cold. "He comes so seldom now," she said. "When he does, I like him to know the kettle is still on." Her family had always done it that way, she told me, and her mother before her.

Three houses, and three different timetables for the same kind of night.

Tonight's Story

When my brother came down again with his hair still wet, I told him the story I had been saving for the longest night. It is less a single story than an old idea, told in many families across East Asia for a very long time. In Chinese there is a phrase for it that means, roughly, to entrust a dream. The dead, the idea goes, can place a dream in the keeping of the living, the way you might hand a parcel to a bus driver and ask him to leave it at the next village.

What strikes me most is how small the parcels are. In these stories the dead seldom come with grand announcements. They come with errands. A grandfather appears to his grandson and says that his roof is leaking. The family climbs the hill and finds that the rain has washed earth away from his grave. A mother appears to her daughter and says that she is cold, and the daughter burns a set of paper clothes for her, as the custom is, so that the warmth can travel to wherever she has gone. A father appears and asks only for the dish he liked best, and the next day it is cooked and set out on the table with the chopsticks laid neatly beside the bowl.

Similar ideas live in Japanese and Korean stories, where a dead parent may stand at the pillow of a sleeping child. The visit is not a haunting. It is closer to a letter from someone who has moved far away and still needs a few small things sent on.

I like what this idea does to the morning. The dreamer wakes up with a job to do, and nobody has to sit alone with the dream. The whole family takes the errand together, like passengers on a ferry who all lean the same way when the boat turns.

A saga from the cold north tells it another way.

Then I told him about Gísli, because a story is easier to see when it has a neighbor.

Gísli's saga is one of the old sagas written in Old Norse, the language of the people who settled the islands of the far northern sea. Gísli is a hard, brave and unlucky man. He kills a man to avenge his wife's brother, who was also his closest friend, and for that he is made an outlaw. For many years he lives in hiding, moving from one secret shelter to another, and his wife stays loyal to him through all of it. During those years, he dreams.

Two women visit him in his sleep, and the saga calls them his dream-women. One of them is kind. She shows him a hall where fires are burning and tells him the fires stand for the years he still has to live. She gives him plain advice, to turn away from old hatreds and to be gentle with the poor and the weak. She also speaks of a fine place where he will one day be at rest. The other dream-woman is grim and comes with dark pictures, and Gísli wakes from her visits shaken. He turns his dreams into short verses and speaks them aloud to his wife in the night, and she listens.

These dream-women are not his family. They do not come to ask for a favorite dish or a warmer coat. They arrive from somewhere outside his life to talk about his fate, and the saga lets them stay strange.

The two stories run on very different lines.

My brother said the two stories felt like two kinds of radio. One was a local station, with a familiar voice asking you to pick up some milk. The other was a signal from far away, crackling between stations, hard to tune and full of weather.

I thought that was right. In the East Asian idea, the visitor is someone you know, and the dream turns into a small family task that everyone shares in daylight. In the saga, the visitors are unknown, and the dream turns into a poem that one frightened man tells his wife in the dark. Yet both stories refuse to throw the dream away. Both give it somewhere to go after waking. It goes to the hillside, to the kitchen, to a verse, to the ear of someone who loves you. That, I think, is what every tradition is really for. It is a track laid down so that a dream has a place to arrive.

I also told him what I have read about sleep, plainly and without dressing it up. Our sleeping minds build dreams from our own memories and feelings. The old stories may say that the dead send the dream, and I tell them as stories, but the dream itself is made in the dreamer.

Our mother remembered whose habit it was.

Our mother called at nine, from the platform where she waits for the late train on Fridays. I could hear the announcements behind her voice. I told her about the baby first, and then about the three timetables.

She was quiet for a moment. "You know where the breakfast telling comes from," she said. "Your grandmother did it every morning, for as long as I knew her. She told her dreams the way she read out the bus times. Short and exact. Then she went to open the workshop."

I had not known that. I had thought my brother and I invented it on the stairs in the spring.

"She never made a fuss of it," our mother said. "A dream was just part of the news. Then the train came, and I had to go."

My brother asked what she would send us to do.

"Then if she entrusted us a dream," my brother said, "what would she ask for?"

We made a list at the table, half laughing and half not. Oil the hinge of the workshop door before it squeaks the whole house awake. Pump up the tires on the old bicycle in the hall. Put the bus timetables back in their drawer, in order of route, not in a heap. Take the night ferry once, just to watch the harbor lights slide away behind the stern. Do not leave a radio half taken apart on the kitchen table, because the small screws always vanish.

That last one was for my brother, and he knew it.

I told him that none of these were messages from her. They were what we knew of her, stored in us like routes on a map. Our memories have learned her errands by heart, so when we dream of her, the dream already knows what she would say. That does not make the list smaller. If anything, it makes it ours to keep.

The longest night is the hinge of the year.

Before bed I went into the workshop. The clocks along the wall were still stopped at the different times they had stopped at in the spring, each one a station where a train had once called and then gone on. The repairer across the street had taken two of them away in the autumn and brought them back mended. Those two ticked softly in the dark, out of step with each other, like two people walking home from the same bus.

From tomorrow, each day would be a little longer than the one before. Not by much. A minute or two at first, the way a long train begins to move so slowly that you only notice when the platform has already slipped behind you.

On the other side of town, I thought, the new baby was asleep in her first night of the world, and in the kitchen my brother's phone lit up once more with another photo of her yawning.

Something to Try Tonight

This is a small way to choose your own platform for a dream, so it has somewhere to arrive if it comes.

Take a card or a scrap of paper and finish one sentence: "If I dream of someone I miss tonight, in the morning I will …" Then choose one ending that feels right for you. You might tell the dream to one person at breakfast. You might set out a cup of tea or a glass of water for a minute before you drink your own. You might write the dream down and fold the paper away without showing anyone.

There is no wrong choice among these, because every one of them is a way of caring for the dream.

Put the card where your morning begins, by the kettle or beside your phone. Then lie down, breathe in slowly while you count four, breathe out while you count six, and do this five times. Let the room grow quiet around you, the way a waiting room empties after the last bus has left.

When you wake, you will find the card waiting where you left it, and you can do what it says or simply let it rest there.