What Do We Say When We Wake?

The dream came on a night when the ice began to thaw.

Many people believe that a dream of someone who has died must be decoded before it can mean anything. Somewhere, they feel, there is a key: a dream book, a wise relative, a website with long lists, where a clock or a river or a red coat stands for one fixed thing. Until you have looked it up, the dream is a locked box.

There is no such key. Reading dreams has no scientific basis, and the old dream books are best enjoyed as stories, the way you might enjoy an old map with sea serpents drawn in the corners. A dream is not a coded telegram waiting for the right machine to print it out. Its meaning is something the dreamer makes, afterwards, by telling it, writing it down, drawing it, or simply turning it over in the light. The dream brings the pieces. The waking person decides what to build.

I found that out from my own dream, at the end of the winter.

All year it had mostly been my brother who dreamed of our grandmother, and I who listened. I had caught her mostly in fragments: a hand on a door, the smell of machine oil, her voice from another room saying something I could not quite hear. Then, on a Thursday night late in the winter, when the ice on the gutters had started to drip, she came properly.

I carried the dream through a whole shift without saying a word.

My alarm went at three, as it always does on bakery days. I lay in the dark with the dream still around me, the way warmth stays in a train carriage after everyone has left.

I did not tell anyone. My brother was asleep, and I did not want to wake him just to say, "I saw her." So I dressed, walked to the bakery through the wet streets, and carried the dream all morning like a sealed envelope in my coat pocket.

The streets were black and shining with melted snow. The first night bus of the morning passed me almost empty, lit from inside like a long lantern, and I thought of her riding buses like that all her life, a flask of tea in her bag and the timetable folded small in her pocket. I wondered whether she had ever dreamed on those buses, and whom she had seen.

At about six, while we were shaping loaves, the baker asked why I was so quiet. I told her only that I had dreamed of my grandmother at her workbench, mending a clock.

She nodded and kept her hands moving in the flour. Her aunt, she said, had owned a thick book of dream meanings and looked up everything in it, from teeth to trains. "Clocks would be in there," she said. "Do you want me to ask her what it says?"

I thanked her and said no. I did not want a page in someone else's book to tell me what my own grandmother had been doing in my own sleep. I wanted to find out by saying it aloud first.

Our mother came home that evening on the Friday train. After supper the three of us stayed at the kitchen table, and I told them.

Tonight's Story

That night, the story I told was not an old one. It was mine.

In the dream I came into the workshop from the garden door, and it was early evening in summer, though I knew it was really winter. The long window was full of orange light. My grandmother sat at her bench in her grey work coat, the one with the burn on the sleeve, and she had the back off the little brass carriage clock, her last unfinished job, which used to stand on the kitchen shelf.

Around her the workshop was exactly as it used to be, not as it is now. The radios on the top shelf had their backs on. The old bicycle leaned against the wall with both tires full. On the hook by the door hung her bus pass on its faded ribbon.

She did not look up at first. She was holding a pair of tweezers very still above the movement, waiting for something. I came and stood beside her, the way I used to when I was small and had to keep my hands behind my back.

Inside the clock the wheels were bright and clean. I could see the escapement, the part the clock repairer had once opened up to show my brother. She touched it with the very tip of the tweezers, and its little anchor began to rock.

Then she looked at me over her glasses and said, "There. It only needed someone to start it." She put the clock in my hands. It was warm, as if it had been sitting in the sun.

That was all. I woke with the ticking still in my ears and the warmth still in my palms, and for a moment I did not know which room I was in.

When I finished telling it, nobody spoke. Our mother had her hand flat on the table, as if she were feeling for a tremor in the wood. My brother turned his cup round and round.

Old mornings had their own rules for telling dreams.

After a while my brother asked whether people in the past had done what we were doing, telling dreams at a table and wondering what they meant. I said they had, in many ways, and told them about two that I like.

The Talmud, the great collection of Jewish teaching written in Hebrew and Aramaic, has a long discussion of dreams. One saying in it compares a dream that is never interpreted to a letter that is never read. Another says that dreams follow the mouth, meaning that the way a dream is spoken about afterwards shapes what it comes to mean. It also describes a custom for someone troubled by a dream. That person tells it to three friends, and the friends answer together that it is good, and they turn the dream toward good with their words.

In old Japanese folklore, people told of the baku, a creature said to eat bad dreams. Someone waking from a frightening dream could call on the baku to eat it, and pictures of the creature were sometimes kept near the pillow.

Even one of the oldest dream books that survive whole, written in Greek nearly two thousand years ago by a man called Artemidorus, did not treat dreams as a simple code. He traveled widely, talked with the dream readers who worked in marketplaces, and collected a great many dreams. Again and again he said that the same dream could mean different things for different dreamers. A rich man and a poor man, a sailor and a farmer, might see the same picture in their sleep, and he would read it in two different ways. Even he, who wanted a key, kept finding that the dreamer's own life was the lock.

What these customs share, I think, is that they do not leave the dream alone in the dark. They bring it into the morning, into speech, among people who are listening. The meaning is not dug out of the dream like a stone. It is made in the telling, the way a route is made by the people who keep taking it.

My brother wanted to know what my dream meant.

"So what does yours mean?" my brother asked. "The clock. Her starting it."

I reminded him of what the photo albums had shown us at the end of the summer: a dream is stitched together from fragments of many different years, like reels from different journeys spliced into one strange evening. The brass clock really did stand on our kitchen shelf. The grey coat with the burn is real and still hangs in the workshop. The orange summer light came from some evening years ago. Her words, as far as I know, she never said in that order.

So the dream does not carry a message that I have to decode correctly. It carries pieces of her, and pieces of me. What it means is what I decide to do with them.

Our mother said quietly that most of the clocks in the workshop had been stopped since the spring. Only the few the repairer had mended were going.

I said yes. Maybe that was what the dream was about, or maybe it was only what I chose to make of it. Either way, I liked the choice. A dream, I told him, is a little like a box of parts on her bench. The parts do not tell you what to build. You look at them, you turn them over, and in the end your own hands decide.

Our mother had been carrying a dream of her own.

When I had finished, our mother took off her reading glasses and folded them on the table. She said that she had been carrying a dream since the autumn and had not told anyone, not even us.

In her dream she was at the old bus station in the middle of the night. Our grandmother stood under the departure board in her winter coat, reading the timetable with one finger, the way she always did, moving from line to line as if she were tracing a river on a map. When our mother came up beside her, our grandmother found the right line, tapped it twice, and said, "That one. That's yours." Then the dream ended.

"I didn't know what it meant," our mother said. "I kept thinking I ought to find out. Then I stopped thinking that."

My brother asked what she had decided.

She said she had decided it meant she could take the earlier train on Fridays. She had asked at work in the new year, and they had said yes, and since then she had been home two hours sooner every weekend. "Maybe that isn't what the dream meant," she said. "But it's what I made it mean. And I'm here for supper now."

I had noticed the earlier trains. I had not known there was a dream behind them.

Something to Try Tonight

This is a way to make your own meaning from a dream, without any dream book.

Take a sheet of paper and fold it into three, like a timetable leaflet. In the first panel, draw where the dream happened. In the second, draw who was there. In the third, draw what was in someone's hands. Stick figures are fine. Nobody else needs to see it.

Then give the dream a title, in your own words, as if it were a short film. Mine was "The Brass Clock in Summer Light."

If the dream was a hard one, you are allowed to add something to the last panel that was not in the dream at all: a lamp switched on, an open door, a bus with its lights glowing at the stop. The drawing is yours, not the dream's, and you may decide where it ends.

Last, say the title aloud once, to someone you trust or just to the room. Lie down, breathe slowly, and let the paper sit on the table until morning.

Not every winter night was as gentle as this one.

I should say plainly that this year was not all warm clocks and quiet tables. There were weeks in the winter when my brother hardly spoke at meals, and nights when I sat up after my shift without a reason to be awake. Grief is not a straight road, and some stretches of it are long and uphill.

If grief stays very heavy for a long time, or if you ever have thoughts of harming yourself, please talk to a doctor or a counselor, and in an emergency contact the emergency number where you live straight away.

Talking to someone is not a sign that you have failed at grieving. It is closer to asking a station guard for directions when the board has changed and the platform is crowded. Our mother said that she had done it herself, in the autumn, and that it had helped.

My brother looked at the table when she said that. Later he told me that he had gone to see the school counselor twice in the winter, after a bad week. He told me the way he might report that a bus had come on time, without any fuss. I was glad he had gone, and gladder that he told me.

The key to the clocks stayed in its drawer a little longer.

Later that evening my brother went into the workshop and came back with the clock key on its loop of string. It had hung on its nail by the bench all year, and only the clock repairer had used it.

He held it out to me. "Do you want to start them?" he asked.

I looked at the key for a long time. Then I said I thought we should wait until the spring, until the night a year after she died, and wind them together then. He thought about it and nodded, and put the key in the drawer under the timetables, where we would both know to find it.

The ice let go of the gutters before morning.

When I went up to bed, water was running steadily from the roof, and somewhere down the street a sheet of ice slid off a car with a soft rushing sound, like a train passing in a tunnel. The air through the window smelled of earth for the first time in months. Next door, one or two bees had come out to the landing board of a hive and stood there in the cold, as if checking the weather before a long trip.

I lay down and listened to the dripping. I did not need to know what my dream had meant. It had been enough to tell it.

I set my alarm for three, turned toward the wall, and fell asleep before the next drop fell.