After the Year

It is spring again as I write this last page, and the clocks in the workshop have been going for some weeks now. I have learned their voices the way you learn the engines of the buses on your own street. The tall one by the window runs a little slow. The brass carriage clock runs a little fast, as if it still has a train to catch somewhere.

I used to think a year after a goodbye would be like a long ferry crossing, with a far shore you finally reach and step onto. It has not been like that. It has been more like the night bus she loved, going out and coming back on the same route, calling at the same stops, with different people on board each time. Some nights she is there in my sleep, sitting by the window with a timetable on her knee. Many nights she is not. I have stopped counting either kind. The bus runs, and I know the route.

If you are in your own first year, keep a small lamp near your bed and a pencil that works. Ask someone in your house about their dreams, or let them ask you. And on the night the year turns over, wind something, a clock, a song, a name said aloud, and listen to it start again.

A Short Quiz

Question 1. In the story from the Iliad, what happens when Achilles tries to hold Patroclus in his dream?

Answer: He stretches out his arms, but he cannot catch hold of his friend, and the spirit slips away under the earth like smoke. Patroclus had asked him for a quick funeral and for one jar to hold the bones of both friends.

Question 2. In the tale The Little Shroud, why can the child not rest in his grave?

Answer: His mother's tears keep falling on his shroud, so it never dries. When she stops weeping, he comes once more, carrying a little light, and tells her that his shroud is nearly dry and he can rest.

Question 3. Do people dream only in REM sleep?

Answer: No. Dreams in REM sleep tend to be the most vivid and the easiest to remember, but people woken from non-REM sleep often report dreams too, usually shorter and plainer, like a single picture. My brother's dream of her hands sorting screws came in a short nap on the sofa.

Question 4. Does a long dream really flash by in a second?

Answer: Usually not. In sleep laboratories, people who knew they were dreaming signaled with their eyes, counted slowly, and signaled again. The gap between the signals was close to how long the same counting takes when they are awake.

Question 5. Cicero kept the tale of Simonides and the unburied stranger, but how did he explain dreams that seem to come true?

Answer: People dream every night about almost everything, so a few dreams will happen to match what comes later. He compared it to someone who throws a spear all day long and hits the mark sooner or later, which nobody calls a miracle.

Question 6. Why did our grandmother look younger in my brother's dream than he had ever seen her?

Answer: Dreams stitch together fragments from many different times instead of replaying one day. Her face came from a photograph of her at about forty with a red bicycle, which he had seen at eight while home with a fever, and his dream set it beside our new kettle.

Question 7. What did I find at the end of my bed after my first afternoon of sleep paralysis?

Answer: My grey work coat, hanging on the bedpost. The doctor at the sleep clinic explained that sleep paralysis is a harmless overlap of waking and REM sleep, and that sensing a figure in the room is one of its most common parts.

Question 8. In the dream that Augustine tells in his letter, what question does the young man ask the physician Gennadius?

Answer: He asks with what eyes Gennadius is seeing him, since the eyes of his body are closed and resting in his bed. After that dream, Gennadius said, his doubt went away.

Question 9. In the poem Pearl, what is the one thing the father may not do in his dream?

Answer: He may not cross the river to his daughter while he is still alive. When he runs to the bank and starts to plunge in, he wakes in the garden with his head on the little mound.

Question 10. What is the name of our cousin's baby, and why did it matter to us?

Answer: Her name is Nora, which was our grandmother's name. Our cousin kept it to herself until the anniversary visit, because she wanted to say it in the house.

The People in This Book

I am the one telling these nights. I work the early shift at a bakery, so my sleep comes in short, oddly shaped pieces. On sixteen nights of the year after our grandmother died, I told my brother one old story, set beside what is known about sleep, and later I wrote each night down.

My brother was sixteen when the year began and seventeen from the summer. He plays drums in his school band, takes things apart, and carries his drumsticks everywhere. He dreamed of her first, on the stairs at two in the morning, and once he knew he was dreaming while she handed him a spoke key. By the end of the year he had found a summer job fixing bicycles at the harbor.

Our grandmother repaired clocks, radios and bicycles in the workshop at the back of the house. All her life she rode night buses and ferries to visit family, and she kept timetables the way other people keep photographs. She said "wait" more than any other word, told her dreams at breakfast, and wrote a few of them at the back of her repair records. She died in the hospital in early spring. Her name was Nora, and I kept it to myself until the last night of the year.

Our mother works far away and comes home by train every weekend. She told her own dream of our grandmother over a box of strawberries, kept one lantern back for the next summer, and booked my visit to the sleep clinic from the train. After a dream at the old bus station, she decided to take the earlier train on Fridays.

The night nurse was changing the water in a vase when I arrived at the hospital. She told us our grandmother had been calm, with the window open a crack so she could hear the buses, and then, folding a blanket, she told us to go home and try to sleep.

The neighbor who keeps bees gave my brother a jar of honey at the funeral and checked her hives by torchlight on hot nights. When she dreams of her husband, she lights incense and sets out a cup of tea for him. She tells her bees the news of the household, and on the last night she told them about the baby.

The clock repairer across the street took over our grandmother's unfinished repairs and wound her clocks on Sundays. He showed my brother the escapement of the brass carriage clock, cleared our path in the snow without being asked, and cleaned every clock on the wall for the anniversary.

My brother's friend from the band lost her father when she was five. She has dreamed of him for years, fixing a bike or driving somewhere, and she floats a lantern for him every summer. She asked her mother for his old coat, and in her latest dream he clapped in the right places.

The doctor at the sleep clinic listened to my whole story, then drew two overlapping circles on the back of an appointment card to show me what sleep paralysis is. She gave me the calm steps that I keep with that card in my bedside drawer.

Our cousin told us in the autumn that she was expecting a baby, and her daughter was born on the day of the longest night of the winter. On the anniversary she came on the coastal bus with the baby and a cake in a tin. The baby, Nora, slept through the winding of the clocks.

The baker who opens the shop slides the first trays into the oven before dawn. On the morning after my own dream, she offered to ask her aunt what a dream book said about clocks, and she let me say no.

Two people I met only briefly matter to me too. A man in a transport company jacket handed me a spare winter timetable when I cried at the bus stop. A woman at the bakery buys two rye rolls every Saturday, one of them the kind her late husband always ate.

Achilles and Patroclus are the two friends of the Iliad. After Patroclus is killed, he comes to Achilles in a dream, asks for his funeral, and slips away like smoke when Achilles reaches for him.

The mother and her child in The Little Shroud are from an old folk tale. The child comes at night to ask his mother to stop weeping, so that his shroud can dry and he can rest.

Zhuangzi is the old teacher who lays his head on a skull and hears it speak in a dream about the freedom of the dead. He is also the one who dreamed he was a butterfly and woke unsure which of the two was dreaming.

Scipio is the young soldier whose dead grandfather shows him the earth from among the stars. When he asks to stay, his father tells him that his place is on the earth, like a guard at his post.

Simonides is the poet who buries an unknown stranger and is later warned by him in a dream not to sail. Cicero kept the tale as a story, not as proof.

Hector and Aeneas meet in a dream on the last night of the walled city. Hector, covered in dust, tells Aeneas to leave and to carry the city's household gods to a new home.

Genji is the prince living on a lonely shore whose father, the old emperor, comes to him in a dream after a storm and tells him to leave by boat.

The monk and Atsumori are from a dream play. The monk was once the warrior who killed the boy Atsumori, and when the ghost comes to him on the beach, it raises its sword, lowers it, and asks for his prayers.

Enkidu and Gilgamesh are the two friends of the oldest epic in this book. Enkidu dreams of the house of dust before he dies, and Gilgamesh grieves for him, searches the world, and comes home to the walls of his city.

Gennadius is the physician who doubted any life after death until a young man in a dream asked him with what eyes he was seeing.

Gísli is the outlaw of an Old Norse saga, visited in his sleep by two dream-women, one kind and one grim. He turns his dreams into verses and speaks them to his wife in the night.

The father in Pearl falls asleep on the mound where his pearl was lost. In his dream he sees his little daughter across a river of jewels and talks with her, but he cannot cross.