Does a Dream Last Only a Second?

Many people believe that a long dream lasts only a moment.

Most of us have heard that a dream which seems to go on for hours really flashes past in a second or two, just before we wake. There is a famous old story that people still repeat. A man dreamed through a whole revolution, with trials and crowds and a long ride to the scaffold, and woke at the very moment the blade fell, to find that a piece of his bed frame had dropped onto his neck. The whole dream, people concluded, must have been built in the instant of the blow.

It is a wonderful story, but it is not how dreams usually keep time. In sleep laboratories, people who can tell that they are dreaming have been able to send a signal with their eyes from inside a dream, and to time simple tasks there. The tasks take about as long as they do when the person is awake. Dream time, it seems, runs at roughly the speed of a clock on the wall, not at the speed of a flash.

I learned this in early summer, because my brother would not let go of the question he had asked me on a rainy night in spring.

My brother rode the night bus all the way to the sea.

By then the evenings were long and gold, and the neighbor who keeps bees was out among her hives every evening in a white veil, lifting the frames one by one to look at them against the light. The workshop window stood open for the first time that year. You could hear the bees from the bench.

One Friday morning I came home from the bakery at noon and found my brother at the kitchen table, still in his pajamas, writing very fast in the back of a school exercise book.

"It was the whole route," he said, without looking up. "The night bus to the sea. The one she always took to see our great-aunt. She was in the seat by the window, with the timetable on her knee, and she told me the name of every stop before we got there. The bridge. The factory with the tall chimney. The petrol station that's open all night. The roundabout with the anchor in the middle. We went all the way to the end."

"She had an orange," he added. "She peeled it in one long strip, the way she always did, and gave me half. I could smell it. I could feel the bus go over the bumps on the bridge."

He showed me the page. He had written down eleven stops, in order.

"It felt like hours," he said. "It felt like the real journey. But it can't have been, can it? It must have all happened in a second, right before the alarm."

I told him that I did not think it had. I told him I would explain why after supper, and that I had a story for him first, about another young man who made a long journey in a dream, much farther than the sea.

Tonight's Story

The story is called the Dream of Scipio. It comes at the end of a book by Cicero, a writer and statesman who lived more than two thousand years ago and wrote in Latin. The book is mostly a long conversation about how a state should be governed, but it closes with a dream.

The dreamer is a young soldier named Scipio, serving in a war overseas. He goes to visit an old king who had been a friend of his family, and the two of them sit up late into the night talking about Scipio's grandfather by adoption, a famous general who had died when Scipio was a very small child. The old king remembers everything about him, and they talk until the night is far gone.

Then Scipio goes to bed, tired from the journey and the late hour, and falls into a deep sleep. His grandfather appears to him. Scipio says he recognized him more from the portrait he had seen at home than from his own memory. At the sight of him, the young man shudders. Be calm, the grandfather says, and do not be afraid, and remember what I tell you.

From a high place full of light among the stars, he shows Scipio the walled city they are at war with, far below, and tells him about the battles and duties waiting for him in his life. Then Scipio's own father, who has also died, appears beside the grandfather. Scipio weeps when he sees him. His father embraces him and tells him not to cry.

Scipio asks the question that many grieving people would ask. If this is life, he says, and the dead are here, why should I stay down on the earth? Why should I not simply stay with you?

His father tells him no. His place is on the earth. He has been given his life to look after, like a guard set at a post, and he must keep it and live it fully until it reaches its end in its own time. Only then is the way to this place open.

Together the two of them show him the heavens. Scipio sees stars far larger than anyone on the ground could imagine. He sees the bright band across the sky that we call the Milky Way, and he is told that this is where those who lived well and served others go.

When Scipio looks down, the earth looks so small that he feels almost ashamed. The great power his people have won seems only a speck on it.

He hears, too, a deep, sweet music, and he is told it is the sound of the turning spheres of the sky. Human ears, his grandfather explains, have grown so used to it from birth that they no longer hear it, the way people who live beside a great waterfall stop hearing the roar. He also shows Scipio how little of the world anyone can know from the ground, and how short and small fame is, measured against the sky.

The grandfather speaks for a long while more. Then he goes, and Scipio wakes up.

Scipio thought the dream came from the talk at supper.

What I love most is a small remark that Scipio makes near the start, before the grandfather even appears. He says that he thinks the long conversation with the old king caused the dream. Our thoughts and words in the daytime, he says, often make something like them in our sleep, the way an old poet said that a great poet of the past had appeared to him in a dream after he had spent his days thinking about him.

It is a very calm thing to say about a very grand dream.

My brother saw it at once. "I spent all Thursday looking at her bus timetables," he said. "For the history project. Routes, dates, all of it."

"So you sat up late with the old king," I said.

"Sort of," he said, and looked pleased.

This fits what is known about dreams in general. The sleeping mind draws on what we have lately been thinking about, feeling and looking at, and mixes those pieces with much older memories. A dream is something like a ferry that takes on cargo at every port. It carries some of the day's freight, and some that has been in the hold for years.

The grandfather in the dream sent the young man back to his life.

My brother was quiet over the part where Scipio asks to stay. I was quiet over it too.

I think the dream is very wise there. Scipio is shown the most beautiful thing he could imagine, the stars, the music, his father's face, and when he asks to remain, the answer is a kind and firm no. His life is a post he has been given to keep. The dead in his dream want him to go back down and live it.

I noticed that I wanted to hear that part more than once. On some mornings that spring, walking to the bakery in the dark, I had felt as if I were only waiting, like a passenger in a station between two trains. The father in the dream would not have liked that. He would have told me to go and bake the bread.

Our grandmother had been like that about journeys. She loved the night buses and the ferries, but she always said the best part of any trip was the moment you turned the key in your own front door again.

Some sleepers can send a signal from inside a dream.

After supper I kept my promise and explained about time.

I told him about the people in the sleep laboratories who can tell, while dreaming, that they are dreaming. Their bodies lie still in sleep, but the eyes are free to move, and the instruments can see the eyes. So before sleeping, the sleeper and the people watching agree on a signal, such as looking hard left and right several times. In the dream, the sleeper gives the signal, then counts slowly or does some other simple thing, then gives the signal again. When the gap between the signals is measured, it is close to how long the same counting takes when the person is awake. For some actions, the dream version even takes a little longer, not shorter.

"So a dream's like a train that keeps to the timetable," my brother said.

"More or less," I said. "Not an express that skips half the stops in a blink. Most of the time it calls at every station."

He thought about that. "So I really did ride the whole route."

I said that I could not prove exactly how long his dream had been. Nobody had been watching his eyes. But there was no reason to think it had been squeezed into the second before the alarm. He had been asleep for hours, and a long ride with her, stop by stop, could easily have taken a good part of one of those hours.

Not every part of a dream keeps steady time.

There is one honest complication, and I told him that too. Dreams do not always run as one smooth piece. They jump. You are on the bus, and then, without any journey in between, you are at the sea. A dream can cut from scene to scene the way a film cuts out the dull parts of a long train ride, so a story that seems to cover a whole day can be told in a much shorter stretch of the night.

But inside each scene, as far as anyone can tell, the minutes still go by at about their normal pace. The cuts make a dream feel long and wide. They do not squeeze it into a single flash.

My brother looked at his list of stops. "There weren't any cuts in mine," he said. "We stopped at every one."

"Then it was a slow train," I said, "and a long ride."

A dream keeps time more like a clock than a flash.

On Saturday morning I took my brother across the street to the clock repairer, who was setting out a row of mended clocks on the sunny windowsill, one beside the other, so that their hands could be checked against each other through the day.

My brother asked whether a clock could ever run fast for a few seconds and then catch up. The clock repairer laughed, picked up a small brass carriage clock that had been our grandmother's last unfinished job, and opened its back to show him the escapement, the little rocking part that lets the wheels turn one tooth at a time.

"This is what keeps it honest," the clock repairer said. "Tick, and one tooth goes. Tock, and the next. It can't skip. If it skips, it's broken."

Walking home, my brother said that perhaps dreams have an escapement too. I said I liked to think so. A dream can change places and faces from one moment to the next, but it seems to let its minutes go one at a time, like the clock on the windowsill.

Something to Try Tonight

This is for an evening when the weather is kind and the window can be open.

Before bed, turn off the lights in your room and stand or sit by the open window, or step just outside your door if it is safe and quiet there. Look up at the sky for as long as one slow song would last. You do not need to find any stars by name. Just notice how big the sky is above the roofs and the streetlights.

Then think of one journey you once made with the person you miss, and let it play through slowly in your mind, stop by stop, without hurrying it. If you lose the thread, go back to the first stop. When the journey reaches its end, picture turning the key in your own front door.

Close the window halfway, so that a little air still comes in, and lie down while the night is still moving above the house.

The first warm night came in through the window.

Our mother was late that weekend and came home on the Saturday evening train. The kitchen smelled of honey, because the neighbor had left a jar on the step, and my brother read her his list of eleven stops while she ate.

She corrected him on one. The roundabout with the anchor, she said, came before the petrol station, not after. Our grandmother used to point it out every time.

My brother crossed out two lines in his notebook, drew an arrow, and wrote them again in the right order. Then he sat for a long time looking at the page, as if he were checking a timetable he meant to use.

That night was the first truly warm night of the year, and we left the windows open until morning.