Do the Dead Come Only to Warn Us?

Many people believe the dead come back only to warn us.

Many people believe that when someone who has died appears in a dream, the visit must be a warning. In this view the dead are like the signal lamp at a level crossing: they light up only when something dangerous is coming down the line. Stay home, cancel the trip, do not get on that boat.

The dreams people really have tell a quieter story. After a loss, dreams of the person who died are very common, and when people describe them, most of those dreams are ordinary or kind. The one who died is cooking, or laughing at the table, or walking a little ahead on a familiar road. Very few of these dreams carry any message at all. A warning is simply easier to remember and better to retell, so it travels farther than a hundred quiet nights, the way news of one late train travels farther than a whole timetable of trains that came on time.

The first hot night of summer kept the whole house awake.

It was the first truly hot night of the year. I had opened every window in the house, and the air that came in was warm and heavy, like the air inside a bus that has stood in the sun all afternoon. I was supposed to be asleep by nine, because my shift at the bakery started at four. At half past eleven I was still lying on top of the sheet, listening to the clocks.

Most of our grandmother's clocks were still stopped. A few had been wound by the clock repairer across the street, who came over on Sundays to wind them and to look at the work still left on her bench. Those few ticked unevenly in the heat, like a row of bicycles freewheeling down a hill at slightly different speeds.

Then I heard the back door open, and I went down.

My brother was sitting on the back step with his phone face down beside him and a glass of water at his feet. He had turned seventeen the week before. He had spent most of his birthday in the garage with his band, and he had seemed fine. Now he looked like someone waiting on a platform for a train that had been cancelled without any announcement.

"I saw her," he said. "In the workshop. She was standing in the doorway with a screwdriver in her hand, and she said, 'Wait.' Just that one word. And then I woke up."

I sat down next to him. The step was still warm from the day.

His band was going to play at a summer festival the following weekend, on an island two hours away by ferry. He had been looking forward to it for months. Now he was turning the dream over and over, the way he turned a broken part in his hands when he was looking for the crack. "What if she meant don't go?" he said. "People say that, don't they? That they come back to warn you."

I did not answer at once. I knew a story about exactly that, and I knew he would want it, so I told it to him there on the step, with the kitchen light behind us and the moths circling it.

Tonight's Story

The story is very old. A Greek poet named Simonides was on a journey when he came upon the body of a stranger lying unburied. Nobody knew who the man was, and nobody had come to bury him. Simonides could have walked on, the way most of us drive past a car stopped on the hard shoulder at night. He did not walk on. He stopped, and he buried the stranger.

Some time later the poet was ready to board a ship. On the night before it sailed, the stranger he had buried came to him in a dream. The man warned him not to go, because if he sailed, he would die in a shipwreck.

Simonides stayed on land. The ship left without him, and the story says that it went down with everyone on board.

That is the whole tale, short enough to tell between two bus stops. I like it because the dead man is not a frightening figure. He is a stranger who was given a kindness, and in the story he gives one back. The tale is not really about fear at all. It is about a debt between two strangers, paid in the only currency the dead man still had, which was a dream.

My brother listened with his chin on his knees. "So it was a warning," he said. "And it came true."

"In the story it did," I said. "Now let me tell you who wrote it down, and why."

Long ago this story was told as part of an argument.

I first found Simonides in a book called On Divination, written in Latin by the statesman Cicero more than two thousand years ago. The book is a conversation between Cicero and his brother about whether anything, from the flight of birds to the dreams of sleepers, can tell the future. In the first half, his brother collects old stories to show that it can, and the poet and the unburied stranger are among them. Even then the tale was centuries old, passed from hand to hand like a coin worn smooth.

In the second half, Cicero answers him. He does not laugh at his brother, but he does not agree with him either. People dream every night, he says, and they dream about almost everything, so it would be strange if a few dreams did not happen to match what came later. Someone who throws a spear all day long will hit the mark sooner or later, and nobody calls that a miracle. He also asks why any god who wished to warn us would choose a language as unclear as dreams, instead of speaking plainly to us while we are awake.

I have always thought this was a fair way to hold such a story. Cicero's brother keeps it because it is moving. Cicero keeps it too, but as a story, not as proof. Both of them were right to pass it on, because the tale of the poet and the stranger is worth telling for its kindness, not for its forecast.

My brother thought about the spear for a while. "So nobody wrote down all the times someone dreamed about a ship sinking and then it didn't," he said.

"Nobody ever does," I said. "Those dreams never make a story."

Most dreams of the dead arrive with no message at all.

Then I asked him a question of my own. Since the funeral in spring, how many times had he dreamed of her? He counted on his fingers in the dark. Six or seven times, he said, that he could remember.

In one dream she was fixing the bell on his old bicycle and complaining that the spring was too stiff. In another she was waiting at a bus stop in her green coat, reading a timetable as if it were a novel. In a third she was simply there in the kitchen while he looked for his drumsticks. None of those dreams had told him anything. They had only let him see her for a while.

I told him that this is what most people find. Dreams of someone who has died come often in the first months after a loss, and for most people they feel gentle, or ordinary, or even funny. The dead in our dreams mostly do what they did when they were alive. They sit and talk, they make tea, they lose their glasses and blame somebody else.

"So the 'Wait' was just one more," he said.

"I think so. And I think I know where that word came from."

My own dreams of her had been just as ordinary.

I told him about mine, too, because it seemed fair. I sleep at strange hours, so my dreams come in short pieces, like a radio dial turned slowly between stations. In most of them our grandmother was doing something with her hands.

Once she was standing at the long table in the bakery at four in the morning, shaping rolls far too small, and telling me that bread was only a slow machine that ran on warmth. Once she was asleep on a ferry bench with her bag on her knees and a timetable over her face against the light. Once she was oiling the chain of a bicycle I did not recognize, and she looked up and asked whether I had eaten.

That was all. Nobody warned me of anything, nobody told me to change my life, and I woke each time to the alarm and the dark kitchen and went to work. Some of those mornings I was sad, and some of them I was almost happy, as if I had caught a glimpse of her through the window of a passing train.

"She asked me that too," my brother said. "In one of mine. Whether I'd eaten."

"Then it was definitely her," I said, and he smiled at the step.

Our grandmother said "wait" more than any other word.

Anyone who had spent time in her workshop knew the word. She said it when the glue was not yet dry, when the oil in a clock movement needed a minute to settle, and when an old radio had to warm up before the station came through the hiss. Wait, she would say, holding up one finger without looking round. Wait, and then you will see.

My brother had spent half his childhood at that bench. He had heard her say it a thousand times, usually just before something started working again. Dreams build their scenes from pieces like these, from voices and rooms and gestures stored away over years, and they do not always put the pieces back in the order they came. A word that once meant be patient can turn up in a dream carrying a weight it never had in the workshop.

He laughed quietly, for the first time that night. "She said it when I tried to take the back off the kitchen radio while it was still plugged in."

"That one was a warning," I said. "That one was real."

The bees next door were fanning the heat out of their hives.

Over the fence a small light was moving. The neighbor who keeps bees was walking slowly along her hives with a torch, checking them in the heat. She saw us, lifted the torch in greeting, and came over to lean on the fence.

On nights like this, she told us, the bees gather on the front of the hive in a thick brown beard and fan their wings to push air through the boxes, like the cooling fan of an engine that has just climbed a long hill. Nothing is wrong when they do it. It only looks alarming if you do not know what you are looking at. By morning, she said, most of them would be back inside, and the hive would be quiet again.

I thought the same was true of my brother's dream, but I did not say so. She went back to her hives, and the torchlight moved along the boxes, and the low hum of the bees went on under everything, steady as a ship's engine heard from a cabin below deck.

A ferry timetable was still pinned above her workbench.

Before we went in, my brother wanted to look at the workshop. I switched on the lamp over the bench. Among the receipts and wiring diagrams pinned to the wall there was a ferry timetable, three summers old, with two crossings circled in her blue pencil.

She had loved ferries more than any other way of traveling. She liked the slow loading of the cars, the rope thrown to the quay, and the moment when the engine changed its note and the harbor began to slide away. She took the night ferry whenever there was family to visit across the water, and she came back with timetables the way other people come back with postcards.

My brother stood in front of the timetable for a long time. "She would have told me to sit on the upper deck," he said. "On the right side, so I could see the lighthouse."

"She would have told you to take a jacket," I said. "Even in summer."

He decided, there in the workshop, that he would go. I did not try to talk him into it, and he did not need me to. It was his own decision, made in her lamplight, and I think that is how she would have wanted it.

Something to Try Tonight

On a hot night when sleep will not come, try this. Lie on your back with the window open and stop trying to sleep for a moment. Instead, listen, and name to yourself five sounds you can hear outside: a car on a far road, a dog, leaves, a door, a voice. Do not judge them or explain them; just collect them, the way you would collect the names of stations from a train window.

Then breathe in slowly while you count to four, and breathe out while you count to six. Do this six times. If a thought about a dream comes back, let it pass like a lit window going by in the dark, and return to the counting.

When I tried it that night, my five sounds were a moped, the bees, a radio somewhere playing very low, the clock in the hall, and my brother's door closing softly upstairs.

Somewhere down the street a late bus changed gear on the hill. After that there was only the hum of the bees next door, going on through the dark like a small engine someone had left running so that the rest of us could sleep.