Does a Dream Come From Outside Us?

Many people believe a dream is sent to us from somewhere else.

Many people believe that a dream of someone who has died arrives from outside, like a letter pushed under the door in the night. The visitor is sent, or comes on their own, and stands for a moment at the head of the bed before going back to wherever the dead live. It is one of the oldest beliefs about dreams, and it is still alive in a great many homes.

What we know about sleep points the other way. The sleeping brain is not a waiting room that visitors walk into; it is a workshop that keeps running after the lights go out. It makes its dreams from its own memories and feelings, from faces it has stored, voices it can still play back, and worries it carried to bed. The figure at the head of the bed is built from the inside, out of what we already hold. That does not make the dream less precious. It only tells us where it was made.

The lanterns went down the river one by one after dark.

In the middle of the summer there is a night when our town floats paper lanterns on the river. People write a name on the side of a lantern, set a small light inside it, and put it on the water at the bottom of the stone steps by the old bridge. The current is slow there. The lanterns drift off in a long loose line, like the lit windows of a night train seen from a hill.

Our grandmother had gone every year. She liked to stand on the bridge rather than on the steps, because from there she could watch the whole line move downstream and see where the river took it.

This year our mother came home for the weekend, and the three of us went together. She was standing at the paper stall when we arrived, choosing a lantern with great care, as if the colors meant something. My brother wrote our grandmother's name on his in thick black marker. I wrote it on mine in pencil, very small, and then I wrote it again, larger, because the first time looked as if I were afraid of it.

We did not talk much on the steps. The water smelled of stone and warm weeds. When my brother set his lantern down, it turned in a slow half-circle, like a ferry swinging away from the quay, and then it found the current and went.

My brother's friend set a lantern on the water for her father.

A little further along the steps, a girl was kneeling at the edge of the water, holding a lantern steady with both hands while the flame inside settled. It was my brother's friend from the band, the one who had lost her father when she was very small. She let it go and stayed kneeling, watching it, and then she came over and sat with us.

She told us she did this every summer. She barely remembered her father's face, she said, only his coat and the way he whistled when he drove. But when she was about six, she had dreamed of him standing at the foot of her bed in that coat, and for years she had been sure that he had really come. She had told nobody about it until she was twelve, because she was afraid someone would explain it away. "Like he'd been sent," she said. "Like someone had let him out for one night."

"Do you still think so?" my brother asked.

She shrugged. "I don't know what I think. I just know it was the best night of that whole year."

My brother looked at me. He had dreamed of our grandmother two nights before, sitting at the kitchen table winding a small travel clock, and he had asked me at breakfast whether she had sent it. I had not answered then, because I was late for my shift. Now, with the lanterns going by, I thought I owed both of them a story.

In the oldest stories the dream stands at the head of the bed.

The belief that dreams come from outside is very old, and I think the old poems explain why it feels so natural. In the oldest Greek poems, a dream is often described as a figure that stands above the sleeper's head and speaks. It has a shape, a voice and a message, and when it has finished it goes away again, like a messenger who leaves by the same door he came in through. To people who had no other way of explaining such a vivid visitor, this was the plainest explanation there was.

A later Latin poem, the Aeneid by Virgil, keeps this picture and adds another one. Near the end of its sixth book, it describes two gates through which dreams leave the land of the dead. One gate is made of horn, and true visions pass through it. The other is made of shining ivory, and false dreams are sent out through that one. Even in the poem, then, a dream from outside could not simply be trusted. You had to wonder which gate it had used.

I have always liked those two gates. They sound like the two exits of an old station, one plain and one grand, and nobody quite sure which train leaves from which.

Tonight's Story

The story I told them comes from the second book of the Aeneid, and it happens on the last night of a walled city that had been under siege for ten years. The enemy have pretended to leave. They have left a great wooden horse outside the gates, and the people of the city have pulled it inside and celebrated, and now everyone is asleep. Inside the horse, soldiers are waiting for dark.

One of the sleepers is a prince named Aeneas. In the first deep part of the night, the hour when rest first comes to tired people, he dreams that Hector is standing in front of him. Hector had been the city's greatest defender. He had been killed in battle some time before, and his body dragged behind his enemy's chariot.

In the dream Hector looks as he did after that day, covered with dust and blood, his hair matted, and he is weeping. Aeneas, as dreamers do, has somehow forgotten that Hector is dead. He greets him like a friend who has been away too long, and he asks where he has been, and why his face and body are so badly hurt.

Hector does not answer those questions. He tells Aeneas to wake and leave at once, because the enemy are inside the walls and the city is falling. Then he gives him a task. He places in his care the city's sacred things and its household gods, and tells him to carry them across the sea and to find a new home where they can be kept.

Aeneas wakes to noise and smoke. He climbs to the roof of his father's house and sees the city burning. The rest of the book is the story of that night, and at the end of it he leaves with his old father on his shoulders and his small son holding his hand.

The lanterns had nearly all gone round the bend by the time I finished. My brother's friend was quiet for a while, and then she said, "He doesn't let him ask about the wounds." I had never noticed that before. In the dream, Hector turns away from his own death and talks only about what Aeneas must carry.

We climbed up to the bridge where she always stood.

Before we went home, I wanted to see the river the way she had seen it. The four of us climbed the steps to the bridge and leaned on the iron rail, which was still warm from the sun. From up there the lanterns were no longer single lights. They were one long, bending line that followed every turn of the current, slowing where the river widened, bunching up behind a fallen branch, then loosening and going on, like the carriages of a train taking a curve at night. Far downstream, where the river passes under the railway, the first of them were already going out one by one, not all at once, the way the windows of a town go dark after midnight. I understood then why she had chosen the bridge every year. From the steps you watch one lantern leave you. From the bridge you see where all of them are going together.

Nobody said anything for a long time.

Then a freight train crossed the railway bridge downstream, slowly, its wheels knocking on the joints, and the lanterns went on under it as if it were not there.

"She'd have known which train that was," my brother said.

The sleeping brain builds its visitors from the inside.

On the way home, my brother asked the question he had really wanted to ask. If Hector came from outside, in the poem, where did our grandmother come from, in his dream?

I told him what I understood. While we sleep, the brain goes on working through the day and the years behind it, pulling up memories, feelings and pictures and joining them into scenes. It does not need a key to a locked door to show us someone we love. It already has her, stored in a thousand small pieces: the travel clock she wound every night, the way she sat with one foot on the rung of the chair, the sound of her voice saying our names. In sleep, the machine runs those pieces together, and she sits down at the table again.

"So I made her," he said. He did not sound pleased.

"You kept her," I said. "That isn't the same thing."

A dream made inside us can still belong to her.

I tried to explain it better as we crossed the bridge. When a film is shown in a dark room, the light comes from the projector at the back, not from the screen. Nobody thinks the faces on the screen are less real because of that. The film was made from real people and real days, and it was carried here in a tin and threaded through a machine so that we could see it again.

A dream of her is something like that. The light comes from inside us, but what it shows was made out of seventeen years of her for him, and twenty-three for me. Every gesture in his dream had been hers first. She had wound that clock in front of him a hundred times before he ever dreamed of it.

My brother's friend, walking a step behind us, said that this made her feel better about her father, not worse. "Then he was in there all along," she said. "Even when I couldn't remember his face."

Our mother, who had said almost nothing all evening, put an arm round her shoulders for a moment as we walked.

Something to Try Tonight

Here is something small you can do before sleep. Take a strip of paper about the size of a bus ticket. On one side, write the name of the person you miss. On the other side, write one ordinary thing of theirs that you still carry: a word they used, a way of tying shoelaces, a song they hummed, a habit with keys or coffee or maps. If nothing comes at first, wait a little. Something usually does, and it is often smaller and more exact than you expected.

Read both sides once, slowly. Then fold the strip in half and leave it beside your bed, under the lamp or the clock. You are not sending anything anywhere. You are only noticing what you already hold, the way Aeneas held the household gods he was given, before you close your eyes.

On my strip I wrote: she always checked the timetable twice, even when she knew it by heart. My brother would not show me his. He folded it into a very small square and tucked it into the case of her old travel alarm, which stood by his bed now.

Our mother kept the last lantern on the kitchen table.

When we got home, our mother took a lantern out of her bag. She had bought two at the stall and floated only one. The other she unfolded on the kitchen table and wrote on it carefully, but she did not light it.

"I'll put it on the water next year," she said. "I wanted something left over for later."

I understood that, I think. Some things you carry across, the way Aeneas carried the gods of his city out of the smoke. Some things you leave on the table for a while, because you are not ready to let them go down the river.

The house was full of small sounds when we came home.

The windows were still open from the afternoon. Moths had found the hall lamp. Somewhere in the workshop a clock that the clock repairer had started that week was ticking a little fast, as if it wanted to catch up with the rest of the night.

My brother stopped at the bottom of the stairs. "In my dream," he said, "she looked younger. Not old like in the hospital. Younger than I ever saw her. If I made her from what I remember, how could I do that?"

I did not have a good answer that night. I found one a few weeks later, on a warm evening at the end of the summer, with a box of old photographs and a story about a prince by the sea, and that is where the next chapter begins.

We switched off the hall lamp, closed the downstairs windows against the moths, and went up to bed.