Why Does She Look Younger in My Dreams?

Many people believe a dream plays back a memory like a recording.

Many people believe that dreams replay our memories exactly, the way a recorder plays back a tape. If you dream of someone who has died, the thinking goes, you will see them as you last saw them, in the same room, wearing the same clothes, saying the same things.

Dreams are not built like that. They rarely replay a whole event from beginning to end. Instead they take fragments from many different times, a face from one year, a room from another, a voice from a third, and stitch them into a scene that never happened in that form. That is why the dead so often look younger in our dreams, or older, or both at once. The dream is not a copy of one day. It is a journey across many days, with stops at stations we had almost forgotten were on the line.

The last week of summer smelled of hot bread and dust.

By the end of the summer I had learned to sleep in the afternoons. I came home from the bakery at noon with my hair smelling of the ovens, slept until five with the curtains drawn, and woke to the light going gold on the wall. The house had grown used to my timetable. The clocks in the workshop did not mind it.

On one of those evenings my brother was waiting in the kitchen with two cups of tea already poured, which meant he wanted something.

He reminded me of the question he had asked on the night of the lanterns. Why had she looked younger in his dream? He had dreamed of her again since then, and again she had not been the thin, tired woman in the hospital bed. She had been strong, with dark hair, standing in our present kitchen next to the new kettle our mother had bought in the spring. "She never saw that kettle," he said. "And she never looked like that when I knew her. So where did it come from?"

I had been thinking about it for weeks. I had an answer ready, and I had a story to go with it.

Tonight's Story

The story comes from The Tale of Genji, a long book written in Japanese about a thousand years ago by a lady at the imperial court. Its hero, Genji, is the son of an emperor, a gifted and admired young man whose life turns sharply in the middle of the book. After a scandal at court, with powerful people against him, he leaves the capital before he can be sent away, and goes to live on a lonely shore.

He stays there for a long time. The house is small, the sea is loud, and the people he loves are far away. Then a storm comes and does not stop. For days the rain and wind beat against the house, and one afternoon lightning strikes the building and part of it catches fire. Genji and his few companions take shelter in a back room, and nobody sleeps.

Late that night, when the wind has finally eased, Genji dozes, leaning against something in the dark. In his sleep he sees his father, the old emperor, who had died some years before. His father looks just as he had in life. He takes Genji by the hand to raise him and asks why he is staying in such a strange place. Then he tells him to follow where the god of the sea leads, to set out by boat at once, and to leave this shore.

Genji is overjoyed to see him. He says that since they parted he has known so much sorrow that he would rather stay here with his father than go on living. His father tells him gently that this must not be. He says the journey across the sea has tired him, but that he cannot stay, because there is something he must see to in the capital. Then he is gone.

Genji wakes and looks round, wanting to follow him, but there is no one in the room. Only the moon is shining, and he feels that his father is still close, like the warmth left in a seat when someone has just stood up. The book says that for years Genji had longed to see his father, even in a dream, and never had. Now he had seen him clearly, if only for a moment.

In the morning a small boat comes to the shore. An old man who lives along the coast has rowed out through the last of the storm, because he too had been told in a dream to come and fetch the prince. Genji gets into the boat, and leaves.

Genji's father came to him looking just as he had in life.

My brother had stopped drinking his tea. "Does it say how old he looked?" he asked.

It does not. It says only that he looked as he had when he was alive, and I have always taken that to mean as Genji remembered him best. A father seen in a dream is not a passport photograph taken on the last day. He is a face put together from many years of looking.

What I love in the story is how little the father asks. He does not explain the storm or promise anything. He takes his son's hand, says he is tired from the journey, and tells him to get into a boat. He behaves exactly like a parent who has driven a long way through bad weather to pick someone up from a station, and has no time to talk because the car is parked where it should not be.

The old man with the boat is the part people argue about. Two dreams, two people, one boat. In the book it works like a meeting of two trains arranged on the same timetable. I told my brother it is the kind of thing that happens in stories much more often than it happens in kitchens, and he agreed, because he is seventeen and very sure about kitchens.

A dream is put together from old parts like a rebuilt bicycle.

Our grandmother used to build bicycles out of parts. A frame from one shop, wheels from a bicycle someone had left behind a school, a saddle she had kept for twenty years in case it was ever needed. The finished bicycle had never existed before, but every piece of it was real, and it rode perfectly well.

I told my brother that dreams work in much the same way. The sleeping mind does not open a file marked last summer and play it back. It reaches into everything it has kept, takes one piece here and another there, and fits them together into a scene that feels whole. The face can come from a photograph we saw once in a drawer. The kitchen can come from this morning. The voice can come from a phone call ten years ago. Nothing in the dream is invented from nothing, and nothing is copied exactly either. When we wake, the scene still holds together, so it feels like a memory, the way a rebuilt bicycle feels like one bicycle the moment you start to ride it.

"So the young face is from somewhere," he said.

"It must be. You just don't remember where you put it."

Our mother sees a different age of her in her dreams.

While we were talking, my phone rang. Our mother was calling from the train on her way back to her flat after a late meeting, with the announcements going on behind her voice. She asked what we were doing, and my brother leaned over the phone and asked her the question straight away: how old was Grandma when she dreamed of her?

Our mother laughed, and then she was quiet for a moment, and the train went into a tunnel and came out again. In her dreams, she said, our grandmother was always about thirty-five. She was the mother who had walked her to school and mended her bicycle chain on the pavement with oil up to her wrists. Our mother had never once dreamed of her as old.

I thought about that after the call ended. Each of us had kept a different version of the same person, like three travelers who have taken the same road in different years and come back with different maps. None of the maps was wrong. Each one simply showed the stretch of road that its traveler had walked.

My brother wrote thirty-five on the back of his hand, as if it were a platform number.

The photo albums were kept in the bottom drawer of her desk.

We went into the workshop together. Her desk stood under the window, with the lamp she had used for fine work and a jar of small screwdrivers sorted by size. The bottom drawer was heavy and stuck halfway, the way it always had. My brother lifted it on its runners, as she had shown him, and it slid out.

There were five albums inside, the old kind with paper pages and corners to hold the prints. We carried them to the kitchen table and opened them under the light. The first one began long before either of us was born. In it she was standing beside a motorbike with a borrowed helmet under her arm, sitting on the steps of a ferry terminal with a paper bag of cherries, and laughing on a station platform in a coat far too big for her.

I had seen some of them before. My brother, it turned out, had seen most of them too, when he was about eight and home from school with a fever. She had sat with him all afternoon and turned the pages, and he had forgotten all about it.

My brother found the red bicycle in a photograph.

Halfway through the second album, he stopped.

In the photograph our grandmother was perhaps forty, with short dark hair and her sleeves rolled up, holding a red bicycle by the handlebars outside the workshop door. There was a wooden crate tied to the back with string. She was squinting into the sun and about to say something to whoever held the camera.

"That's her," he said. "That's the one in my dream. That's exactly her."

It was not exactly her, of course. In his dream she had been in our kitchen, next to the new kettle, years after that bicycle was sold. His sleeping mind had taken a face from an afternoon when he was eight and feverish, and put it into this summer, and joined the two so neatly that he had never seen the seam. It was like a map of a route drawn from memory, where two roads that are far apart in real life somehow meet at the same crossing.

Something to Try Tonight

If someone you miss has looked different in your dreams, try this before you sleep. Take a sheet of paper and draw three boxes, side by side, like three windows on a train. They do not have to be neat.

In the first box, write or draw how the person looked in your dream: their age, their hair, what they wore, where they were standing. In the second box, put how they looked the last time you saw them. In the third box, put how they looked at a time you liked best, from a photograph or from memory.

Look at the three boxes for a minute. You may find that the dream borrowed something from each, or something you cannot place at all. You do not need to explain it. It is enough to see that the person you carry has more than one age, and all of them are yours to keep.

I did the boxes that night at the kitchen table. In my third one I drew her on a ferry deck, holding her hat against the wind, though I am not sure I ever saw that happen. Maybe I only saw a photograph of it. Maybe I put it together myself.

The clock repairer remembered her when she was forty.

At about ten there was a knock at the back door. The clock repairer from across the street stood on the step with the small brass carriage clock in a cloth, her last unfinished job, which he had finished that week. He had seen the light in the workshop and thought we might like to have it back tonight.

We showed him the photograph of the red bicycle. He held it up to the lamp and smiled. He said he remembered that bicycle well, because she used to ride it across to his shop with a clock in the crate and her toolbox on the handlebars, and argue with him about springs. She had been the only person on the street who could beat him at escapements, and he had never forgiven her for it.

"That's how I still see her," he said. "Not later. Like that."

He set the carriage clock on the shelf over the bench and wound it with her key, and it began to tick in that small, busy way travel clocks have, as if it were already late for a train.

We left the albums open on the kitchen table overnight.

After he had gone home, neither of us wanted to put the albums away. We left all five of them open on the table, each at a different page, and the electric fan in the corner turned slowly from side to side across them.

When the air reached a page, it lifted the corner a little and let it fall. On one page she was twenty and laughing on a platform. On another she was forty with the red bicycle. On another she was older than I can remember, sitting in a deckchair on a ferry with her eyes closed against the sun. The fan swept across all of them in turn, like the beam of a lighthouse passing over boats at different distances from the shore.

My brother stood in the doorway for a long time, watching it.

"She's all of them," he said.