If I Don't Remember a Dream, Did I Dream at All?

Many people believe that some of us never dream at all.

Many people believe that some of us simply do not dream. They say it about themselves with a shrug, as if it were like being unable to whistle: other people have dreams, they have a quiet black gap between going to bed and the alarm.

In fact almost everyone dreams, every night, and usually several times. What differs from person to person is not the dreaming but the remembering. Most dreams are forgotten within minutes of waking, often before we have even sat up. A person who says they never dream is usually a person whose dreams leave very early, like passengers who get off at the first stop before anyone has noticed them on board.

My brother said he had stopped dreaming of her.

Autumn came in quietly that year. The evenings grew cooler, school started again, and the light in the workshop went from gold to grey an hour earlier than it had in August. My brother had a new timetable for school and a new rehearsal night for the band, and he pinned both above her bench, next to the old ferry timetable, without saying why.

One evening I found him sitting at the kitchen table with his chin in his hands, not eating.

He told me he had not dreamed of our grandmother for nearly three weeks. In the summer she had come to him every few nights, in the workshop or the kitchen or at a bus stop. Now there was nothing. He woke up in the morning with an empty head and a feeling that he had been somewhere, and he could not say where.

"Maybe I've stopped dreaming," he said. "Or maybe I've stopped dreaming about her. I don't know which is worse."

I could see what he was really afraid of. He thought that if she was no longer in his dreams, she might be slipping out of his memory too, the way a station sign slips past before you have read the name. I sat down across from him, and I told him first what I knew, and then, because it was a night for it, I told him a story.

A dream fades on waking like a station seen from a fast train.

I told him that he almost certainly had not stopped dreaming. Everyone who sleeps dreams, and a night's sleep carries us through several long stretches of it. What changes is how much of it we bring back.

Waking is like stepping off a night train onto a cold platform. For a few seconds you still feel the motion of the carriage and see the dark fields going by. Then the platform takes over, with its lights and its noise and its signs, and the journey begins to fade. If you reach for your phone, think about school, or jump straight out of bed, the dream is usually gone before your feet touch the floor. It was there. You just did not bring any of it with you.

"So she might still be coming," he said.

"She might be coming every night. You might be getting off the train too fast to see her."

He thought about that. He is the kind of person who would rather know how a thing works than be told not to worry about it, and I could see that this helped him more than comfort would have.

My early alarm sometimes catches a dream in the middle.

I know about catching dreams because of the bakery. My alarm goes at three, in the dark, and on some mornings it cuts into a dream like a train braking hard between stations. For a moment I am still there, wherever there is, and then I am in my room, reaching for the light.

On those mornings I can sometimes keep a piece. Our grandmother at a bus stop in the rain, with a radio under her coat to keep it dry. A long corridor of clocks, all showing different times, and her voice saying that none of them was wrong. A ferry deck at night, and her hand pointing at something on the shore that I never got to see.

On other mornings I keep nothing. I used to think those were empty nights. Now I think they were simply journeys I slept through, like the hours on an overnight bus when you wake at the terminus and cannot remember a single town on the way.

Old plays written in Japanese are built around a single dream.

The story I told him that night is not one story but a kind of play. About six hundred years ago, actors in Japanese theater began to perform plays that today are often called dream plays. They are slow and beautiful. Actors in carved masks move across a bare wooden stage under a roof, with a painted pine tree on the back wall. A small group of musicians plays flute and drums, and the drummers call out between the beats in long, rising voices.

My brother sat up when I mentioned the drums. He wanted to know what kind, and how many, and I had to admit that I knew more about the stories than about the drumming.

The stories in these plays follow a pattern. A traveling monk comes to a place where something happened long ago, a battlefield or an old well or a ruined house. There he meets a local person who seems to know a great deal about the past, more than any local person should. Then that person vanishes. In the second half, the same figure returns in its true form, as the ghost of someone who died there, and tells or dances its story. By morning the ghost is gone, and the monk is left wondering what he has seen.

Tonight's Story

One of the best known of these plays is called Atsumori, and it is usually said to be by the great playwright Zeami. It is based on an older story from a long war between two powerful families, told in a famous book of war tales.

In that older story, a battle is fought on a beach. The losing side flees to its ships. A seasoned warrior named Kumagai sees a young rider in fine armor urging his horse out into the waves toward the ships, and calls him back to fight. The young man turns and comes back. Kumagai throws him down and pulls off his helmet, and sees that his enemy is a boy of about sixteen, about the age of Kumagai's own son. He wants to spare him, but other soldiers are coming, and he kills him. Afterwards he finds a flute in a silk bag at the boy's waist. The boy's name was Atsumori.

In the play, years have passed. Kumagai has given up being a warrior and has become a monk. He travels back to that beach to pray for the boy he killed. At dusk he hears a flute, and he meets some young men coming back from cutting grass. One of them lingers after the others have gone, asks the monk to pray for the dead, hints that he is connected to Atsumori, and disappears.

That night the monk prays on the shore. Atsumori appears to him in armor, as he was on the day he died. The monk, startled, says to himself that this must be a dream. The ghost asks why he should call it a dream, because he has come to be freed from what bound him in his waking life.

Then Atsumori tells his story: the fall of his family, the evening before the battle when the young men in the camp played the flute and sang, and the morning when the ships had already left the shore without him. As he reaches the moment of his death, he raises his sword against his old enemy. Then he stops. The man in front of him is no longer an enemy. He is a monk who has spent years praying for him. Atsumori lowers the sword, asks the monk to pray for him again, and is gone.

In many of these plays the traveler wakes alone at dawn.

My brother was quiet for a long time after I finished. Then he said that it was strange how kind it was. A ghost, a sword, a battlefield, and in the end nobody gets hurt.

I told him that is what I love about these plays. The ghost comes to finish something, not to frighten anyone. In many of them, the meeting ends at first light, when the ghost fades and the monk wakes alone, with only the wind in the pines or the sound of the sea, and cannot be sure whether he dreamed it all. The play does not decide for him. It leaves the question open, like a door left ajar in a corridor.

What the plays understand, I think, is how a dream feels from the inside. It is real while it lasts. It leaves very little behind. And the little it leaves can change how you walk on through the day.

My brother's friend asked to hear the story again.

The next Saturday, my brother's friend from the band came over to rehearse in the garage, and during a break she sat with us in the kitchen eating toast. My brother told her the story of Atsumori, badly, with the drums described in more detail than the ghost. She asked me to tell it again properly.

When I had finished, she said that after the dream at the foot of her bed when she was six, there had been whole years when she could not remember a single dream of her father. For a long time she had thought that meant something was wrong with her, or that he had not wanted to come.

I told her what I had told my brother. Not remembering is not the same as not dreaming, and not dreaming of someone is not the same as forgetting them. She nodded slowly and looked out at the garage, where my brother had started playing again on his own. "Then I'll try to get off the train slower," she said.

Her repair records had a few dreams written at the back.

After the friend had gone home, my brother went into the workshop and came back with a stack of our grandmother's repair records. She had kept them for forty years in cheap notebooks with soft covers, one after another, like the logbooks of a ship that never left port. Each line was a job: the date, the customer's street, the kind of clock or radio or bicycle, what was wrong, what she had replaced, and how long it had taken. Her handwriting was small and upright, the same in the first notebook as in the last, and she never crossed anything out; if she made a mistake, she drew a single neat line through it, the way a guard marks off a station once the train has passed. My brother had been reading them for weeks, he said, the way some people read old letters, because each line put her back at the bench for a moment.

At the back of three of the notebooks, upside down, she had written down dreams.

There were only a few, a line or two each, with dates. Dreamed of my mother on the night ferry, she had the tickets. Dreamed the station clock was running backwards and nobody minded. Dreamed of my father's bicycle, the black one, and I fixed the brake.

We read them twice. Then my brother closed the notebook carefully and said, "She did it too."

We bought two notebooks at the shop by the bus station.

The next afternoon my brother and I walked to the small stationery shop next to the bus station, the one where our grandmother used to buy her pencils and the cheap notebooks she used for repair records. We bought two plain notebooks with soft covers, one blue and one green, and two short pencils, because pens run dry when you hold them upright in bed.

On the way home we passed the timetable board at the station, and my brother stopped to read the night buses out loud, the way she used to. He did it in her voice, almost by accident, and then he laughed and walked on.

Something to Try Tonight

If you think you never dream, or that the person you miss has stopped visiting your dreams, try keeping a dream notebook for a week. Put a notebook and a pencil beside your bed, close enough to reach without getting up. Write tomorrow's date at the top of a clean page before you turn off the light. Keep this notebook only for dreams, not for lists or homework, so that it stays a quiet place.

When you wake, do not move at first. Keep your eyes closed and lie still for a few breaths, the way you would sit still for a moment when a train pulls into the station, before you stand up and reach for your bag. Ask yourself quietly: where was I just now?

Then write down anything that is still there, even if it is only one word, one color, a feeling, or the shape of a room. Do not try to explain it or decide what it means. If nothing is there, write nothing came, and the time. That is a real entry too.

After a week, read the pages through once. You will probably find more than you expected, and some of it may be the person you miss, glimpsed at a bus stop or in a doorway, on the way to somewhere else.

My brother put the blue notebook beside his bed, on top of her old travel alarm. I put the green one beside mine, wrote the date on the first page, and turned off the light.