Why Was Last Night's Dream So Frightening?

Many people believe a dark dream of the dead is a warning.

Many people believe that a frightening dream about someone who has died is a bad sign. If the dead come back grey and silent, the belief goes, they must be unhappy, or a warning must be hidden somewhere inside the dream. I have heard this all my life, in queues and on night buses, said half as a joke and half not.

It is not true. Frightening dreams are common in the months after a loss, and they predict nothing at all. They come from the dreamer, not from the dead, and they show how much feeling the dreamer is carrying, the way an engine runs loud on a steep road. The noise does not mean the engine is failing. It means the road is steep.

I knew some of this on the night of the storm, and I learned the rest slowly.

The storm reached the house an hour before my alarm.

It was the middle of autumn, and the first real storm of the year came in after midnight. I work the early shift at the bakery, so I sleep from the evening until three, and my nights are short and oddly shaped. That night the wind woke me before the alarm did. Rain hit the workshop roof at the back of the house like gravel thrown from a passing truck. The kitchen light flickered twice when I switched it on, then held.

My brother was sitting on the kitchen counter in the half dark, holding an empty mug he had forgotten to fill.

He was seventeen now and taller than our grandmother had ever been, but he sat the way he used to sit at six, knees up, shoulders round. It was a Thursday, and our mother would come home the next evening. "I had a horrible one," he said. "She was in the workshop. Everything was covered in grey dust, thick, like your flour. The radios were on, but there was no sound. I called her and she turned round, and her face was grey too, and she didn't say anything. Then the floor started going down, like the ramp of a ferry, and I woke up."

He looked at me the way people look at a departure board when they think their train has been cancelled. "Does that mean something's wrong? With her, I mean. Wherever she is."

I filled the kettle and lit the gas. The flame made its small blue ring, the same ring it had made for her every morning. "No," I said. "It means you love her, and it is a stormy night. Let me tell you a very old story while the water boils. It has dust in it too."

Tonight's Story

The story is the Epic of Gilgamesh, which was pressed into clay tablets in an old language of Mesopotamia more than three thousand years ago. Gilgamesh is a king, proud and restless, too strong for his own people. The gods make him a match: Enkidu, a wild man shaped from clay, who runs with the gazelles and drinks with the herds at the waterholes. When the two men finally meet, they wrestle in a doorway until the walls shake. Then they stop, and they become the closest friends in all the old stories I know.

Together they travel to the cedar forest and kill its guardian, Humbaba. Later they kill the Bull of Heaven, which a goddess has sent down against their city. In the story these are great deeds, but they are also the kind of deeds the gods do not forgive.

Then Enkidu begins to dream. In the first dream he sees the gods sitting in council, deciding that one of the two friends must die for what they have done, and the one they choose is Enkidu. He wakes and tells Gilgamesh, and soon he falls ill.

In the second dream, a dark figure with the talons of an eagle takes hold of him. His arms turn into wings, feathered like a bird's, and he is led down to the house of dust. It is the house that no one leaves once they have gone in. The people there sit in darkness and wear feathers, dust is their bread and clay is their food, and dust lies thick on the door and on the bolt. Enkidu sees kings there whose crowns have been put aside, and priests, and the queen of that place, Ereshkigal, with her scribe kneeling before her and reading from a tablet. The queen lifts her head and asks who has brought this man. Just there the clay is broken, and the next lines are lost.

Enkidu lies ill for twelve days, and then he dies.

What comes next is the part I always remember. Gilgamesh will not believe it. He touches his friend's heart and feels nothing. He covers the face gently, the way a bride's face is veiled, and he walks around him again and again, like an eagle circling, like a lioness who has lost her cubs. He calls on the roads they walked, the forests, the rivers and the wild animals to weep for Enkidu. He has a statue made of his friend. For days he will not let him be buried. Then he takes off his fine clothes, puts on a lion's skin and walks out into the wild, alone.

The dust in my brother's dream came from our own house.

My brother listened with both hands round the mug, which I had filled by then. When I stopped, he said, "So it's the same dream. The dust. That's not good, is it?"

"In the epic, the dream comes true," I said. "That is how old stories are built. Their dreams are printed in advance, like a timetable, so the listeners know where the journey ends. Real dreams are not timetables. Nobody prints them."

Then we looked for where his dust had come from, the way she used to look for the loose wire before she blamed the radio. The workshop had not been swept since the spring. Nobody wanted to be the first to move her things, so a soft grey layer had settled on the bench, on the stopped clocks and on the radio dials. The clock repairer across the street had come for two of her unfinished repairs the week before, and my brother had watched him lift them out of their clean rectangles in the dust. And every morning I came home with flour on my sleeves. As the photo albums had shown us in the summer, a dream takes pieces from many days and stitches them together, and our house had been leaving grey pieces everywhere.

"And the silent radios?" he asked.

"You switched one on last week," I said. "It hummed and gave you nothing. You told me at dinner."

He nodded slowly. The ferry ramp he could explain himself. She had taken us on night ferries to visit family when we were small, and he had always been afraid of the moment the ramp lifted and the black water showed underneath.

A frightening dream shows how heavy the load is.

I told him what I had read over the summer, between shifts. Bad dreams are common after someone dies. They come to people who loved the dead person well, who did nothing wrong and owe nothing. The sleeping mind seems to keep working on strong feelings at night, fear and longing and the shock of an empty chair, and sometimes the work is loud. A frightening dream about her did not mean she was frightened. It meant he was carrying something heavy, and his mind had gone down into the hold at night to check the cargo.

And frightening dreams are not the whole picture. When people who have lost someone describe their dreams of that person, most of the dreams they describe are comforting ones. One storm does not tell you the weather for the whole year.

There is one more thing I want to write down here, plainly, because it matters. If bad dreams come back night after night, or if sleep troubles go on for weeks and weigh on your days, please talk to a doctor. Doing that is not a failure. It is like taking a clock that keeps stopping to someone with the right tools.

Something to Try Tonight

This is the way back to sleep that I showed my brother at a quarter past three, with the rain still coming down. You can use it after any frightening dream.

First, switch on a small lamp, not the big light, and put both feet on the floor. Feel the floor under you. Then name five things you can see in the room, out loud or in your head, slowly: the lamp, the door, a jacket on a chair, whatever is there. Then name three things you can hear. On a stormy night that part is easy. Next, breathe in while you count to four and breathe out while you count to six, five or six times, so the breath out is always the longer one. If you like, drink a little water. Then tell yourself one plain sentence, such as "That was a dream, and this is my room." Lie down again with the small lamp on if you want it. You do not have to fall asleep straight away. Resting in the dark with a calm breath is already rest.

In the morning, if the dream still bothers you, write it down and give it a new last line. My brother's new last line was short: the floor stopped going down, and she handed him a brush.

My brother went back to bed before the rain stopped.

He did it all, a little embarrassed at first, then less. He named the lamp, the toaster, my bakery shoes by the door, the calendar where our mother had circled her weekend, and the photograph of our grandmother on a ferry deck with her hair blown sideways. He heard the rain, the fridge and the kitchen clock. On the fourth slow breath his shoulders came down.

"Did Gilgamesh ever get over it?" he asked from the stairs.

"Not quickly," I said. "Go to sleep. I'll tell you the end when I get home."

The bakery was warm and full of ordinary noise.

I cycled to work through the tail of the storm, along streets that shone like wet machinery. The baker who opens the shop was already sliding the first trays into the oven, and she said the wind had taken the sign off the shop next door. I shaped rolls for two hours and thought about Gilgamesh walking into the wild in his lion's skin.

What struck me that morning was how honest the epic is about grief. It does not hurry him. Gilgamesh does not move neatly from shock to calm. He refuses, he rages, he travels to the edge of the world to find a man who escaped death, and he fails. The story lets all of it take as long as it takes. It is three thousand years old, and it already knows that grief is a long road with no printed timetable.

I thought about Enkidu's dream too, and about why it frightened me less than it once had. When I first read it at school, the house of dust seemed like a threat aimed at the reader. That morning, with my hands in the dough, it seemed more like what a very ill man might see at night: the dark, the kings he had heard of, the feathers, the dust. The storytellers put his fear into the poem so that listeners could feel it with him for a while, and then set it down again.

Gilgamesh came home with nothing but the walls of his city.

Here is the end, as I told it to my brother when I came home at midday. Gilgamesh crosses the waters of death and finds the one man the gods allowed to live forever. The man tells him the story of a great flood and gives him a test: stay awake for six days and seven nights. Gilgamesh falls asleep almost at once and sleeps for seven days. Then he learns of a plant at the bottom of the sea that makes the old young again. He dives and finds it. On the way home he stops to bathe in a pool, and a snake smells the plant, carries it off and sheds its skin as it goes.

So Gilgamesh comes home with empty hands. He stands beside the boatman who brought him back and shows him the walls of his city, the brickwork, the gardens and the gates. That is where the epic ends. He has not found a way to keep anyone forever. He has found his way home, and he can look at what people have built and go on.

My brother ate his toast and said nothing for a while. "That's a sad ending," he said at last.

"It's a quiet ending," I said. "I think those are different."

We swept the workshop floor that same afternoon.

After I had slept a few hours, we went into the workshop together. We did not move her tools. We only wiped the bench, the dials and the clock faces, and swept the floor from the door to the window. The clean rectangles where the two repairs had stood vanished into the clean wood around them.

Halfway through, my brother stopped with the broom in his hands. He asked whether a person could go back into a bad dream on purpose and change it from the inside, while it was still happening. I did not know the answer that afternoon. I kept that question for the next chapter.

Then I opened the window, and the cold, clean air of the day after a storm came into the room.