Then one night I was woken by a shout. Or maybe I wasn’t asleep? I jumped out of bed and ran outside, the dogs followed. I couldn’t see lights on in any of the cabins. It was quiet as it usually is around here. Maybe I dreamed it, I thought to myself. I sometimes dream something that wakes me up. Even from a deeper sleep. Afterwards I find it hard to believe that I only dreamed it. Like what? I won’t tell you, dreams can’t be told. When they’re told, they stop being a dream. It’s like you wanted to tell about God. Would God still exist? Besides, can anything actually be told? Things told are just things told, nothing more. Usually they have little in common with what was or is or will be. They live their own lives. And they don’t settle down for good, but instead they keep on moving, growing, getting further and further away from what was or is or will be. Though who knows, maybe in that way they draw closer to the truth?
Try and reach down deep, try if you can to touch the world with the very first thought, that’s still untainted by anything. You’ll admit then that it’s what’s told that establishes what was or is or will be, not the other way around; that it fills it out, determines whether it’s bound for oblivion or resurrection. And what is told is the only possible eternity. We live in what is told. The world is what is told. That’s why it’s harder and harder to live. And perhaps only our dreams determine who we are. Perhaps only our dreams are ours.
To be honest, mostly I don’t dream that much. Less and less. Plus, when I wake up I don’t remember anything. In general I sleep badly. Often I’ll be dead beat, but when I go to bed I can’t get to sleep. Then if I do, I can’t tell if I’m sleeping or not, whether I’m sleeping in a waking state or dreaming of being awake. This doctor that has one of the cabins gave me some foreign sleeping pills, he told me they’d for sure send me to sleep. He sometimes comes and gives me a checkup, listens to me with his stethoscope, checks my blood pressure. I tell him, what for, doc? I don’t need to live so very long. What I’ve already lived is enough. Let’s say I take a pill, and I’m sound asleep, and during that time something happens in one of the cabins. If I take a pill the dogs might not even be able to wake me up, and they can’t go off and help all on their own. They can’t even open the door, I always keep it locked. I’ve never taken sleeping pills, and I’m not going to start now.
How long have I had trouble sleeping? As long as I can remember. Except it’s getting worse and worse. Who knows, it could be that death is already getting me used to not sleeping. They say the closer you get to it, the more you sleep. But with me it’s evidently the opposite. I’ll die when I stop wanting to sleep at all. Maybe I’ll see Death. I’ll ask him, why didn’t you come for me back then? That way it would all have been over long ago.
So as you can see, I don’t even have time to dream. Besides, my dogs protect me from having dreams. I don’t know if they don’t like it when I have a dream, or whether they don’t want dreams to add to my difficulties. Whenever I start having a dream they come up right away and start licking my hands and my face, tugging the blanket off of me, or yelping as if someone was breaking into one of the cabins. Then when they finally manage to wake me up they jump for joy that they’ve woken me. Something tells me they know about my dreams. Because I sometimes dream something that makes it really hard to even get up afterwards. It’s like I’m still wandering about inside the dream, helpless, I can’t tell whether it’s me or someone in my place. Everything around seems to still be the dream.
In the middle of the night I’ll take the dogs and go check up on the cabins, and I have the feeling I’m walking in the dream. The air is like now, in autumn, it’s sharp, it pinches your cheeks, or even more in winter, and I can’t be certain that I’ve woken up, or if I’m only dreaming the lake and the cabins and my dogs trotting beside me. And to tell you the whole truth, sometimes I’m not even certain it’s my own dream. No, you didn’t mishear. I’m not sure if it’s my dream, or if someone else is dreaming me. Who? I don’t know. If I did …
I remember my grandmother used to say that you don’t always dream your own dreams. For instance you can dream the dreams of the dead, that they didn’t manage to dream in their lifetime. Or the dreams of people who haven’t yet come into the world. Not to mention that according to my grandmother dreams can sometimes pass from person to person, house to house, village to village, town to town and so on. Sometimes they can even get lost. One person in some house was supposed to have a particular dream, but actually someone else had it. Someone in the village was supposed to have a dream, but it ended up being dreamed by someone in the town. Someone in this country, but it was dreamed by someone in a distant place. So it’s quite possible I’m having someone else’s lost dreams, and that’s why the dogs sense it right away and wake me up when I’m having that kind of dream.
I should tell you too that my grandmother was known to be an expert on dreams. There wasn’t a dream whose meaning she couldn’t explain. Not just in the family. Neighbors came from near and far, from both sides of the Rutka. They came from other villages. Old folks, young ones. Unmarried women, wives, Doubting Thomases. They’d seen the world, but they came when one of them had had a dream that was too much for them. And grandmother would explain everybody’s dreams. When she explained them, every dream became clear as waking life, as if it were simply something the person had lived through but overlooked. She’d have them provide some small detail, because people don’t pay enough attention to details. And that detail would sometimes alter the meaning of the dream from one thing to another, from good to better or from bad to not so bad at all. Or even that the dream was meant to have been dreamed by somebody else, because one detail was from someone else’s life.
Every day over breakfast we’d each have to tell her what we’d dreamed about. And it couldn’t be that no one had dreamed anything. To sleep through the night and not have any dreams? The only exception was grandfather, who never had any dreams. It’s hard to believe, right? Even us children, we always dreamed something. Though according to grandmother our dreams didn’t count yet, because we still got our dreams from our mother or father. She’d say that you only grow into your own dreams through suffering.
You can’t imagine how many dreams she knew. When we were shelling beans she’d tell one dream after another, as if she was pulling them out of the husks. Dreams that belonged to the living. Dreams dreamed by the dead. The dreams of kings, princes, bishops. I remember one time she told about a king who dreamed that a pearl fell out of his crown. No, she didn’t say if he’d actually come to her for an explanation of what the dream meant. But I believed he had, and that he’d brought her the pearl in the palm of his hand. Aside from me, I don’t know if anyone else believed it. Grandfather did for sure, because he believed every story grandmother told. Though it made no difference whether anyone believed it or not. When you’re listening, especially during bean-shelling, you don’t have to believe in what you’re listening to. It’s enough that you’re listening. For me in any case, my heart would stop when grandmother would begin, saying, one time a king had a dream, a prince had a dream, one night a bishop had a dream …
Everyone would be enthralled, whether or not they believed it all. It would go so quiet that if it hadn’t been fall or winter, you could have heard a fly buzzing. Mother and father, Jagoda, Leonka, even Uncle Jan, who didn’t believe in anything anymore. Not to mention grandfather, who would be so intent on listening he’d stop shelling beans. Though the others too, the husks would hang loose in their hands, and the beans would fall much less often onto the canvas sheet. Though father didn’t like kings, he used to blame all kinds of misfortunes on kings, so when grandmother started telling about a king he’d sometimes interrupt her: