Dream Reading

 

I wade into the white noise blaring from the computer in the evening. The room has an infant scent that’s like Halloween candy—sweet, waxy, new. Even though I make no noise, there’s a mewling coming from the cradle. My son, two weeks old, is on the verge of waking up in there and I tiptoe over to my side of the bed and wince each time undressing makes the slightest sound. I make it into bed without waking him. My wife’s asleep. My son’s asleep and, the next room over, my daughter’s asleep. I close my eyes and stare at the back of my eyelids in the dark and listen to everyone’s breathing as best as I can through the white noise.

When an hour has gone by and I still haven’t gone to sleep, I try to copy my wife’s breathing. At first, it’s lulling to know that I’m breathing as one would who is in such a deep state of sleep as she appears to be, then I remember that our bodies are different and that her breathing is matched to her, not me. I stop and my thoughts go back to the approaching fall semester and all I have to do to prepare. Great ideas occur to me on the improvements of my classes, but I don’t write them down; I don’t even get up because to do so would break the spell of this strange anesthesia I’m under, like the original twilight sleep. This is not the darkness of unconsciousness, but neither am I fully awake.

Sometimes, when I’m very tired and I try to read, I fall asleep knowing I’m holding the book, but, asleep, I know I’m holding the book and I have reading dreams. That is, the content of my dreams comes to me as strange things I’m reading. These dreams have no visual element other than text, but the text somehow creates pictureless ideas.

The sleep I’m having now feels like one of those reading dreams, but I’m reading the room, hearing the sounds of it, even looking at it as I remember it when I closed my eyes. The computer screen shows a waterfall. This accompanies the roaring sound I’m hearing. The computer light is periwinkle and electric, like static popping under a blanket. The corners of the room lie in shadow. I feel the weight of the blanket on me. My legs are warm; I move them apart from each other. I begin to hear strange things in the repeating white noise. The falling water has begun to sonically blur. It sounds like the rush of wind heard when biking down a steep hill and then it turns into a hiss, sort of like static but without seamlessness of static. I hear it stop and start. It’s a sound I’ve seen before when watching falling water. If you focus on one part of a waterfall, the whole thing looks like it’s falling in jerky stop motion. The sound is like that and, if I could look up at the screen, I bet I’d see that now, too. But even dream reading the screen feels like too much work and I continue not to focus on anything in particular until gradually, a sound shapes itself from the distance: an opening, a throat clearing, an “ahem”. It clarifies. The first few hiccupping sounds of my daughter’s crying. Am I dream reading this, too? I strain my ears for it. A loud car growls by outside. When it’s passed, I can clearly discern the cries that are punctuated by a taking in of air and sound, mostly, like letting it out through the glottis, like a swallow in reverse.

I realize that I’m completely awake and I swing my legs over the side of the bed. Getting up after just lying there for hours comes as something of a relief. As least now, I have something to do. I wade out of one white noise soundscape and into another. When I open my daughter’s door, the sound of pouring rain runs out and bifurcates with the waterfall sound in my bedroom everyone else is asleep in. There’s a lambent night light, like a small church candle in a monastery niche, more revealing the darkness than relieving it. Another hiccupping cry. I shut the door after me and close myself into the sound of crying rain.

“What’s wrong?” I ask my daughter, standing at the railing of the crib, her hands tightly wrapped around it. She doesn’t answer, but when I reach down, she releases the railing and allows herself to be carried upward. I bring her to my shoulder and her thirty pounds rests squarely against me, like a backpack swung around to the front.

I lean back into the rocking chair, but I’m too tired to sing, really too tired to hum, so I just rock and feel drowsy. I rock and after a while I’m dream reading again and it’s like my daughter is the one rocking me, she’s just doing it backwards. This is a strange feeling and it makes me feel like I’m not holding her tightly enough, so I force myself a little more awake. I open my eyes and see that she’s wide awake. Her eyes are taking in everything, although she’s perfectly still. It’s strange that she doesn’t talk to me. She just stares, like she’s trying hard to remember something.

I try a few songs. Eventually, they become half-hearted humming and when, after 20 minutes her eyelids haven’t even begun to close, I tell her I’ll lie down next to her. She tenses, but lets me put her back in the crib. Lying down, she keeps her eyes open. I pull over a beanbag to rest my head on and, from the small foam pad by her bed, I push my arm through the slats of the crib and gently pat her on the back. My arm is somewhat cinched in, but it’s not completely uncomfortable: I’m still lying down; I’m not holding her anymore, I can even pat without too much discomfort. I close my eyes and the sound and the dull golden light of the nightlight seem to wash over me—only they are much more soporific this time. The room has a close humidity, that isn’t dampness—it’s the kind of summer night I remember from June in Michigan when the air is totally still and the stars and fireflies are all hung together in the motionless air and there’s a kind of sublimination that seems to happen between the body and the air. It’s not sweating but the gradual turning into the same languid night air the surrounds one.

I realize I’m falling asleep. I open my eyes and see that my daughter is still awake. I wonder if she’s forming the kind of memories that I’m tapping into right now. I wonder if in the future when she’s unable to sleep, if she’ll lean into this memory, into this room and, thinking of what she’ll think of in the future for a sleep mnemonic, I fall asleep.

I wake up with the dust motes rising from the carpet into the morning light. I feel better rested, having slept on the floor than I would’ve if I’d slept alone in a comfortable bed and I find myself looking forward to the day as I once did when I was young and it was summer. My daughter is still asleep and the white noise is still going in each room, though now this hiss of the falling water sounds a bit primitive in the daylight.