4:512 - The dream of sex without pain. I dreamt four nights ago of clock hands descending from universe like rain, of moon as a green eye, of mirrors and insects, of a love that never withdrew. It was not the feeling of not being empty.
4:513 - The dream of angels dreaming of men. It was during an afternoon nap that I dreamt of a ladder. Angels were sleepwalking up and down the rungs, their eyes closed, their breath heavy and dull, their wings hanging limp at the sides. I bumped into an old angel as I passed him, walking and startling him. He looked like my grandfather did before he passed away last year, when he would pray each night to die in his sleep. Oh, the angel said to me, I was just dreaming of you.
4:514 - The dream of, as silly as it sounds, flight.
4:515 - The dream of the waltz of feast, famine, and feast.
4:516 - The dream of disembodied birds (46). I’m not sure if you would consider this a dream or a memory, for those of you who were there, you will remember how we sat without speaking, eating only as much as we had to. You will remember when a bird crashed through the window and fell to the floor. You will remember those of you who were there, how it jerked its wings before dying, and left a spot of blood on the floor after it was removed. But who among you was first to notice the negative bird it left the window? Who first saw the shadow that the bird left behind, the shadow that drew blood from any finger that dared to trace it, the shadow that was better proof of the bird’s existence than the bird ever was? Who was with me when I excused myself to bury that bird with my own hands?
4:517 - The dream of falling in love, marriage, death, love. I dream of our marriage. But when I dream of my own death, which I have heard is impossible to do, but you must believe me. I dream of my wife telling me on my deathbed that she loves me, and even though she thinks I can’t hear her, I can, and she says she wouldn’t have changed anything. It feels like a moment I’ve lived a thousand times before, as if everything is familiar, right up to the moment of my death, that it will happen again an infinite number of times, that we will meet, marry, have our children, succeed in the way we have, fail in the ways we have, all exactly the same, always unable to change a thing. I am again at the bottom of an unstoppable wheel, and when I feel my eyes close for death, as they have and will a thousand times, I awake.
4:518 - The dream of perpetual motion.
4:519 - The dream of low windows.
4:520 - The dream of safety and peace. I dreamt that I was born from a stranger’s body. She gave birth to me in a secret dwelling, far away from everything that I would grow to know. Immediately after I was born, she handed me to my mother, for the sake of appearances, and my mother said, Thank you. You have given me a son, the gift of life. And for this reason, because I was of a stranger’s body, I did not fear the body of my mother, and I could embrace it without shame, with only love. Because I was not from my mother’s body, my desire to go home never led back to her, and I was free to say Mother, and mean only Mother.
4:521 - The dream of disembodied birds (47). I remember two white birds that my mother brought back for me from Warsaw when I was only a child. We let them fly around the house, and perch wherever they wanted to. I remember seeing my mother’s back as she cooked eggs for me, and I remember the birds perching on her shoulder, with their beaks up next to her ears, as if they were about to tell her a secret. She reached her right hand up into the cupboard, searching without looking for spice on a high shelf, grasping at some elusive, fluttering, not letting my food burn.
4:522 - The dream of meeting your younger.
4:523 - The dream of animals, two by two.
4:524 - The dream of I won’t be ashamed.
4:525 - The dream that we are our fathers. I walked to the Brod, without knowing why, and looked into my reflection in the water. I couldn’t look away. What was the image that pulled me in after it? What was it that I loved? And then i recognized it. So simple. In the water, I saw my father’s face, and that face saw the face of its father, and so on, and so on, reflecting backward to the beginning of time, to the face of God, in whose image we created. We burned with love for ourselves, all of us, starters of fire we suffered — our love was the affliction for which only our love was the cure..
- Jonathan Safran Foer
