‘A Grammar of Dreams’ is a series of short stories based on a sequence of vivid dreams I had, while undergoing treatment for chronic migraines. The dreams are paired with grammatical phenomena from the English language and quotes by Wittgenstein. The first three stories were published in enbloc magazine in 2022.
INDIRECT SPEECH
I blame it all on Wittgenstein.
I am not too hot on philosophy, but I was given this book by the man I love who does not love me back and I leafed through it, mostly out of curiosity. Plus I had nothing better to do. This is probably what triggered the dream:
Death is not an event in life.
A self-evident truth, if ever you saw one.
I also blame it on my brother, who has the sensitivity of a double-horned rhinoceros. We were all sitting around the Christmas table and, instead of the usual small talk, he said he had just gone and had our mother exhumed. In this godforsaken country we are all entitled to our own piece of dirt for up to five years. After that we must make room for the new dead. There are so many dead we don’t know what to do with them. Most people take the bones of their loved ones and place them in what is called the ossuary, together with all the other bones that have nowhere else to go. As it happens, we own a family grave in this village at the end of the world where no one ever goes, so Mum would avoid the indignity of disintegrating in the company of strangers. The little man in charge of unearthing the dead dug up Mum’s bones, wrapped them in an old sheet and placed them near the toilet in the shed allocated for that purpose.
‘We are very sorry about this,’ he said to my brother, ‘but we cannot release the remains until they are disinfected properly. Come back after Christmas. The bones will be fine here.’
Apparently, the man responsible for disinfecting the bones was on his annual leave and would not return to work until after the holidays.
‘You mean you left Mum by the toilets? For the entire Christmas holidays? In an old sheet?’ I was horrified.
My brother said he would sue their arse off, but that is just talk. He was Mum’s favourite and misses her awfully.
This conversation at the Christmas table, in combination with the Wittgenstein book, was the material that set my mind on fire. I sleep like a baby at nights and have lots of dreams, and I know it is probably because of the pills, but they are damn good dreams. They are all logical and structured like a movie. I sleep with a pen and paper next to my bed. I write down all the dreams and send them to the man I love who does not love me back and I keep a diary for future reference, in case I need to see a shrink again. I go to bed every night trembling with joy and I can’t stop my feet from doing a little dance under the covers before I fall asleep. Dreaming is a second life to me, much better than the first one. A postscript by an affectionate God who realized he did not give me enough the first time and came back to complete the task in regular nightly instalments. I know I am nothing spectacular in reality but I don’t care. In my dreams I am this amazing person. Others have nightmares. I don’t. In my dreams I am usually a trapeze artiste walking the tight rope at an incredible height. At the end of the rope I take a bow and a bunch of little children with rosy cheeks cheer me to high heaven. Can it get better than that, I wonder.
In the Wittgenstein dream I was an English teacher, like in the old days. The lesson was taking place in the living room of the family home, which was preserved in all its past splendour and glory. I was tutoring a group of about five or six students and I was very pleased about it because I would make some good money. I am ashamed of needing money but at least I always try to give high quality lessons. I learned this from good old professor Cernic, who used to teach a course in existentialism, when I was in College back in the States. He was completely bald with pointy ears and had this vibrant teaching style, running up and down the aisle between the students, screaming: life is a doughnut and all we get is the hole in the middle. That was existentialism, apparently.
In the dream, I was supposed to be teaching indirect speech. That is not the easiest thing in the world, but I know it well and have taught it a million times. I started with an exercise from the book but the students were unable to do it.
‘Guys, just give me a minute,’ I said. ‘I will find the right exercise for you in no time.’ If I did not find an exercise in the grammar book, I would make one up on the spot. In real life, I would have collapsed under the stress, which is why I usually prop myself up with hundreds of bottles of wine.
Just then, a new student arrived, one of those stern, unrelenting women who terrorize the dreams of teachers. My brother is certainly to blame for the appearance of the woman in the dream, because at the Christmas table, apart from revealing the horrors of the cemetery, he had talked to some extent about a woman who had showed up at the meeting of the Board of Directors at an obscure little charity where he is presiding officer – the Macedonian Affiliation of Educators of Northern Greece or something equally trivial. The woman, under the assumption the charity was a big thing, had been very demanding.
‘I shall require you to fax me the minutes of the meeting as soon as possible,’ she said to my brother.
My brother is a man with no time to waste on bullshit. I would have sent the goddamn minutes, rather than go into a confrontation. The man I love who does not love me back has tried many times to tell me that I am strong enough to deal with the events of life as they come. They are mere events, he says to me, and he strokes my face where I don’t like it, the beginning of my jaw bone under my ear. He does not stroke me exactly, mostly he presses with his finger in a circular sort of motion until it begins to hurt. Then I complain and he stops. It’s funny but I think that this sums up our relationship, more or less.
My brother is two years younger than me. When we were kids, he looked up to me. Now everything has changed. We all rely on him, he is a rock. I love him more than our mother did. She loved him in a most selfish way, as if he belonged to her, as if he were an achievement, her crowning glory. Sometimes I think that my brother continues to participate in obscure charities only to live up to the image our mother had of him.
‘The minutes,’ the woman insisted, as if it were a matter of life and death.
‘The fax is broken down, Ma’am,’ my brother said to her.
‘Don’t you have a scanner?’ she insisted.
‘The scanner is broken down too, Ma’am,’ my brother said and it will be a true waste if he does not go into politics.
This same woman, as I had imagined her, with red hair, horn-rimmed glasses and a mouth full of great big teeth (possibly false), came into my dream and sat among my students. She looked around at the baroque furniture and the heavy curtains and I could tell she was not impressed.
Now I cannot afford to lose any students and I did not want to lose the old hen either. How many losses can we sustain in a lifetime, I wondered. Is there a limit or does it just go on and on? The woman remained oblivious to my inner trepidations and eyed me with cold contempt, suspecting I was this bumbling ineffectual has-been who finds solace in dreams.
‘We are doing indirect speech,’ I said. ‘Indirect speech in grammar is the act of reporting what another person has said. When that happens all the verbs have to take one step back into the past. For the time being the dream is hiding the right exercise from me, but I will find it.’
‘When?’ the old hen said coldly, getting ready to strike with her beak.
‘Soon,’ I said.
‘You are a waste of time,’ she said. ‘I want my money back.’
She said that I was a waste of time and that she wanted her money back. I had it! I finally had it! There was the perfect example and the perfect exercise. The students could turn all of the hen’s words to indirect speech!
Just then my brother walked in and who would be at his side but Mum! He had at last rescued her from spending her Christmas by the toilet. Mum was wearing her favourite two-piece suit woven in golden thread, the one we had buried her in. Her hair was immaculate, styled at the hairdresser’s. She had always liked her hair wavy and piled tall on her head, to add more height to her figure. In the sixties she had worn it in a beehive that was truly awful. Over the years, succumbing to the demands of modern times, she had toned it down a bit and had even added blond highlights on one occasion, a few months before she died. She was not very pretty in reality, but to me she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen in my entire life.
‘Guys,’ I said and my feet danced under the covers, ‘this is my mother!’
Mum stood in the middle of the living room, with an aloof expression on her face. She seemed a bit withdrawn, as she had been the last months of her life. When the cancer had spread to her brain, she had lost her ability to understand speech. That is why I found it very fitting that she should appear in the indirect speech dream. Maybe she had something to tell me.
The students looked at my mother in disbelief. The old hen sat down again, defeated by my mother’s regal countenance.
‘Mum, where have you been all this time?’ I said, screeching a little. I always screech when I talk to her. ‘I thought you were…’ I thought you were dead, I wanted to say, but I did not say it, because I did not want to upset her.
‘Foolish girl,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you ever come to see me?’ That was a thing she often used on me.
The truth was I had not visited her grave a single time in those past five years. I don’t think it makes a difference. The living belong with the living and the dead with the dead. Death is not an event in life, that is what I wanted to say. But I said nothing. Mum was staring at me, looking disappointed as usual. She had perfected that look just for me.
‘Come, have a seat here, Mum,’ I said in the end. ‘You look tired.’ And I took her by the hand and placed her in the red velvet armchair, part of the fabulous furniture Mum loved so much, when she could still play being the lady of the manor.
And there she sat, in the red velvet armchair in the middle of our baroque living room, queen-like, with a half-frozen expression on her face, mildly irritated by everything that had happened to her, before and after she died. And there is no more to be said after that, because whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent, as good old Witt says.
VERBS OF PROBABILITY
A few nights ago, I dreamt about the big earthquake of ’78. I wrote it all down on the notebook I keep next to my bed and sent it to the man I love who does not love me back. He was not very keen.
‘Stop sending me your dreams and just read the goddamn book,’ he said.
I have no idea why he gave me the book. All I wanted was for him to love me. But I did as he said and kept on reading, until I found something that seemed kind of relevant.
Like everything metaphysical, the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.
The events of the night of the earthquake are clear on my mind. There was a sea of cars flooding the streets of the city, as people attempted a quick getaway. There was talk of a building that had collapsed, trapping everyone inside. I was thirteen. That year I had experimented with losing my virginity – a disastrous affair. The young man, a mere four years older than me, had concluded the penetration hastily, though effectively. My lack of any second thoughts before the event or any remorse after it, led him to believe that I had lied about being a virgin. Only when I pointed at his fingernails, dirty with my blood, was he finally convinced. At that time, I could not suspect that I was destined to be surrounded by insensitive morons throughout my entire life. I thought he was a one off and next one would be better. But no such luck.
That was the year I decided I was going to have an adventurous life. And I did, much to Mum’s dismay, as she disapproved greatly of adventure. The man I love who does not love me back says I did it because of the dead baby. My mother, before having me, had a baby girl who was born dead. She and Dad were devastated. When she became pregnant with me, she had a dream about Jesus ascending to heaven – it seems that all the women in my family rely more on dreams than we do on reality. In her mind, the dead baby would be resurrected. I grew up under the burden of being God’s gift – my goddamn name, Theodora, means God’s gift. When puberty came along and I came down from my pedestal for a roll in the mud with the moron with the bloody fingernails, it was the end of the little miracle that had been my life. And because people rarely die when their dreams die, I exchanged the dream with another one. A life of adventure, a walk on the wild side!
If not the events and decisions of that year, at least the earthquake warranted a dream. It was a good earthquake, went on for thirty seconds, which is a mighty long time to be shaken about. Mum screamed non-stop. That was really something. I think she mostly screamed because a bottle of olive oil fell out of the cupboard and spilled all over the floor. There was really no reason for all that screaming, Mum had a maid who did all the cleaning up for her. Dad came soon after with my brother and we abandoned the crumbling apartment. Sometimes I think back to that night and I remember how the walls cracked and the plaster from the ceiling fell on our heads like cosmic dust. My life resembles that crumbling place, an easy, well-appointed life that is coming apart at the seams. We spent the night in the car, the streets were utterly blocked. In the morning we managed to leave the city and made it to the country house by the sea, where we remained the entire summer. Eventually, we forgot.
But in dreams nothing is ever forgotten. So there I was, in another wonderful instalment-of-happiness dream, standing in the street, looking at all those cars that were going nowhere. Every now and then the cars inched forward at a maddeningly slow pace. Then a car drove up next to me and – what do you know – it was my Dad’s old black Citroen. I don’t think Dad had ever loved anything more than that car. It was a symbol, more than anything. He had beaten poverty, had escaped death during the civil war, survived the years of torture in the hands of the communists in a labour camp in Albania. What a life Dad had, and here I am, complaining over nothing. Dad had been born in a small mountain village of Greece. His father was a teacher. There were no more than ten students at a time, so they were all grouped together, in one class, and the older ones helped the younger. The village women nursed their children until they were four years old. Where would they have found cow milk, it would have been impossible to survive otherwise. During the civil war, Dad was a lieutenant in the Greek army. On the last day of the war, he was captured by guerrillas. All the prisoners of war had to walk the whole night, until they crossed behind the Iron Curtain, only to be delivered to the communist regime in Albania. Dad wrote a book about it. Seven years of being tortured by fanatical bastards would be enough to drive anyone into a dream world for good.
But Dad had a good grip on reality. He returned, safe and sound, the only thing troubling him for the rest of his life being the terrible headaches, from having been kicked on the head too often by men in boots. And then, instead of becoming a whimpering idiot like me, what did the man do? He set out to win mother’s heart of steel – and won it! What an achievement!
That was precisely what the Citroen meant: victory. I have been victorious, Dad said, every time he sat behind the wheel. He was not much of a driver either. After Dad died, we did not know what to do with the old car so we parked it somewhere in the street and tried not to think about it, until a lorry crashed into it and smashed it to bits. We threw it away in a car dump and that was the end of that.
In the dream, the old Citroen looked shiny and new. It was packed, of course, with all the dead in the family. Most of them were loaded in the trunk, for they were just a bunch of bones, having died a long time ago. The ones I knew personally were travelling in luxury, inside the car, and appeared to me as they had looked in life. Uncle George, who died first, was sitting in the back. He was a tall, handsome man, a doctor. The people in the village locked their girls in when they saw him walking down the street. He broke so many hearts, until his own heart betrayed him. Next to him was Aunt Eleni who died of bone cancer. Such was the destiny of a woman who had not touched anything or anybody for half a century. She always used a piece of tissue to turn door handles. Once, when I was a kid, I went to shake her hand to wish her happy Easter and she gave me a little stick and I shook the stick. My mother had told me the story of Aunt Eleni. When she was young, she fell in love with a man, who was deemed by the family to be socially beneath them. They forbid her to marry him. She went crazy, lacking a layer of skin, as some of the women in our family apparently do. She started dressing in rags and wearing men’s shoes and screaming in the cobbled alleyways of the village. She was given a series of electric shocks, which was the usual treatment in those days and those had amazingly cured her partially, apart from causing a persistent case of germaphobia.
The funny thing is that she got her revenge in the end. She convinced the family, after they moved to the city, that their house in the village had to be destroyed, as it was haunted by the ghosts of the past. They demolished the lovely old house, probably out of guilt for having destroyed Aunt Eleni’s life. Now we have nothing in the village, just a family grave. Aunt Eleni remained single and a virgin – at least one of us managed it – and went on with her life barricading herself behind tons of tissue paper, which she used for turning door handles. She would also buy huge rolls of bubble wrap to wear inside her clothes, which is why she crinkled when she walked.
But she could not protect herself, no one can. The enemy got her from within. She was looking straight ahead now, in the dream, avoiding my eyes. What could she say? I fucked up? Most of us do anyway. Mum was there too, in the passenger seat, holding the dead baby. Her hair was immaculate, as usual. Dad was driving the car, of course.
‘Hey, Dad,’ I said. ‘Where are you going? Take me with you!’
Dad turned and looked at me and his face was sad and yellow. That is the last image I have of my father, his sad yellow face, when they brought him home for the funeral. What a day that had been! I remember a very tall, thin man like a scarecrow, all dressed in black, who came up and sprayed something on Dad’s lips. ‘There,’ he said to me, ‘now his mouth will stay shut for good,’ and my Dad’s mouth is now shut for ever. So it was my mother who turned and spoke to me, though she spoke in my father’s voice, because in dreams this shit happens and nobody bats an eyelid.
‘There is no room in the car. You are supposed to stay here. Try not to make such a fuss. You should be fine.’
Mum would always come up with those phrases, containing modal verbs. You should, you could, you might, you can’t…She knew better than anyone what was possible and what impossible, what probable and what improbable. What were the probabilities that I would be fine, I wondered.
They drove off and left me standing there. I could not single out our car anymore because they all looked the same. They were going nowhere anyway. Big deal.
I have had enough of this dream world. I am so tired I wish I could give up. That is what I wanted to say to the man I love who does not love me back. But we went to bed instead. He had finished reading the diary of dreams and was slightly annoyed at my general lack of direction and self-confidence.
‘I want to treat you badly,’ he said and that thrilled me. He stroked my tongue with his finger until saliva started dribbling on my chin. He said he liked it when I looked vulnerable. Then he proceeded to hurt me methodically.
In a life riddled with pain, this was the least of my worries. I even welcomed it, in a way. What is truly difficult is to connect the real to the unreal. Modal verbs don’t help much, they mostly express unreality.
Probability is a thorn in the grammar of dreams.
THE PAST
I have given up teaching. I am working at a mental institution, very fittingly I might add, pushing paper and turning out documents that are grammatically perfect. Nobody cares about grammar these days. Most people I meet are simply trying to hold onto their sanity. The man I love who does not love me back left me some time ago. I tried many times to contact him, but he wants nothing to do with me. I cannot imagine a life without him, so I keep returning to the book he gave me.
We are asleep. Our life is a Dream. But we wake up sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming.
I have no idea whether I dreamt of this life or it was real. Does it really matter? I continue to keep a diary of dreams, in case the man I love who does not love me back ever returns. I do not think that he will.
Now this is true. It all happened, exactly like that. Election day came and nobody wanted to take Mum to vote. My brother was out of town and my son knew that Granny would vote for the wrong party. My daughters refused. Throw Granny into the sea, was the secret thought in everybody’s mind, even in my own.
Mum put on a pink shirt with long sleeves, completely inappropriate for that time of year. She could not put the shirt tail into the back of her skirt and I helped her, but I did not do it very well because she does not understand anyway how much it bulges. I felt embarrassed over that, but I was really tired.
I had washed her hair in the morning (past perfect, for actions completed in the past before other actions) and styled it and she looked great. There used to be a severity about her, she had been so unforgiving. Now, as she was approaching the end of her life, she had turned soft. It suited her.
At lunch, she refused to have any of the chicken soup (simple past, for actions that happened at a specific time in the past). She said she would have some cherries instead. I had bought a whole load because I knew how much she liked them.
‘I will not take you to vote unless you have some soup first,’ I said and she looked at me, perplexed at this unexpected reversal of roles.
A little later she came into my room and said she had eaten. I checked in the kitchen and found a small bowl with remnants of soup, but maybe she had only had a spoonful, how should I know. I took her to vote anyway.
It took us ten minutes to walk to the taxi depot, she walks so slowly. She was wearing a black woollen cardigan over the shirt. It must have been about a hundred degrees out there. Perhaps she does not feel the heat, I thought. I keep telling her to dress more lightly for this time of year. When we sit outside in the veranda, instead of wearing the satin dressing gown I got her for her birthday, she wraps a towel round her neck. I find it silly and I tell her and then she goes and puts on the dressing gown.
We arrived at the voting centre and I helped Mum up the entrance stairs. We took the lift to the second floor. The poll clerk looked at Mum and asked if she needed any help.
‘Certainly not,’ Mum said. She is always afraid that people will trick her and steal her vote.
They gave her the ballot papers and the envelope. I asked her if she wanted me to find the paper with the party of her choice, the right-wing morons that she votes for, but she did not answer. She does this all the time, she does not answer. She might answer me one day. Tell me something useful Mum. Tell me something I don’t know. Fat chance.
She went behind the blue curtain. I could see her silhouette in the sunlight. I waited for about fifteen minutes, until she found the ballot paper she wanted. Her hands tremble so much, you see. She put it in the envelope at last and came out.
‘Do I put this here?’ she said holding the sealed envelope and pointing to the waste basket.
‘In all truth you should,’ I said.
The poll clerk was looking at us. Into the sea, the children had said. But it was her right to cast her vote and I was certain this was going to be her last one so I would not deprive her of it.
Downstairs we went, first the lift, then the stairs. She was holding on to me tight (past continuous, for actions that went on for a while in the past). Out in the street she said:
‘Should I take off the cardigan now? It is rather hot.’
I helped her take it off. Then a taxi came along and we took it.
Back at our street, I helped Mum out of the taxi. She was walking very slowly now. She belched loudly a couple of times and I looked the other way. In front of our apartment building, she suddenly felt sick. She let go of me and staggered to the street curb to throw up. A bucket of blood came out of her mouth. She is dying, I thought. Mum is dying. My Mum.
Then I realized she was throwing up cherries. She had eaten the goddamn cherries. Probably all of them if I know my Mum.
She lasted until the end of the summer. Her party lost the election.
I had this dream once that Mum was sitting in the kitchen eating cherries. Then she was no more.
When I feel lonely, I burrow back into the grammar of dreams, like a blind mole finding comfort in the dark. I have come to realise that one can easily master the past, even imagine a possible future. It is not hard, not hard at all.
The present can be a little harder.
