After Getting It Right

In a dream, you can even answer a question correctly. The trouble is not that this is strange, but that after you get it right, that world can still refuse to acknowledge it. Someone asleep hears an arithmetic problem from outside, does not wake up, yet sends the answer out. The answer is correct.

The answer has already gone out, but the world in which the answer belongs does not have to remain. The question once held; understanding once took place; the reply also arrived. The dream preserves only that result, not the place connected before and after it. It lets a correct result stand, but does not preserve the relations that made it stand. So the result is a little lonely: it is less like a road leading from question to answer, and more like a stone taken out on its own. You can pick it up, but you cannot find the ground that held it a moment ago.

Words on a wall can be like this too. You recognize each one, but the sentence will not connect. You know what the word in front of you means, but not why it has to stay in the same sentence as the word beside it. Each word is clear on its own, yet when they are placed together, the relation that would let them continue is missing. It is not that meaning has vanished completely; if it had vanished completely, waking up would be easier. The harder thing to handle is that it gives you a little clarity, enough to make you believe you have grasped something, and then lets that clarity stop halfway.

The toothbrush presses this matter down to an even lower place. You have brushed your teeth; later, when you truly wake up, the toothbrush is still dry. That stretch of morning just now was lived through, yet it did not leave behind the slightest wetness. It simply withdraws from consequence, as if an occurrence can occur, while traces need not follow. What the body has already done leaves nothing in place after waking to stand in for it.

To say it was merely fake is, instead, too light. The fake usually still resembles a clean opposite: wrong, scattered, absurd, all of it can be pushed back into the night. Here it is more awkward: the question was once there, and the answer really did come out; the words were once recognized, and the morning was once walked through by the body. A dream can give a local correctness, then let correctness stop at the local, refusing to let it bring out the world that comes after.

The answer is correct. But inside the dream, there is nowhere that has to take responsibility for this “correct.”