Dreaming in Two Grammars
In sleep the two languages trespass on each other, and the unconscious begins to fuse them
For many months my days belonged to the new language and my nights to the old one.
By daylight I bargained, apologised, and explained myself in careful, borrowed, well-behaved sentences.
But sleep obeys no immigration law, and in dreams the two grammars began to upon each other.
I would start a sentence in the shape of one language and finish it in the bones of another.
Word order slid beneath me like sand, subject and verb changing places while I was not looking.
In one dream my dead mother called me to supper in the very tongue she never learned.
Her mouth made the new sounds, and the wrongness of it woke me, trembling, into the dark.
The , I saw, is a , one language written over the erased lines of another.
Beneath every foreign phrase my old words still breathed, like a river running under a paved street.
Sometimes I dreamed of my childhood house described entirely in the grammar of the country that took me in.
The rooms were the same, yet the light fell differently, angled through the syntax of a stranger.
I chased a word down a corridor and it changed languages each time I reached for the handle.
Meaning leaked from one tongue into the other, staining both, so that neither stayed wholly pure.
I woke unable to say in which language I had dreamed, or whether it had a name.
My waking self wanted borders; my sleeping self kept quietly dismantling every fence I built by day.
The mind, it seems, refuses to keep two homes in separate, tidy, well-labelled rooms.
It knocks down the wall between them and lets the furniture of both drift into one dim hall.
In that hall my grandmother argued with my landlord, each in a language the other could not know.
And yet, in the logic of the dream, they understood each other perfectly and were not afraid.
I began to suspect that some deeper self was translating ceaselessly, even while my reason slept.
This self obeyed no dictionary; it spliced roots, bent endings, and coined words no waking mouth had spoken.
What frightened me by day delighted me by night: the border I mourned was already dissolving.
Perhaps the knew, long before I did, that of language was a childish dream.
It was building, in the dark, a third house from the salvaged stones of the other two.
Each morning I carried a few of those strange, sentences up into the daylight like .
They did not fit either language, and yet they described my life more truthfully than either could.
I wrote them down before they faded, these messages smuggled across the frontier of sleep.
And I began to wonder whether the voice forming in my dreams was the one I had been seeking.