“What language do you dream in?”

Gabriela de Mendonça Gomes

Dreaming, like counting and cursing, seems to be a measure by which we’ve decided to measure what our true, or most fundamental, language is.  

Cursing is automatic, an expression of force rather than of meaning.  What sounds come most quickly in the exclamation of frustration or pain—the most private and unshareable yet universal experience of how the self takes up space—ought to demonstrate what language feels most visceral to the curser.  

Counting is deeply mundane, coming from the basest parts of our learning experiences.  It’s about simplicity: which language comes first because it’s easiest, most ready-at-hand?  How lubricated is the pipeline between tongue and tongue?  

Cursing and counting consider where in the geography of the mind does language sit. 

While dreaming also accounts for the polyglot’s instinctual world of words, the significance of the dream seems to be more deeply ontological.  Dreams have a long history of philosophical influence, interpretation, and complication.  Because, unlike numbers and isolate verbal exclamations, dreams are stories our subconscious weaves for us.  My dreaming self’s linguistic preference shows with which tongue I swallow my own mind and drop into the world of idealistic ideation.

So, “what language do you dream in?”—the question asked of so many of us who speak different languages—assumes that the answer will show something deep about who we really are because the language the mind decides to speak when the thinker is not in conscious control should be the most essential one.  

When, in response, I tell them about mental-body modification, my split-tongued stupors of the night, I know that I have not provided an answer that fits neatly into that schema of how language translates identity.  There’s not one language that dominates the interstitial spaces of my subconscious; no one way my mind hinges between the way the sounds shape the air in the long-voweled sibilant English words or ambrosial Portuguese lines of verbal sheet music.  That is, I dream in both.  My self is subsumed in their convergent streams.  

And it’s not an even split.  When either language comes depends on what’s happening, with whom I’m speaking, where I am.  

There, however, arises a dimension of further deferral, because where I dream never seems to be one set place, either.  

My dreams always happen in the inbetweens.  

First, it’s the room where the small white round dinner table stands on matching kitchen tile in the sand-paneled house of my childhood in New Jersey.  It served as the informal dining room, fragmented by a wooden strip from the living room—the sala de estar in Portuguese, literally ‘the room of being.’  Out of my left periphery, as I pass the table on my way to the deck, I see the kitchen where my mom’s mom burned her hand in a grease fire.  It left a dark puddle of smoke on the ceiling that we never painted over.  And it’s there, in my dream. I fidget with the screen door to open it and step out onto the dry greyed wooden slats, their blandness contrasted by deeply fragrant lavender stalks skirting around the deck’s squareness.  But when I walk outside, it’s not the deck that meets my—always unshoed—feet. 

I step onto deeply red Brazilian earth that turns to carmine clay when it rains in the winter. The red earth stains everything on the ranch, the ranch where my father’s parents now live, in their eighties with three new dogs and a solar-heated pool.  Next to the house, I see a long and somewhat flat patch of land valleyed by flanks of deep mata atlantica––the Atlantic forest which enfolds the Brazilian coast and follows it into the interior.  The greenness remains and shifts from beach to ungeological Minas Gerais ‘mountain’ on this ranch. It’s a mountain not because of tectonic formation but because it’s big and peaked, and my grandmother calls it her mountain. And who am I to say otherwise?  I am just dreaming after all.  

I see the mountain rising up and up and up, with the orchard on one of its faces and up much higher the precipitous faces of dark rock which glisten with warm tears when it rains.  In all its deep beauty and forewarned danger—I cannot remember a time I even stepped foot outside the cool tiles of the glass-enclosed deck without my grandmother issuing stern, grandmotherly warnings about how this is really a real jungle and I really could die if I took the wrong step or sat on the wrong rock because it turned out to be a snake—what I dream about is not the forest.  I dream about the parking lot, and the small, now-old wooden sign which my grandfather built and my grandmother painted, suggesting: AUTOS. 

And once I step from the parking lot into the house through the iron-detailed doors fixed with adjustable curtain in case any small barefooted girl or curled up dog wanted to perhaps sleep on the couch in my grandparents’ shared office space while they worked on digital fengshui, headphoned piano composition, or joint architectural projects, I feel that perpetual coldness of Brazilian tile.

In the shock of the cold, I look down and my toes crinkle, and I find myself in another green palace of childhood, vignetted by soft memories of long wooden tables, barbeques, and sunned-over boulders hot to the thin-skinned touch of small hands and smaller fingers. It is the sitio, my parents sitio, the last two vowels coming together like a kiss contained.  The floor is equally cold, unlike American deck wood.  But the red brick house and adjoining towers of always-flowering willows under which I find warm and prickly memories are a swirl of syntax written in light.  

I know I haven’t mentioned talking so far.  Trust me, it does happen. 

Poet Rachel Blau Duplessis says that opening a book is like tripping over a threshold, and when my dreams open to me the book of the self that I am now I am jolted through the space-time momentum to the present.  And the talking, the self-translating, is what brings me to the place from which I dream and write now, the alternately lush and brittle landscapes of this college campus. 

Because, in fact, most of my dreams don’t have the cloudless silence or delicately gargling bubbles of natural phonetics I imagine as I read over these descriptions of the other worlds of my past.  Instead, they tend to involve rather bland and typical concerns—some task that I am supposed to be doing or am to find my way to do in the cobalt evening nearby oversized squares of orange-shaded dormitory windows.  And somehow, the characters in my life conjoin in these places and no-places and speak to me in different languages, and I respond accordingly.  But, at least for those memory-smudged moments, I got to be in those places again, feeling the allness of it all.