Yrsa Sigurðardóttir - I Remember You

Now for the first time Freyr regretted not being more familiar with the most recent theories on dream interpretation. He knew that many clinical studies were being conducted on dreams, but very few of the articles published in the journals appealed to him. He had thus merely skimmed through them. He owned an excellent book on the subject, in which more than fifty thousand dreams were investigated, but it was somewhere in storage. Actually, Freyr recalled that the result of this extensive investigation had been something along the lines that people throughout the world generally dreamed the same things and that the dreams depended to a large degree on events in their daily lives. Firemen dreamed more often of fires than divers did, and so on. It was difficult to tell whether this conclusion fitted in Védís’s case, except perhaps that if her dreams reflected her everyday reality, that reality was considerably different to what Freyr was used to.

Freyr had read through every single dream in her diary, since they were neither numerous nor long. He read some twice, some three times. He wanted to try to understand what these strange descriptions and interpretations said about the woman; what she saw in her dreams, how she reported them and what she thought most interesting about them. He even scrutinized Védís’s handwriting in the hope that it would shed some light on her condition at the time of writing down each dream. But there was little to be discovered from it. The delicate script was nearly always the same, with nothing to indicate that any unusual agitation was controlling her hand. Every single letter was crisp and clear; the script slanted slightly to the right and the capital letters were more elaborate than Freyr was used to. Yet although the handwriting said nothing about the woman, her dreams were a different story. Freyr believed that the descriptions were realistic and that the woman hadn’t made up anything that she described; he based this, among other things, on how irregular the entries were. If she’d written about her dreams day after day, Freyr would have been suspicious, since no cases existed of people being able to recall their subconscious adventures every single morning.

It wasn’t until 2007 that her dreams became significantly interesting. Prior to that they’d been very normal, describing banalities that sleep distorted and changed into adventure or horror. Védís either ended up in situations characterized by overabundance and positivity, or else she was trapped in a world in which her arm fell off, the earth swallowed her home, she wound up in jail or something in that vein. Her interpretation of these dreams was extremely simple: bad events were omens of good things and vice versa. If her friends or relatives appeared in her dreams, she would write about them particularly, often noting to herself at the conclusion of her interpretation to contact them and warn them of this or that or ask about prospective heirs who proclaimed their arrival in one way or another. Twice, dead relatives of prospective parents had come to give names for the children and, according to her entries, she wanted to pass this information on. These were the extremely ordinary dreams of an extremely ordinary woman.

But as if someone had clicked their fingers, the descriptions took on a completely different form in February 2007.

When her dreams had first taken an odd turn, Védís seemed rather reluctant in her interpretations. Now they no longer centred on family and friends or anything else she was familiar with, but instead she entered a world characterized by darkness, danger and evil, from which she repeatedly woke terrified and drenched with sweat. At first she tried to interpret this as a positive omen: soon she would win the lottery, if she could just manage to count how often specific things that appeared repeatedly in these dreams turned up, but this soon stopped and Védís approached her dreams with increasing fear and tension. Freyr wasn’t surprised. The woman now seemed to be prevented from sleeping peacefully and getting enough rest, and that alone created fertile ground for psychological difficulties, anxiety and depression. It was impossible to say which came first, the chicken or the egg, but after these dreams had been going on for around six months, it was difficult to follow the thread of the woman’s readings of them; her language and references grew ever vaguer, making it harder to grasp their significance without further information about the woman and her circumstances.

But he didn’t need to know anything more about Védís to connect one specific detail to her life. Or rather, her death. During the last two months before she died, garden shears started appearing more and more often in her dreams. They were bloody, and they frightened Védís. As she described them, the shears were either lying on the ground or in the hands of a boy who was the main character in these unsettling dreams, from the very first one to the last. Védís never saw his face, and she woke with a start every time he seemed to be on the verge of showing it. He generally appeared in the distance or turned his back to her as he stood, head bowed, at the edge of the dream. Védís didn’t give any indication of who this boy was, but in her dreams her task was to get to him and speak to him. But she never accomplished this. He was always out of reach, no matter how fast she ran or how kindly she spoke to him. Freyr was fairly certain that Védís thought she knew who this boy was, but she never put his name to paper; she only hinted that he seemed familiar to her, but she could never be entirely sure of who he was – besides not being certain that she wanted to know. Freyr felt that this suggested Védís could have had something on her conscience that she pushed aside, and that by doing so she was depriving herself of the healing or comfort that could be found in coming to terms with a painful experience. If she refused to deal with her problems in her waking state, it was no surprise that they invaded her dreams.

The last dream she recorded was from the night before she died. The night before Freyr’s son disappeared. He read over the description of this dream particularly carefully but discovered little to shed light on this strange coincidence. The dream was essentially the same, a hopeless chase of this unknown boy through dark corridors and fog, past crying children. They leaned up against the walls of the maze through which Védís wandered and refused to show their faces when she bent down to them. The children were covered with cuts, sores and bruises, which were visible when they reached out to grab her legs. In fact, the only significant difference between this dream and the others was that now there was a green lustre to everything, and Védís felt she couldn’t breathe properly because of this green air. For further clarification she’d written that she felt as if she were in a submarine that had run out of air. The dream ended differently as well. This time she managed to approach the boy from behind and touch him. As soon as she placed her hand on his bony shoulder she regretted it and realized that it was a terrible mistake, as she wrote clearly in her dream diary. Then she heard the boy say: ‘You shouldn’t have done that.’ The voice was much more like that of an elderly man than of a child, but the worst thing was that it seemed as if the voice came from behind her. The boy she was holding onto wasn’t the same one she was always chasing. He stood behind Védís, and when she turned around slowly she woke up, her chest heavy.

‘The only connection that I can see to Benni is so random that it hardly deserves a mention.’ Freyr had just told Dagný all the details of Védís’s dreams. ‘One of the boys playing hide-and-seek with Benni said that Benni was going to hide in a submarine, but then he immediately took it back.’ Freyr’s eyes stung from all the reading, and he blinked several times to moisten them. ‘This suggested what the police always considered most likely – that he’d gone down to the sea – but there was nothing there that could have been described as a submarine, even as viewed through a child’s eyes.’